Reading with Understanding

The book brings together twenty passages taken from modern children's stories and nonfiction books, giving learners a range of texts to work with.

After each passage, students complete tasks that check understanding in several ways. They fill gaps in the text, forecast what will happen, put events into order, and draw out meaning. Other tasks ask them to turn information into diagrams or tables, and to write their own questions about the text.

Each chapter ends with suggestions for creative writing inspired by the extract's theme. A final section presents five stories whose parts have been jumbled, and asks readers to predict how each stage of the narrative might unfold.