Guidelines for extensive reading of ESP texts. The students' main task is reading, but writing summaries is valuable not only to provide a means for teachers to check comprehension

The students' main task is reading, but writing summaries is valuable not only to provide a means for teachers to check comprehension, but because the writing of summaries improves comprehension. In addition, this practice helps students improve their writing ability. Another task that can be adapted for extensive reading is the "standard exercise," a set of open-ended questions that can be designed to suit most texts available to students in a course. Students also have some responsibility for determining the appropriateness and comprehensibility of the texts they are reading. One means of doing this is checking dictionary use: too much necessary use shows that the text is too difficult. Too much unnecessary use shows that the student's approach is not appropriate for extensive reading. In any case, a poor or inappropriate text is not the disaster it can help in a translation or skills-building course because in the extensive reading procedure reading is individualized: if a text proves to ' be uninteresting or too difficult, the student simply abandons it for another. In other words, readability or comprehensibility is an element of the course rather than a precondition, and is determined by the techniques of this procedure.