"work"/"deal with" the text

Hi, everybody! I'm new to this forum. My name is Leandro and I'm from Brazil where I work as an English teacher. Recently, I have realized that many Brazilian teachers use the expression "work / deal with the text." It will probably sound awkward to native speaker's ears, but it's very common, in Portuguese, to use such a combination of words when it comes to Language teaching. This is clearly an example of Transfer, since in Portuguese, we do use the expression "Trabalhar o texto" to refer to all methodological procedures a teacher follows in order to make students benefit from the activities related to the text and the text itself. My question is: how can we refer to such a thing using an expression, or verb that conforms with the scales of collocational probability and acceptability?

You can exploit a text. ;-)