In a jumbled (or scrambled) text activity, learners see sections of a text - eg the paragraphs or the individual sentences - out of order, and have to reconstruct it by putting the sections in a logical order, eg by noting indicators of cohesion and coherence, or by making logical inferences based on their knowledge of the world. For example, to reconstruct and fully understand ...
- There were several people there so he thought she must be running late.
- He walked in, sat down, picked up a magazine and started reading.
- John looked into the waiting room.
- However, one of the others was talking loudly on his phone and he found it impossible to concentrate
...they would need to understand :
- that John must have an appointment with a doctor, dentist, solicitor or other professional who would have a waiting room in their office and time appointments with clients
- that John would see the people when he looked in,
- that He in sentence 2 and in sentence 1 refers anaphorically to John while she refers to the doctor (or whoever) he had the appointment with
- there refers anaphorically to the waiting room
- that ..to the waiting room is elided but understood after He walked in..
- that he is elided before sat down and in the waiting room is elided afterwards
- again, he is elided before picked up a magazine
- that magazines are often found in waiting rooms and that these are magazines you can read - not magazines of guns etc, and therefore that the magazine is elided after reading
- that his assumption would be that if they were running late, he would have to wait, so reading was a way to pass the time
- that However indicates concession, and therefore that a problem is going to occur
- that others is a pronoun substituting for the other people in the waiting room
