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| Michael Hudson |
I love using graded readers with students. Not only do they introduce them to reading in English for pleasure but they also allow you to change the dynamic of your classroom work, help with motivation and provide lots of recycling of vocabulary and grammar. You get engaging stories that are specially adapted for the language level of your students, which means they're ideal of out-of-class reading work. Like any other resource, readers work best when you give students work to do before, during and after they read the book. I usually do pre-reading activities in the lesson, then give students a chapter or part of the book to read at home (fast finishers in classroom activities can do part of this homework during lesson time). We then review their while-reading tasks at the start of the next lesson and follow-up with post-reading discussion and extension activities. You don't have to do it this way, of course. A great thing about readers is how flexible they are, so you could give students silent reading time in class, too. I don't usually recommend getting students to read aloud directly from the book. However, if you want to use the reader for speaking and pronunciation work, you could get them to act out or even improve certain scenes as a post-reading activity.
Pre-reading activities
1. Show your students the cover of the book and elicit as much vocabulary as possible. Then ask the students to guess what happens in the story and to write short summaries of the plot. Keep these until they've finished reading the book and you can look at them again to see which summary was closest to what really happened.
2. Give the students the chapter titles (jumbled up) and ask them to work in small groups to put the titles in what they think is the correct order. Like the first activity, you can extend this by asking the students to then write a short outline of their story which they can compare to the real one later. You can also use this as a link to grammar work. Which chapter do the students think will be the most interesting? Which will be the funniest? Which will be the most exciting?
3. Lots of readers have pictures to go with the text. Photocopy the pictures, jumble them up and ask the students to put them in order. Like the chapter titles, they can use the pictures to predict their own version of the story. Once again, you can easily integrate grammar work into this activity by asking the students to describe what they can see in the picture and what the characters are doing.
4. Often readers will have a list of characters at the front of the book along with some biographical details such as their jobs or where they live. You could make role play cards for your students. Give each student a different character (include the name and 2-3 other pieces of information about them). The class can then do a roleplay where the characters meet at a party. You can make the task harder by giving the students extra questions to ask, which means they have to invent extra information about their characters before they read the book (they can check their ideas later when they're reading).
6. Find out about the author. Give the students the author's name and ask them to write down some questions they would like to ask him/her. The students can then try to find the answers to the questions either online or using the biography of the author at the front of the book.
7. Make a K-W-L chart. This has three columns: K (what I already know), W (what I want to know) and L (what I learnt). Students can work in groups to complete the first column with any information they know about the book before they start reading. Then ask them to think of questions they'd like to find the answers to while they read and put these in the W column. The final column, L, will be blank for now but students will complete this either while they're reading or when they finish the book.
While-reading
1. Students write a newspaper-style article on events in the chapter they're reading. They could also interview the characters involved to get extra information, which works really well if you've already allocated characters to students before they read the book (see ideas for this in pre-reading activities 4 and 5).
2. Horoscopes. After the students have been introduced to the characters and have read part of the story, you could ask them to write horoscopes predicting the future. What will happen to each character next? What's going to happen before the end of the book?
3. Ask the students to make a comic strip summarising the main events in the chapter as they read. You could either ask the students to draw the pictures (and write text in speech bubbles) themselves or they could use one of these free apps to do it online.
4. You can do lots of prediction activities before students read each new chapter. For example, you can write out some sentences about things that might happen in the next part of the story and get students to discuss whether they are true or false (pre-teach or elicit the phrase 'No spoilers!' for enthusiastic students who are reading ahead). You can also ask students to write down information about specific characters from the chapter they've just read (quotes by or about them, where they are and what they are doing) on bits of paper. Swap the paper with another student/group and ask them to write some predictions based on the information they've been given.
5. The students can also fill in a table about the characters while they read. You could have each character on the left of the table. Along the top there will be categories like age, appearance, likes and dislikes, possessions, etc. You can compare the tables in class. Eventually, you could get the students to create a Facebook page or Wikipedia entry for the characters (on a poster if you don't want to do it online).
6. Students can retell parts of the story from the point of view of one of the characters. What happened to you? How did you feel? "I......"
7. What should the character do? Stop reading at a crucial point of the story. Ask your students to write down or brainstorm some advice they would give the characters involved. "I think you should....'
8. Putting events in order. At the end of each chapter, give the students a list of events that have happened in the book so far. Can they remember the order they happened in?
9, Give the students a list of questions to answer while they're reading. They then compare their answers in the next class. Pearson readers have lots of while-reading activities like these already prepared to save you time and effort. You can see an example here.
10. Encourage students to keep a list of new words. Which words would they like to remember? What was their favourite word in the chapter? You could then get the students to make vocabulary cards of these words to help you review and practise them. The simplest way of doing this would be to make cards with English on one side and Ukrainian on the other. However, you could do an online version of this too. Your students could even create their own quiz.
Post-reading
1. Ask the students to review the book for future readers. You can give them criteria such as the theme/topic of the book, how difficult it was to understand, how interesting it is (for boys / girls / people interested in (history), etc, Ask the students to write their reviews down and you can stick them to the inside back cover of the book or place them in an envelope you attach to the back cover. If your students have smartphones, you can use this great free app and ask them to review the book more interactively. This way, students can see video reviews of the book just by scanning the cover with their phones!
2. The students can make a quiz about the book. You can either do this in groups with students making questions for other groups to answer or you could switch the normal classroom role and ask the students to make questions for you to answer. If necessary, you can let the students check for answers they can't remember in the book (but they don't get as many points for a correct answer).
3. Give the students a list of quotes from the book. Can they remember which character said each one and why? Can they put the quotes in the correct order?
4. Put important words and phrases from the book on the board in the same order they appear in the story. Can the students retell the story using the prompts you've given them?
5. Alternative endings. Ask the students to come up with a different ending to the book. They could then write an email to the publisher (or to us at Dinternal Books) explaining their suggested changes.
6. The students could write and perform a play or a short film based on the book. They could even record this on their phones!
7. The students make a promotional poster for the book to advertise it to other students in your school.
8. Spin-off stories are very popular nowadays, especially in TV. The students could take a minor character and invent a whole new story about him/her.
9. Make your own audio book. Now the students know the content of the story, you could use an app like audacity to enable them to record themselves reading parts of it aloud. This reduces the stress of reading live in front of the class as students can delete and re-record if they make any mistakes. In fact, mistakes could be a good learning opportunity - you could tell the students to make 3 deliberate factual errors while they're speaking. Can the rest of the class listen to the recording and spot the mistakes?
Pearson also have lots of ideas for using readers as well as certificates you can print out and give your students to celebrate their achievements in learning through extensive reading.
Happy reading and congratulations to our May winners from Novoukrainka in Kirovohrad Oblast, I'm sure your students will enjoy using their new Pearson graded readers!
Cheers,
Michael
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