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[sparks]

I'd pretty much agree with all of that, and I use it just as a little time-waster too, change of pace, whatever. It's works well for younger kids sometimes, and they love it. I'd also say that memorizing some poems, short quotes etc. can be beneficial and sometimes one of the only things they remember long into the future.

[artemisia]

Sorry for hijack, OP, but it�s an interesting issue. In a small, mixed nationality high school class I had, part of the time was officially allocated to reading graded readers /individual reading aloud. It gave me a chance to work on some individual pronunciation issues.

One kid was Thai and his pronunciation was so poor that no one could understand a single word he said, although he was ahead of the other kids in some respects. As well as the ESL class, he�d been having one to one language sessions with a teacher aid for I don�t know how long. I�m sure it greatly enriched his vocabulary (very good) etc. but his speech remained incomprehensible � a serious issue for a kid at school in an English speaking country. When I arrived, he�d speak (mutter) quietly with his head down, which only made things worse. I had this class for about two months and two months down the track he could communicate intelligibly with me and the other kids (& he�d stopped ducking his head down).

I attributed a lot to the one on one reading aloud work � it was such a noticeable improvement in his case, although his pronunciation was still far from wonderful. But people could understand him. Any one on one work would/should have helped, but this certainly had an impact.

[Solar Strength]

I was reading an interesting article this morning on TALO (text as a linguistic objective) and TAVI (text as a vehicle for information) uses of texts in the EFL classroom.

TAVI is the approach I'll take with the text which is based more on comprehension of a text.