Why reading? It’s a skill that everybody should excel at. We need to read to interact, to agree, to disagree, to make decisions, to comprehend, to understand. All in all, it is an invitation to savour life.
Reading sometimes goes unnoticed, because we are focused on doing something else. Have a look at the picture on the right. What five words from the word cloud resonate with you and your relationship with reading? Continue reading
To mark the publication of the 100th Dominoes graded reader − The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling − the author Alex Raynham talks about the challenges of adapting such a classic title and gives some advice about classroom use.
When Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Books (originally plural) in the mid-1890s, he was the most popular author in the English-speaking world, and his stories became an instant classic. The Jungle Books have stood the test of time, appealing to successive generations of readers and appearing in many print, movie, and theatrical adaptations. The characters of Mowgli, Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, Kaa the snake and Shere Khan the villainous tiger have become part of popular culture. No wonder then that Oxford University Press has produced so many different versions over the years! Continue reading
Throughout my teaching, I have used literature in the EFL classroom, and the most rewarding moments have always been connected to lessons where I was teaching a poem, a short story, or a play. I’ve always thought that the most important factor was my own love of the pieces that I was teaching and finding ways of sharing that love with my learners.
Here are four ways in which you can engage learners with literary texts, convey your own love of literature to your students, and show them how literature reflects human experiences and connects to our lives. Continue reading
International friendship day is a holiday established by the United Nations in 2011 to celebrate friendship worldwide. The UN celebration is on 30th July. (This choice of date originated in Paraguay in 1958.) Some countries celebrate friendship on different days: In Spain, Argentina and Brazil it’s 20th July. In India and the United Arab Emirates, it’s the first Sunday in August. Regardless of the date, friendship is important for people everywhere.
One way you can explore this theme of friendship with your students is by using thematic quote cards to prompt class discussion. First, put learners into small groups. Then give each group a cut-up set of Friendship Quote Cards (download below) to look through. Allow learners to use a dictionary to check the meaning of unknown words. Go around monitoring to make sure learners stay on task. Once they are ready, write these sentence stems on the board and drill the correct pronunciation:
My favourite quote about friends is….
I really like it because…
My least favourite quote about friends is….
I don’t like it because…
Then ask the learners to choose their favourite and least favourite friendship quote. (There are as many different ‘correct’ answers as the number of students in your class. Everyone is different!) Once learners have done this, encourage them to compare their ideas with the ideas of other learners in their group, using the stem sentences to guide them.
If your students seem motivated by the topic of friendship, you can open this out into a whole-class discussion. However, if time is short, you may want to keep to small group discussions which you monitor as you walk around the classroom. If you want to express your personal preferences regarding your favourite/least favourite quote, do this at the end of the discussion so learners are not put off sharing their thoughts by you taking part too early in the discussion.
If we want our learners to read a classic story that describes a group of friends, we couldn’t do better than recommend ‘The Three Musketeers’ by the French writer Alexandre Dumas. The three Musketeer friends – Porthos, Athos and Aramis – have a slogan: ‘All for one and one for all!’ This describes their readiness to collectively help one of their number in need (‘all for one’) as well as each man being ready to work for the greater good of the group as a whole (‘one for all’)
As well as the Three Musketeers of the title, there is also the character of D’Artagnan. He arrives in Paris from the country and ends up, after many adventures, befriending the three Musketeers and himself becoming a Musketeer by the close of the story.
If you want to explore the differences between the four close friends in this story, give learners the Three Musketeers Grid (download below) and ask them to complete it with details about the different characters as they read.
To make this grid-filling easier, write on the board the information above in jumbled order. Students can check the meaning of unfamiliar words and match the phrases with the four main story characters, later reading the story to double-check their predictions.
A final (freer) speaking activity could involve learners matching the friendship quotes we mentioned earlier with key moments in the story, with learners explaining why they made these connections. (For example, ‘The W.B. Yeats quote matches the story opening because the three strangers D’Artagnan bumps into in chapter 1 become his friends later.’)
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Bill Bowler is a founder series editor, with his wife, Sue Parminter, of Dominoes Graded Readers (OUP). He has authored many readers himself. He has also visited many countries as a teacher trainer, sharing ideas about Extensive Reading. Bill has contributed to the book Bringing Extensive Reading into the Classroom (OUP). Two of his Dominoes adaptations (The Little Match Girl and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) were Language Learner Literature Award Finalists. Born in London, he now lives in Spain.
The benefits of extensive reading for learners of English have been well documented, and there are some informative articles easily discoverable on this blog.
The Graded Reader can play a hugely important part in developing reading skills, and OUP has a fantastic selection of them for all levels – as a teacher I used them regularly in and out of class. Occasionally, however, I would have a medium to high-level student ask what they could read in unabridged format, and when they did I often pointed them towards a novella.
This post will consider the novella: one of the more neglected fiction categories and how you can find novellas suitable for your students using lexical frameworks.
What is a novella?
At the most basic level, a novella sits between a short story and a novel, with a word count between 17,000 and 40,000 words. Typically, it may include subplots, twists and a range of characters. A novella will frequently not have chapters as you’d find in a full-blown novel and can often be read in one sitting. There are a lot of exceptions in the world of the novella so some works mentioned may be considered ‘short novels.’
The novella can be difficult to sell (Stephen King, in his collection ‘Different Seasons’, describes the novella as being thought of as ‘an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic’), but they can also be enticing to write: Ian McEwan wrote, the novella is “… the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant.”
However viewed, the novella/short novel can be ideal for the Intermediate+ student.
What’s a Lexical Framework?
Very simply, a Lexical Framework (developed by Stenner and Smith III in 1989) is a method used to grade (never ‘score’) readers through quantitative methods around, amongst other things, individual words and sentence lengths to assess difficulty and readability.
Many sites online provide a full breakdown of lexical ranges. Many will let you put in a published novel or novella and give a Lexile measure. Some will let you enter your own Lexile measure and provide you with a percentage comprehension estimate of a text, and identify challenging vocabulary in it.
A simple Google search around ‘Lexile level’ will help you choose the most suitable site for your needs.
Five Novellas/ Short Novels to Consider…
I have selected five pieces of fiction to consider – all with a Lexile measure of less than 1,000 (roughly equivalent of a US Grade 5/11 year old native speaker UK). There are, of course, other issues beyond ‘difficulty’ and ‘readability’ levels in deciding upon suitability – subject matter being key. These five novellas/short novels are, in cinema terminology, no more explicit than a PG-13. Depending on your location, this will depend on who the publisher is.
At around twenty-nine thousand words (approx. 187 pages) Of Mice and Men was published in 1937. It tells the story of George and Lennie; two field workers in depression set California trying to scrape out a living until they can ‘live off the fat of the land’. The beautiful simplicity of Steinbeck’s writing makes this an easy-to-read tale with complex ideas.
The last major work published in his lifetime and probably Hemingway’s most well-known work. The story of Santiago, an ageing fisherman, and his struggle with a giant marlin off the Cuba coast is approximately 27 thousand words – which makes it 179 thousand words less than Moby Dick…
Note: this is available as both a short story and short novel.
Flowers tells the story of a man, Charlie, with learning difficulties whose intelligence grows after a science experiment (some terminology acceptable of the time around mental disability are somewhat problematic today).
Written in journal format, Flowers is told from Charlie’s POV: initially almost unintelligible in its’ spelling and style but becoming increasingly lucid and intellectual as the story progresses.
Taken from his collection ‘Different Seasons’ (also including the novella ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ was based on), The Body (filmed as ‘Stand by Me’) is the story of four boys who go on a hike to find the dead body of a boy with the aim to become famous. The novella is a poignant examination of youth and ideal for those who think King only writes horror.
William Golding’s 1954 Nobel Prize-winning novel(la) is the longest in this list at around fifty-nine thousand words. Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels, the book follows a group of schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited Pacific island and the disintegration of their newly built ‘society’.
You can find the exact Lexile ratings for each of these titles, and many more as well, via simple searches around ‘Lexile level’.
For a challenging reading piece – native speaker or not, you could always try A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess – its use of a slang Burgess invented for the book makes for an interesting read levelling for the native speaker or learner.
Happy Reading!
Simon Bewick has taught in the UK and Japan and worked in ELT for more than 25 years. You can find more of his writing: including fiction, resources for writers, and reviews and articles for Readers at www.bewbob.com