S : Hoaamm... (His eyes were glazing over the long, dull, and difficult reading text as he tried to answer the questions).

T : Jack, are you sleepy?

S : (He simpered.) No, Ma’am, just lack of oxygen. (He said to himself, “We’ve been doing this reading and its exercise over and over again and she thinks I’m sleepy? Well, let’s just simply say that.” He smirked as he saw the teacher’s face.)

T : I see. (While showing a fake smile on her face, she said to herself “Oh, man, I can’t help it. I don’t even know what to do with this reading lesson for the test prep class. I am well-aware that it is boring and hard, but this kind of text is there. Baby, I’m sorry I’m not sorry.”)

Been there or still there? If yes, then you and I have been, or at least are, on the same boat. We are somehow clueless of what to do in reading lesson for a test prep class whose reading texts are mostly long and hard to digest and are even using technical terms. What makes it a lot worse is that the students themselves detest reading even in their own language, let alone English. What are we supposed to do, then? Here, I’ll share a technique called Jigsaw reading, some of you might be familiar with, which I find quite successful when I taught reading lesson and which I think could also help students improve the other three English skills. Its how to use in class would also be covered.

What is Jigsaw?

Jigsaw refers to a cooperative learning technique in which students work together in a small group and they help each other to accomplish a goal (Aronson, Blaney, Stephan, Sikes, & Snapp, 1978). This technique allows the interaction among the group members in which each student would be an “expert” on one particular section of the given material and would then share it to the other members. For the task to be completed successfully, everyone in the group should work together and exchange the information they have. If you want to help your students learn about cooperation and responsibility, this technique would do. The other good news is that this jigsaw allows students to better their listening and speaking skills, not to mention their writing. Couldn’t picture it? Let’s see how it works, but I’m going to zoom in on the use of reading text for the English test preparation class.

Here are the steps!

First, look for a text that has some segments for students to share later on. It would be better if the length of the passage is similar to that of the TOEFL passage. Find the topic of the text which would likely be of the students’ interest and you'd better use authentic texts, such as newspaper articles, for this activity. Second, prepare the activities and also the comprehension questions for the passage. After that, divide the students into groups of five. Cut the text based on the segments and hand each segment to each member of the group. A person in each group might have similar part as another person in another group. Let each person first read their piece of text and then ask him/her to find a person from another group who has a similar reading part. Then ask them to discuss what the text is about. Hand each student a table to fill in the information. Once done, let each person get back to his/her original group to share the information of his/her own text to the rest of the group and fill the other missing information in the table. Through this activity, it is like they are having a real conversation and they will work on their listening, speaking, and writing skill as well. Once finished, hand each person the comprehension questions. Then, ask each group to compare the individual's answers and discuss together. You could even create some other activities, such as arranging the texts into a good order, etc to provide more reading skill activities. How’s that?

To sum up, jigsaw reading is an interactive technique to be used in class. It could also help students improve the other four skills provided they are included in the activity. You could try jigsaw to vary your teaching technique so that the students would not get bored of having the same activities throughout, like reading the text and answering the questions. It is hard for your students to even get the required score to pass the college, and it is even harder to do something they do not favor. So, make your class engaging so that the students would feel happy being in the class and get something to write home about.

You can refer to the following link http://bit.ly/JigsawGens to see an example of Jigsaw reading activities I tried to make. Hope you find it useful.