Graded readers in the classroom
An old article of mine, I forget which magazine it was first in:
Most schools have at least a couple of graded readers somewhere around the place, if only freebies that were sent unsolicited by publishers, and if not it is easy enough to get hold of some. In too many schools, however, they lie around gathering dust on a shelf in the teachers’ room or the Self Access Centre. The obvious thing to do seems to be to take them into the classroom in order to add a bit of variety to the class, to let the students see what is available, and hopefully to persuade students to take them home to read for themselves. Here, then, are some ideas on how to do so, all of which are designed to avoid two potential hiccups – you don’t need class sets of the same books, and the ideas don’t depend on all the students reading the books for homework.
What makes an ‘easy reader’?
Most people think of this as just avoiding difficult vocabulary and that is certainly a major part, but there is more to it than that. To start with, ‘get’ and ‘around’ may seem like words you could include in even a beginner’s book, but if you put them together as the phrasal verb ‘get around’ the meaning is far from easy to deduce. As well as the vocabulary, the grammar has to be carefully graded, and the writer has to think about other factors such as the use of pictures and avoiding ‘dense’ texts with too much information, such as subplots and large lists of characters.
How and why should students read graded readers?
The most important thing is the ‘how’. Students should read these texts for pleasure, in the same way as they would read in their own language. This ‘extensive’ reading is therefore different in intent and effect to the ‘intensive’ reading done in class, such as work on guessing vocabulary from context, skimming etc. The basic idea is that students will be able to absorb the language naturally as they read without the need to sit down and analyse it. Some theories suggest that this type of learning is inherently better than conscious language study, and that lots of ‘comprehensible input’ is the secret to a real command of the language. Even if you wouldn’t go this far, you can at least agree that any work students do outside the class can only help.
How can we use them in the classroom?
Obviously, we want to avoid lots of time spent silently reading in class, so we need to think about what people naturally do with books apart from that. Reading out loud doesn’t really match the bill, as is not a very natural thing for an adult to be doing. ‘Reading out loud for pleasure’ is also, unsurprisingly, not an expression that exists. Apart from reading books, what people do is talk about and write about books. Of these, the obvious thing to do in class is speak.
When people talk about books, the things they talk about seem to fit into two main categories:
1) Storytelling, e.g. summarising the plot
2) Making judgements, e.g. saying whether you liked it.
The teaching ideas below are arranged around these two concepts.
Storytelling
The most natural form of storytelling is simply for students to pass on some idea of the plot of a book they have just read to someone else, but we have to be careful to give their partners a real reason to listen. As well as the teacher saying ‘Tell your partner the story of the book’, they need to tell the other people to ‘Listen and decide whether you would like this book’, ‘Listen and see if it reminds you of any other stories’, ‘Listen and decide what genre of book you think it is’, etc.
It is also possible to get students telling the story before reading the book. Although at first sight it might seem unnatural, in fact everyone does something similar internally as soon as they pick up a book and look at the cover – they start to form a picture of what it could be like in their heads. So, get students to look at the cover of the book and predict everything they can about the story in pairs. This can then be checked against reality by reading the blurb on the back of the book, taking the book home to read, or checking their predictions with a student who has already read the book.
Giving them a bit more help, you can give them all the pictures from the inside of the book (more common in lower level ones) and get them to put them in order, and then tell what they think the story is based on them. The story can then be checked any of the ways above, or by opening the book to check the real order of the pictures.
Alternatively, they can read parts of the book and fill in the rest of the story, e.g. reading the first couple of pages, predicting the story and reading the last couple of pages to check; or reading the beginning and end and filling in the middle.
Making judgements
I think the first thing we are likely to say about a book we’ve read is ‘You would/ wouldn’t like it’, but our students probably don’t know each other well enough to do that. This can be easily remedied by getting them to talk about their taste in books first, which should make for a nice, personalised lesson with plenty of vocabulary.
Brainstorm types of book onto a mind map on the board, starting with fiction/ non-fiction and then branching off until you reach terms like ‘whodunits’ (for a high level class). Then get students to discuss their likes and dislikes using this vocabulary. Next, put them in new pairs and get them to find similarities and differences between the tastes of the people they were just speaking to, e.g. finding that both their previous partners like romance. Next, give them a couple of graded readers and ask them to decide which of their two previous partners each book would suit best. Finally, students share their conclusions as a whole class and people say whether they would actually like the books that are being recommended for them. If so, they might actually take them home and read them!
Other ‘making judgements’ activities delve a bit deeper into books, and so get a little bit further away from everyday chat. In a way, you are asking your students to briefly be a critic, academic or editor, but this deeper analysis can produce lots of language and is often needed for English language exams such as the FCE.
Being critics
This generally involves getting students to write reviews of books they have read. This can be made more relevant by making sure they know they are writing to be read. They could, for instance, pass the book and the review onto another student and find out in a future lesson whether the next person to read the book agreed with the conclusions in their review. Alternatively, the reviews could be put somewhere where other students can use them to decide which books they want to pick next, e.g. on the inside of the book covers or on the wall of Self Access Centre or Student Lounge.
Being academics
These activities involve identifying texts from small samples – being ‘text detectives’, if you like.
Give pairs of students a page or two photocopied more or less at random from a graded reader, with each pair talking about a different book. Ask the pairs to guess the genre, where it might be set, who the characters might be, etc. Then bring the whole class together in a place where you have laid out all the books they have just read from and discussed. Working together, they must try to match the extracts to the books using only the clues from the covers and/ or blurb on the back of the book, i.e. without opening them. NB. For this to work you must make sure that the extracts don’t include anything too obvious like the names of people and places mentioned on the back of the book.
Being editors
For these activities, students have to make judgements on how best to present the book. Either after the students have read the book at home or after reading a page or two in class, ask them to design a suitable cover for the book. If they are too shy to draw or run out of ideas, they can cut out pictures from magazines or try Google Images. They can then add the title etc to make the finished front cover. You could then also ask them to write the blurb for the back.
If they all worked on the same book, you can vote on the best one as a class. Alternatively, another pair of students can make assumptions about the book from the cover and then discuss with the original pair if they are correct.
More of mine on graded readers
15 fun ways to switch students onto graded readers
