Book reading for beginning students - An experience

In January, after reflecting about my previous years teaching beginning levels, I realized I should focus more on reading and writing skills. I talked to my coordinator Jennifer Loewen about that and she gave me a wonderful idea: to create a book reading list.

I really liked this idea because I am a strong believer in helping students become more autonomous in language learning. In fact, my Master's thesis in Linguistics was about autonomy, language learning strategies, and computer assisted language learning.

As my school provides funding to buy great resources for our classrooms, I ordered lots of photostories books for adults from Grass Roots Press. They have a great selection of books on various topics including romance, humour, health, and others. I keep all these books in two baskets so my students have easy access to them in our classroom.

As many students are not used to reading a lot, I had to think about something to encourage them to start reading. I started by raising their curiosity and told them some hints about the books so they would get interested in reading them. The idea was to do something similar to what we experience when we watch movie trailers. I believe the idea worked because soon they started reading and laughing with the humour series books! :-)

I leave the lists on the bookshelf so each student is responsible for choosing a book, copying its title, writing the date, and writing yes or no to say if they liked the book.

I told them they could read books if they finished a task or activity early, and during breaks or lunch time. I also told them that, if they wanted to learn a language, reading books was extremely important. They could learn new vocabulary, spelling, and much more.

In the end of the term, we had a reading assessment about the books and the students answered questions about the number of books they read, their favourite ones, their least favourite ones, some characters, words, and sentences they learned, and anything else they wanted to share. My coordinator also gave me the idea of asking them to draw a poster about their favourite character and talk about them.

All the students really enjoyed this experience of reading books and learning English with them. I was very happy when I saw that some students read more than 20 books in 18 weeks! As the results were very positive, I plan to continue with this activity.

Do you encourage your students to read too? What do you do?

Social media platforms and ESL beginning students - an experience in Winnipeg, Canada

The Canadian ESL program for immigrants and refugees aims to help them learn English for their daily lives. As social media platforms are present in the daily lives of many people, learning how to use English there is important for ESL (CLB 2/3*) students too.

So I am going to tell you how I have been helping my beginning students use English in social media platforms since most of them chose the theme "technology" in their recent needs assessment.

After I had discussed with them what they wanted to study specifically, I had some ideas for listening and speaking activities (talking about broken cell phones, tablets, computers and laptops in a computer store). However, as I could not think about any nice ideas for reading and writing, I talked to my coordinator Jennifer Lowen about that and she gave me a great idea about using a "Facewall" with my students.

Before I go on talking about this "Facewall", it is important to mention that, in order to ask my students to write something, I always give them plenty of texts with the textual genre to be read and analysed first. As my objective was to help my students write a paragraph about themselves, I provided them with various stories about people.

I chose the materials for this objective using an ESL Library lesson. This lesson has various stories about a teenager, his best friend, his sister, and his parents (I have already asked the ESL library team to create lessons based on adults and they told me they are working on it).

I like to use these materials because they have nice pictures to be used before the students read each story. I display the pictures using my Smartboard (I am so thankful for having this amazing tool in my class!). We discuss about the pictures and they get curious to check if their assumptions about the characters were true or not. After they read the stories, they answered questions.

We read these stories for two or three days so they could have time to process the patterns and the genre. After that, they answered questions about themselves and wrote a paragraph with the answers. They also had the opportunity to draw themselves. I believe using art is a good practice in order to activate certain parts of our brains that are often forgotten.

During these days of story reading, we had the opportunity to have a Skype conference with Katherine Heikkila's students from Kingston, Ontario. Before the video conference, we reviewed and practiced how to introduce ourselves and how to ask and answer questions. The students got very interested and practiced English a lot.

The Skype conference was a real success and one of my students asked if Katherine's students had Facebook profiles because she wanted to continue to interact with the new friends. Then Katherine suggested the creation of a Facebook page so our students could interact more. Maybe we are going to do that soon. You can see some pictures of our interaction below.

Photos of my students during the Skype conference.

Katherine's students used a laptop to talk to us.

With this idea about a Facebook page, I decided to help my students practice more their writing skills using the "Facewall" idea. I read each student's story and talked to each one individually to provide feedback. After that, I gave them a sticky note so they could copy their stories and stick them on our classroom wall. The students could write more if they were willing to (many were and really impressed me).

After the students posted their stories on the wall, they stood up to read their stories. It was great to see their interest in their classmates stories. They made interesting comments while reading the stories. This made me believe that the use of stories was very meaningful to them.

Finally we had a writing assessment and they were supposed to write their stories on paper like they would on a Facebook page for ESL students. I got very happy with the results and various students wrote more than I expected. The students were also proud of their stories in English.

As you can see, the results were positive and the scaffolding provided a great support for students to improve their writing skills in meaningful ways. The next step is to open a Facebook page so they can interact and write more.

Do you use social media platforms in your classes too?

*CLB - Canadian Language Benchmarks