TEXT RECONSTRUCTION

Benjamin Franklin used the following strategy to improve his writing: when he liked how a text was written, he noted down several words from each sentence. Next, he mixed them and set them aside for a time. Some weeks later, he tried to reorganise the text by placing the words in the logical order and completing it.


Similar ideas lie under the design of exercises used in language learning. They are particularly useful to practise logical order, coherence and cohesion in a text.

This website collects some activities of the kind.

Other types of text reconstruction exercises are based on the learner’s capacity to guess the words in a text and test their knowledge about word frequency, collocations and vocabulary.

We can see some examples here.