ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in some detail how the language teacher can work with texts, by looking at three texts: for near-beginners; for intermediates; and for advanced-level students. The rationale for the beginner-level text is its inherent interest to students, the opportunities it provides for useful vocabulary, and its lack of syntactic complexity. In many cases, especially at novice level, the teacher would prepare students for the reading of a text by pre-teaching some of the key words. With intermediate students, the teacher clearly has access to a wider range of texts. If the class is not the quickest, then the teacher can work on relatively complex and interesting texts using the parallel text approach. It is at advanced-level that the teacher can extract the utmost from interesting written texts. Students are at a standard where they can access a good deal more content while the sources of texts are wide ranging.
