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:
- Introduce the story. Talk about the photograph on the introductory page, and do the pre-reading questions with the class.will
- Introduce vocabulary that will be new to most students.
- Have students first read the story silently then work with students around them to figure out parts they don’t understand (usually for about 10 minutes total).
- Read the story for the students (or play the CD).
- Have students repeat the story after you, phrase by phrase.
- Do extra pronunciation practice of problematic words.
- Do the written exercises that follow the story.
- Move on to something else and/or go home and get some sleep. (You might be able to do everything listed here in one long class period, but I think doing the above and then sleeping on it really helps the pronunciation practice to sink in.)
- Listen again to the story (if it’s the next day).
- Read the story as a class, but this time with individual students each reading a section.
- Elicit a whole-class retelling of the story. Show one “line” (three pictures) of the story at a time on the projector while covering up the accompanying text. Have students try to remember what the text says. It’s not important that they remember the exact wording, just that they can convey the general idea. Give hints as necessary, especially by asking questions — Who is this? How does she feel? etc. — and by pantomiming the verbs you’re looking for.
- Do the above activity again, this time as a pair activity. One student covers up the text and tries to remember it while the other gives hints if the student gets stuck. I usually suggest that students do page 1, then switch roles and do page 1 again, then switch roles and do page 2, then switch roles and do page 2 again. Better yet is to have student A tell the story for the first three pictures, student B for the second three, etc., then do the whole story over with student B starting off. That can be a difficult procedure to convey, though. In any case, as with any complex activity, you will need to thoroughly model what you want students to do before starting them off.
- Dictation. Dictate sentences that use words from the story but aren’t exactly the same as the sentences in the story. I usually try to come up with a condensed version of the story, 10 or 12 sentences long. If you’re going to use character names, write them on the board so students won’t have to worry about how to spell them.
- Conversation practice. Most of the stories include a final exercise called “Discussion Practice.” It’s often pretty skimpy — five or six yes/no questions, for example. It’s usually pretty easy to build it up, though, or to create new conversation activities that employ the vocabulary and themes of the story.
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