Favorite books for beginning ESL: the Very Easy True Stories series

I’ve been teaching ESL for over 12 years, and I’ve tried a lot of books. At the beginner level (not true beginner, but a little above that) nothing has worked more reliably for me than Very Easy True Stories, and All New Very Easy True Stories. The stories in these books provide the perfect occasional supplement to the hyper-practical, standards-oriented textbooks most of us find ourselves using these days. In a given semester, I usually choose one of the two books to draw from for classwork and suggest the other book to students who would like to do additional reading at home.

The stories are cute and engaging, and the accompanying pictures really help students to quickly get the gist of what they’re reading. The exercises that follow the stories are a pretty good, but they are really only a starting point. I recommend the following sequence of activities:

So that’s the routine. In my experience, it leaves students feeling that they’ve had a very solid linguistic workout and that they have made some real progress. And assessments done in the following days will usually show that they have retained a good percentage of the words and phrases newly encountered in the story.

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Best regards,

Kurt Edward Robinson