Adapt the task As a general rule of thumb, the simpler the input, the more challenging the accompanying task can be and, conversely, the more challenging the input, the simpler the task. If you're presenting the student with an authentic text which you know will be challenging for them, then it's vital to design tasks that will guide them towards coping with the text. The aim of the initial tasks should not be to test the students comprehension, but to help them in decoding the text. That means careful staging and scaffolding Staging is where you break the overall task down into intermediate stages. So you wouldn't jump straight in and ask students to write a summary of something they'd just read, for instance. Instead, you'd walk them through the process of getting to grips with the vocabulary maybe, picking out the key points and then paraphrasing them to eventually produce a summary The number of stages you choose will