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[hereinbeijing]

Hello,
Do you know of any websites that has free worksheets and exercises for teaching adult students reading comprehension, especially guessing the meaing of words from the context?

[Opiate]

http://www.esl-lab.com/

EDIT:
To clarify a bit....most of stuff there is designed to be listened to. However, you can copy and paste the quiz script into a Word doc or whatever and use it for reading comprehension. They usually have a few questions at the end as well as other exercises. While you may have to spend some time on prep, some of the stories and vocabulary are pretty good.

[Brian Hugh]

I sometimes have the students power read. I give them something they can understand ( maybe 500 words) and give them five minutes to read it and then have them turn over the sheet. I ask them what happened or what's it about? I guess it was called skimming in and scanning in the Communicative teaching days. One thing that is hard for them to do is read silently. They are taught to say the words while they read (Lee Yang Crazy English). I also have them read with a finger under the words they are looking at. It's a tough subject to teach because it's difficult to find materials that please everyone.

[time to teach]

You can download textbooks online via rapidshare and others, some you have to pay for but you can get a lot of books and materials free. Filecrop is free right now and will hopefully stay that way:
http://www.filecrop.com/
The Cambridge Interchange book series has reading sections in each unit that might be good to use. If you save PDF copies of the Interchange books onto your computer you can paste single pages into word and print them for your students.

[hereinbeijing]

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

[Miles Smiles]

One thing which can help a lot is to introduce them to Greek/Latin prefixes. While it isn't really reading comprehension, it goes a long way toward helping the students to guess at the meaning of unfamiliar words.

[Josef K]

Any newspaper article, online news service article or snippet from a magazine can be used for reading comprehension depending on the level of your students. And with little effort you can write your own questions and personalise the lesson for your students

For example, find an article with numbers in it: ages, dates, addresses and have the students read the article quickly looking for the meaning of these numbers. This is scanning for information.

Brian, your terms are wrong. You are having your students read for gist not scan or skim. They need something to scan or skim for like specific details.

A reading comprehension lesson should have pre, during and post reading activities: the lesson often moves from building up the students schema, using prediction activities, to skimming and scanning, reading for gist, and questions to tackle while reading and finally a post reading reflection activity. One of the keys is giving them enough information in the pre-reading stage to understand the reading. Prediction exercises using words and or pictures are great for this.

Scott Thornbury has written some great books on reading, listening and speaking and most if what I have said is taken from his work.