Job Discussion Forums

[jr1965]

I work at a private language institute in the States, and in September, I�m going to be teaching a reading class. I�ll be working with a group of adults (approx. 18-25 years old) who are at the upper intermediate/low advanced level. The majority of the students will be from Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) though there will be some from Europe and Latin America as well. The class will be meeting Mon-Friday for 50 minutes.

Materials are being provided for me to work with, but I�d also like to supplement these with one or two short stories (or excerpts from longer pieces of fiction).

I�d be interested in hearing about your experience using short stories/fiction in the classroom: which have you used with success?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

[Glenski]

In my high school course for advanced students, I've used a few 1-3 page long stories snipped from various Internet sources. Short Bytes is a nice source.

Depends on what you want to do with reading. Comprehension? Vocabulary? Context? Detail? Imagery?

[jr1965]

Glenski,

Thanks for the Short Bytes source; I'll check it out.

In terms of what my goals are with the short stories, I'm primarily interested in focusing on different reading strategies (predicting, making inferences, recognizing tone/mood, etc) and building reading fluency.

[Glenski]

jr,

I can tell you what I have done with my HS students if you like. Some of it was over their heads, but I did it anyway.

Predicting
Gave them a 1- or 2-page short story (mystery, drama, ironic, etc.) to read. Inserted into the text were 2 or 3 "stops". Students were then asked to write what they predicted would happen. Sometimes I would put a stop before the last sentence, which was key to the story.

Of course, I modeled this with a sample story.

Context
Gave them a paragraph that I'd written with some words in gobbledegook. It was written in such a way that students could make a guess at the meaning through the context. I had students decide first what part of speech the word was, then guess at the meaning even if it was only a general guess.

Imagery
Gave them several exercises on this.
1. Descriptive poems. Students have to guess what is being written about. You have to teach them certain vocabulary and encourage them to draw sometimes.
2. Descriptive poems or pieces of literature. Students read it once, then write what senses were stimulated (and perhaps how). They can reread to find the words that explain why.
3. From a longer story (I suppose this would work for any story), students were told to draw a picture of the image it put in their minds. Quality did not count. Stick men figures were ok (although most of my students are good artists). I then collected them, arranged them on one huge page (had to shrink individual pictures to do this), then gave each student a copy of this collection. No names were on any picture. Students had to then pick out the pictures that were the most like theirs, and pictures with any differences. They had to describe the differences very carefully, too (mind's camera angle, clothing details, background scenery, etc.). Then we discussed what was different, and if students had made any mistakes from what they had read. For example, did the author describe a curved sword, but the drawing showed a straight one?

[bukowski1234]

I worked for a Korean school here in the states for awhile. I think that soem excellent ideas have been presented here. I've used many of them myself. It's nice to know that I'm on the same track as other teachers.

Depending upon the level of ability (and motivation) you might want to look for news articles from the Korean Times and use some excerpts from some of Amy Tan's books. Amy Tan has tremendous appeal to High school girls.

Do a search on "American Short Stories" and you'll find a wonderful assortment of short stories free for the asking. For the less motivated and possibly the least advanced, try Aesop'd Fables (they're online). Print out several at a time sans moral. Ask the students to fill in the moral of the story. The different answers will spark some great conversations.

Glenski, I think that poetry is an overlooked genre for ESL. The ambiguity forces the reader to make sense of what is missing. My favorite is Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking." The imagery is wonderful. The ambiguity is is just enough to make the kids think. There are compelling arguments for several interpretations. After the kids realize that their interpretations are valid, they often gain the confidence to 'explicate' more poetry, and prose becomes less daunting.

And yeah, I've done the same thing with the gobbledy gook but with diagraming. It was so interesting to see ten kids guess which words were the articles, the nouns used as the subject, the verbs, the direct objects and which were the propositional phrases. The first time I did this, everyone guessed the exact same usage. A spooky silence came over them as if a very wonderful, but unexplainable thing had happened.

Let's keep this thread going.

[moonraven]

Poetry can be used very effectively in the ESL classroom--but don't stop at READING poems and talking about them. Students here in Mexico get very excited about writing their own poems--even short ones. This is a very Right Brain culture, so some of the poems they have produced are really excellent.

[jr1965]

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

Bukowski,

It's interesting that you mention Amy Tan and Korean students. I started teaching about a year after her book "The Joy Luck Club" came out. In one of my classes (a reading/writing class), I had 6 advanced students--all from Korea. For that class, I bought everyone a (paperback) copy of the book, and we read three excerpts from it (the book is written in such a way that this is quite easy to do). The students LOVED it.

JR