Passages with the words you are teaching

The passage that serves three purposes

A comprehension passage in a language or a content class does three jobs at once: it practises reading at a level, it carries the vocabulary you are teaching this week, and it delivers some content: a setting, a fact, a story. Textbook passages rarely do all three for your class, because they were written for an average class in another place. A generated passage can, if you specify all three.

The prompt

Write a passage for Class 6 English, reading age 9, about a girl buying vegetables at a weekly market in a Kenyan town.
Length: 180 to 220 words. Sentences under 14 words. No idioms.
Use each of these words once, spaced through the passage, in a sentence that shows what the word means from context: bargain, scarce, weigh, fresh, coin, queue, ripe, borrow, patient, receipt.
Do not define the words. Do not put them in bold.

Three constraints, all measurable. The vocabulary line is the one that fails without care, and the check question shows how. “Use these words” is satisfied at the cheapest point: one paragraph, ten words, done. “Spaced through the passage, in a sentence that shows the meaning” is the instruction that produces the passage you wanted.

Check the result by counting. All ten present? Spread across the text? Each one in a sentence where a student could guess the meaning? If not, the second-message habit: “Words 4, 7 and 9 are together in one sentence. Spread them out and give each its own context.”

Levelled versions of the same passage

The strongest use of generation for reading is not one passage but three versions of one passage: the same market, the same girl, the same facts, at reading ages 7, 9 and 12. The whole class discusses the same story; each student reads the one they can. Publishers charge for this. The model does it in a minute:

Rewrite the passage at reading age 12: longer sentences, richer vocabulary, one extra detail about how prices are negotiated. Keep every fact the same. Then rewrite at reading age 7: sentences under 9 words, keep the ten target words, cut any detail that is not needed for the questions.

The instruction “keep every fact the same” matters. Without it the versions drift apart and the class is no longer discussing one text.

The questions, and the check that is not optional

Ask for the questions in a separate message, after the passage is final, and specify the kind:

Six questions on this passage: two where the answer is a phrase in the text, two where the answer must be inferred from two sentences together, one about the meaning of a target word from context, one asking the student’s opinion with a reason. Mark each question with its type.

Then do the one check that catches the failure the worksheets lesson warned about: for every question, find the answer in the passage yourself. Not “does this seem answerable”: find the sentence. A generated question whose answer is not in the passage is common, because the model writes questions from its idea of the topic rather than from the text in front of it. It takes three minutes and it stops you handing forty children a question with no answer.

Passages in other languages

The same prompt works for Hindi, Kiswahili, Yoruba, Portuguese, Arabic, with two cautions from the first block. The model’s sense of reading level is weaker in languages where it has read less graded material, so the numeric target is less reliable; use sentence length instead. And the register may be wrong: formal, literary, or the wrong regional variety. Paste a paragraph from your own textbook and say “match this register” and it corrects.

Passages about your content

In science, history or geography the passage is a way to deliver content at a reading level the class can handle. The prompt is the same, with one addition: “Every fact must be accurate; do not invent names, dates or figures.” Then treat every proper noun and number as unverified, because the passage was written to read well, not to be true, and a fluent passage about the Mau Mau uprising or the Kaveri river can carry an invented date as smoothly as a real one.

The honest limit

Generated passages are competent and slightly flat. They rarely have a sentence a student remembers. For practising reading, that does not matter. For teaching what good writing is, it does: a class raised entirely on generated passages learns a voice that is clear and forgettable. Keep real literature in the diet. Use the generated text for the practice and the real text for the example.