Louanne Piccolo is a native English speaker living in France who is also an English language teacher. As a regular reader and contributor to our blog, she’s written an article that’s bursting at the seams with top tips for using graded readers in the EFL classroom!
What’s a graded reader and why should I use it?
Graded readers are books written for foreign language learners. They can encompass any genre and they are sometimes a simplified version of an existing book. Graded readers can be adapted to different levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Extensive reading is the concept behind graded readers. Learners read large quantities of texts, and they do so for pleasure. They should be able to read quickly and without relying on a dictionary. The idea is that they can read as easily and enjoyably as they can in their mother tongue. Extensive reading promotes fluency, reinforces vocabulary and teaches new words in context. It has nothing to do with decoding a text, and it isn’t meant to replicate comprehensive reading in a muggy classroom on a long and hot afternoon!
Extensive reading is fun!
In order to ensure that the extensive reading process remains fun, I’ve suggested some activities. You can use these with single learners, or with a class full of students (so long as everyone is reading the same book)!
Activities before reading
Contrary to popular belief, you can judge a book by its cover (well, at the very least, you can make a guess as to its contents). Ask your learners to describe what they think the book is about, based on the cover. Then, make them vote on what they think is the most likely story they’ll read inside. Based on the winning story, divide the class into groups and ask them to come up with an ending. Ask them to present to the rest of the class.
You can also give your students information on a particular character. Ask them to walk around the classroom and talk about their character to the other learners. Encourage your students to add some strange information – the stranger the better – to their character descriptions. Then, get them to write down everything that they have learnt from each other. Finally, get them to vote on what they think to be true or false. Whilst reading the book, get them to check for the truth.
Activities whilst reading
Once learners have started the book and have some idea of the plot and who the characters are, they can use this knowledge to their advantage. Provide learners with a list of personality traits for each horoscope sign and ask them to attribute a sign to each character and to justify their answers. They can work in groups or discuss ideas as a class. You could even create a quiz called “Who?”. The learners must decide which character would behave in a certain way or say a particular sentence. For higher level classes, learners can create their own quizzes.
You could also ask learners to create alternative endings to chapters that they have read. Get them to present this to the class. Ideas can be serious, weird or comical – it’s their ending and their choice! There are no right or wrong answers.
Activities after reading
Ask your learners to draw posters or cartoon strips of the story. They can either orally describe what is happening in their poster, or they can draw speech bubbles in their cartoon strip that show the characters speaking.
Mini plays are also useful for checking how much a learner has understood of the story. Divide the class into groups and ask each group to act out a chapter. Allocate the task in front of the other groups, and don’t give any advance warning (this will help you to see who has fully understood the contents of the graded reader).
Lastly, you can make flashcards with the titles of each chapter, or with a sentence describing the main idea in a chapter. Get your learners to put them into the correct order. Encourage your learners to swap their flashcards with each other.
Playing is to children what extensive reading should be to language learners: fun, whilst learning stuff along the way! So, make sure to give these activities a go and let us know how you get on!
If you’ve enjoyed these activities by Louanne, you might also like her post about how can teachers encourage language learning by using technology in the classroom.