Special thanks to John Fanselow for the basis of this idea. The text from the photo and idea itself was lifted from his, as of yet unpublished, booklet “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s superman!”
This is a simple trick to help students get over their fear of unknown words. When reading a text, have the students copy all the words they don’t know into their notebooks in random order. Then have them go back to the original text and using a black marker, have them redactate (completely black out) all of those words they didn’t know. If the students are working on guessing the meaning of a word from context, this will help them focus their attention on the words and phrases the do know as opposed to worrying over that one word they don’t know. I also find that even in a longer text of 200 words or so, when students see that there are only 5 or 6 blotted out words in total, they realize that they do know and understand a vast majority of what they have read. This sometimes allows students to try and guess the meaning not only from the context at the sentence level, but at the paragraph level, and occasionally at the level of the whole text. As an added bonus, students can then go home and try and, using the their notebooks, replace the redacted words, a kind of student created mini cloze-test.
(And thanks also to Sandy Millin for her fantastic Twitter feed for the inspiration to post this very short blog post.)
The Other Things Matter 
Simple and effective. Like the blog post.
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Like your comment, simple and effective (and appreciated).
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Brilliant! On my “must-do” list for next semester!
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I want a copy of your “must-do” list. Please post as soon as possible.
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Great idea for a blog post! Thank you Kevin!
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Great idea! I am going to try it today!!!
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From blog to class in 3,2,1…(thanks for the feedback)
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I like this approach. Going to try it in my next lesson. Nice & simple, but effective. Thanks for this.
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My pleasure. Thanks for that.
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Sounds like another great idea to add on #FlashmobELT 🙂
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Laura! I was trying so hard to keep all my responses as brief (relatively speaking) as the post, but this is just impossible. I thought about adding this to the #FlashMobELT (http://linoit.com/users/annaloseva/canvases/flashmobELT) but I was unsure if this was an activity or not. So finally, I decided not to post it. But I will keep it under consideration. (Do you think this is an activity?)
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It does seem like an activity to me, Kevin 🙂 Had not thought about what makes something an activity or not -what made you uncertain about this one? Just curious.
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Laura, you asked one of those magic confuse-a-teacher questions. If I went into class with a text I was sure had words students didn’t know with the intent of having them do this, I would call it activity. But when I recommend students do this, I’m usually thinking of it as a study skill. In a class, I might be working with a text and find one or two students struggling with a few words, remind them of this process, and leave whether they do it up to them. But now that I think about it, when I do it the first time with the entire class, that probably does count as an activity. So I guess it’s both. And as to what makes an activity an activity, I’m not exactly sure, other than it probably has a beginning, middle, and end. Maybe the answer to this question is a blog post in and of itself.
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I’ll do it, too. And I bet the students will like to black words out.
(This is also to give you a chance to get back to the short response.)
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Yes, this works so well! My students love it.
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Hi Walton. Glad to hear about other students digging this (maybe). Thanks for the comment.
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Thanks a lot, a good idea, I’ll try to do that in class.
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