STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

  1. Ask tutors to create a mural or a collage of the multiple ways we use reading, such as to get information, for pleasure, to help a child with homework or to prepare a meal.
  2. Have them note the purposes and reasons for reading that they portrayed in their collages.
  3. Write Task, Purpose and Reason on a flip chart.
  4. Ask tutors to share their collages with the group. Record their answers on the flip chart, showing the types of reading they did and the purpose for each of them.
  5. Based on the discussion, ask tutors why they think we read. Explain that we read different items for different purposes.
  6. Ask tutors what we are trying to do when we read. Write their answers on the flip chart.
  7. If the following doesn’t come out of the discussion, then write on the flip chart “We read to make sense” or “We read for meaning.”

Activity B

Reasons for reading

Use this activity to help your tutors gain further insight into how reading challenges may impact the day-to-day lives of learners.

Variation

Use a role-playing exercise to take the discussion to a deeper level. The idea is to create, and then enact, a setting and some characters for each reading purpose developed in the previous exercise. This will provide tutors with the perspectives of learners. The activity and debriefing discussion may give tutors a deeper level of insight about what it could be like not to be able to read well and how others tend to respond.


Discussion, role-play

Materials and equipment

Flip chart and markers
Slips of paper

STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

  1. Ask tutors to choose one purpose for reading listed in the previous activity. Ask them to brainstorm the impact of not being able to read for that purpose. Do this with all the purposes you have listed.
  2. Ask tutors to consider the strategies learners might use to compensate for not being able to read in each instance. Many learners have developed coping strategies that enable them to function despite their reading challenges. If you watched the video Learning for Life in Unit 5, About Literacy, you may want to brainstorm with tutors how those students learned to cope.
  3. To build the role-play, provide tutors with lots of slips of paper. On the slips, ask them to write the reading purposes listed earlier, as well as possible settings (e.g., school, doctor’s office, travelling on the bus) and characters (e.g., parent, teacher, government worker, bus driver). Make sure they use separate slips of paper for each purpose, setting and character. Keep the three categories in separate piles.
  4. Have pairs or trios then draw one folded slip from each category and role-play the resulting situations.
  5. Ask them why they think a learner would come for help with reading.