Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)

Drop Everything And Read celebrates the power of SSR (sustained silent reading). Our students can acquire powerful amounts of vocabulary and lexical/linguistic knowledge by learning language within the context of a story/book. Stephen Krashen is one of ELT’s biggest advocates of “The Power of Reading” and he advocates we get our students reading lots of books at a very easy level. Here’s a site with more info. on this powerful methodology.

So the recipe is to get a wide selection of reading for students. (you can get lots of printable books on EFL Classroom resources – click Reading!). Students for 5-10 minutes every class select a book or magazine, comic  or newspaper (I used to bring in the Metro from the subway, in stacks. My ESL students loved them!). They then quietly read. That’s all. No book reports, no presentations or talk. Just enjoying the books/reading!

IMPORTANT! The teacher should read with the students!

Track your student’s “DEAR” reading by getting them to log their reading into a notebook, noting title, time spent and how they felt (just a happy, blank or sad face will do).

This post was submitted by david.