Bringing graded readers into the classroom
By Alex Case
Reading equals Speaking: Bringing Graded Readers into the Classroom
Most schools have at least a couple of graded readers lying around the school, 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 with them seems to be to take them into the classroom, to add a bit of variety to the class and to let the students see what is available, hopefully persuading students to take them home to read for themselves. Here, then, are some ideas on how to do so. I can’t absolutely guarantee they’ll all work with your classes, but they are all deliberately designed to avoid two potential hiccups- you don’t need class sets or for all the students to read the books for homework for the activities to work.
What makes an ‘easy reader’?
Most people think of this as just avoiding difficult vocabulary and this 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.
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