Reading: road-schooling and student-led learning

Reading comprehension. Read the passage carefully, then answer the questions.

(1) Three years ago, the teachers of a secondary school in Sousse noticed that many of their younger students were quietly falling behind in mathematics. Hiring extra staff was out of reach, so the school tried something cheaper: it asked final-year students to give up two hours a week and teach what they had just learned themselves. The programme was given a modest name, “One Hour, One Chapter”, and nobody expected it to last.

(2) The first sessions were difficult. The volunteers knew their subject but had never stood in front of a class, and some of them spoke so fast that the younger pupils lost the thread. A teacher of mathematics, Mrs Hajer Trabelsi, therefore trained them for a month before the programme reopened: how to ask a question, how to wait for an answer, how to turn a mistake into a lesson. “Explaining is a skill,” she says, “not a gift you are born with.”

(3) Two years later the results are visible on both sides. The younger pupils have improved their marks, but the tutors have gained more: by preparing a chapter for somebody else, they understood it far better than by revising alone. The school now keeps a small library of the worksheets its own students have written, and three neighbouring schools have copied the idea. Education, the headmaster argues, becomes stronger when learning travels in two directions instead of one.

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

1. For each of the following statements, pick out one detail from the text showing that it is false.
   
   a. The school solved the problem by recruiting new teachers. (paragraph 1)
   
   b. The student volunteers were successful from their very first session. (paragraph 2)
2. What do the words in italics refer to?
   
   a. it in “nobody expected it to last” (paragraph 1)
   
   b. them in “trained them for a month” (paragraph 2)
3. Find words or expressions in the text meaning nearly the same as:
   
   a. impossible to afford (paragraph 1)
   
   b. became unable to follow (paragraph 2)
4. Give a personal justified answer to the following question.
   
   Would you accept to teach a younger class for two hours a week? Why? Why not?

Reading comprehension. Read the passage carefully, then answer the questions. (Original passage written for this exercise.)

(1) When Salma left school at sixteen to help in her parents' bakery, nobody in the family thought she would ever sit in a classroom again. For eleven years she got up at four, and by the time the shop closed she was too tired to read a newspaper, let alone a textbook. Yet the idea of finishing her education never quite died. “Every time a student came in to buy bread before an exam,” she says, “I felt I had left something unfinished.”

(2) Last September the town's secondary school opened evening classes for adults, three nights a week, taught by its own teachers after their normal working day. Salma enrolled on the first evening. The teachers did not treat the adults like children: there was no register, no bell, and homework was optional. What surprised her most was the other learners. She had expected teenagers who had failed; instead she found a nurse, a mechanic and a retired postman, all older than her.

(3) The first weeks were humbling. She had forgotten how to take notes, and the mathematics she once knew had vanished. But learning as an adult had one advantage she had not foreseen: she knew exactly why she was there. In June she will sit the baccalaureate as an independent candidate. “If I fail,” she says, “I will simply try again. That is the one thing the bakery taught me.”

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

1. Decide whether each statement is true or false, then justify your decision with one detail from the text. You are not told the answer: the mark goes to the right decision and the right detail together.
   1. Salma stopped studying because she disliked school. (paragraph 1)
   2. The evening classes were run by teachers from the same school. (paragraph 2)
   3. Salma's classmates were mostly young people who had failed their exams. (paragraph 2)
   4. Salma thinks that being an adult made learning harder in every way. (paragraph 3)
2. What do the words in italics refer to?
   1. she in “nobody in the family thought she would ever sit in a classroom again” (paragraph 1)
   2. That in “That is the one thing the bakery taught me” (paragraph 3)
3. Give a personal justified answer to the following question: Would you like your school to open its classrooms to adult learners in the evening? Why? Why not?

I. READING COMPREHENSION. Read the text below carefully, then answer the questions that follow it.

1. Hédi Mansouri was 44 when the shoe factory where he had worked for twenty-two years closed its doors, and he thought his working life was over. "At my age, who would hire a man who only knows how to run a sewing machine?" he remembers asking his wife. For weeks he hardly left the house. But one evening his daughter, a second-year engineering student, showed him an advertisement for evening classes in solar panel installation at the regional training centre, and Hédi, to his own surprise, filled in the form that same night.

2. Going back to a classroom after almost thirty years was a shock. The other learners were mostly in their twenties, and the first lessons in electricity used mathematics he had long forgotten. Yet Hédi soon noticed that his age gave him something the younger ones lacked: after two decades of working to strict deadlines, he never arrived late and never left a job unfinished. By the second term, the teacher had asked him to lead a group of four.

3. The course was not free, and Hédi had no savings left. He did consider giving up. In fact, it was his former colleagues who kept him in the classroom: eleven of them, some still unemployed themselves, collected enough money to pay the second half of his fees. "I could not let them down," he says. "Every exam I passed was also theirs." In June he finished first in his group, and two months later he was hired by a company that installs panels on the roofs of schools and clinics.

4. Hédi now spends one Saturday a month at the training centre, talking to adults who are thinking of enrolling. He does not pretend it is easy. "You will feel stupid for the first month," he tells them. "That is normal. It means you are learning something." Last year, three of his former factory colleagues followed his example and joined the course.

Practice text written in the style of the adapted press articles of the bac papers.

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

1. Tick (✓) the most appropriate option. (1 mark)

The text is mainly about a man who

a- lost his job and never worked again.

b- went back to studying in his forties and started a new career.

c- opened a solar panel company with his former colleagues.

2. For each of the following statements, pick out ONE detail from the text showing that it is FALSE. (4 marks)

a. After the factory closed, Hédi stayed at home and did nothing to change his situation. (parag. 1)

b. In the classroom, Hédi's age was only a disadvantage. (parag. 2)

c. Hédi gave up the course because he could not pay for it. (parag. 3)

d. Hédi tells future learners that going back to study is easy. (parag. 4)

3. Complete the following paragraph with two words from paragraphs 1 and 3. One word per blank. (2 marks)

When the factory closed, Hédi thought that no company would ever ____________ a man of his age. Fortunately, his former colleagues paid the second half of his ____________, and he finished the course.

4. Find words / expressions in the text meaning nearly the same as: (2 marks)

a. realised, became aware (parag. 2): ____________

b. abandoning, stopping trying (parag. 3): ____________

5. What do the underlined words in the text refer to? (2 marks)

a. "them" (parag. 3): ____________

b. "That" (parag. 4): ____________

6. Give a personal justified answer to the following question. (1 mark)

Do you think it is ever too late to go back to studying? Why? Why not?

I think it ____________ too late to go back to studying because ____________.