The students will be asked to just glance at the title and the two pictures in the book, and then guess what they will read in the text. And they’ll be divided into groups of four to have a discussion.

This activity is to inspire the students to read actively, not passively. Surveys show that active reading can raise the readers’ interest and reading efficiency. Other purposes are to develop the students’ reading skill—making prediction and to encourage the students to think in English, express their thoughts in English and cooperate with each other.

Step 3 reading

Activity 1 scanning

The students are required to scan the text quickly and find out specific information of the following questions.

1 who is the student?

2 what animals are observed?

3 when did Jane Goodall arrive at Gombe? How old was she?

4 what was the purpose of her study?

By doing this activity, the students can improve their reading skill—scanning. And they can get the two lines of the whole passage, the main line—student, and the hidden line—wildlife. It builds a solid base for the latter reading comprehension.

Activity 2 skimming

The students are asked to skim the text quickly and summarize the main idea of each paragraph.

By doing this, I can train the students’ reading skill—skimming. And before their skimming, I’ll remind them to find out the topic sentence of each paragraph.

Activity 3 careful reading

For paragraph 1: Video watching and completing a diagram

Get the students to watch a short video of Jane’s research with chimps.

This paragraph is a description of what Jane and her partners did in the forest. The video can turn the description in words into images. So it seems as if the students themselves went into the forest. Then a diagram will be shown to the students. It contains the main actions of the chimps. They have to complete it. By these two changes, the students can master the important words, phrases and sentences better.

For paragraphs 2-3: Retelling job

These two paragraphs are relatively long, so the students may have difficulties in classifying the content. Therefore I divided all the sentences into 3 aspects, that is, Jane’s difficulties, her discoveries and her contributions. According to the key words, they have to retell it.

By doing this activity, I can train the students’ language organizing ability to meet the demands of the new curriculum.

For paragraph 4: Question answering

It is a short summary to Jane and implies that women can do what they want to do as men. This paragraph is relatively short and easy to understand. So the questions are fairly easy and will be offered to the less talented students.

Step 4 post—reading

I designed 2 activities.

Activity 1: multiple choice questions