[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 14 | September 5, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
What’s in a story?… Incredible potential for creative learning and teaching. Getting students involved in the story, and only then ‘teaching them language’ secondary to this, is a very effective way to develop learners’ reading skills. It can be challenging however to get your students into reading in the first place. Here are some ideas to get your learners excited to read:
One way of getting students involved in the story is to read a part of the first chapter, and then ask them to work in pairs and answer some questions about the chapter set by the teacher in advance. For example, the first chapter of level 4 ‘thriller’ reader The Amsterdam Connection ends with a dead body. Reading the first chapter to them is a good way to whet the students’ appetite for what comes next! You could also play the rest of the reader using accompanying audio to give the students some variety.
Another way of getting students into a book is ‘choose and tell’. Students choose an original reader they like the look of.