Extensive Reading: Voice Diary

This recipe works best if you combine it with Extensive Reading. It builds confidence and teaches reading, speaking, and listening
Encourage your students to make a voice diary with their cell phones. Its listed under the “Voice Memo” Feature. First you need to provide a high interest story to your students.

1.    Have them read the story once quietly
2.    Next read the story aloud and record it on their voice diary
3.    Then have them playback and listen while they read

And the best part of it is, the students can track their progress. If they keep at it for a couple weeks they can actually hear the difference. Its worked great with Tech students

Can be adapted to anything, if they see a funny or cool sign, they can read it and save.

This post was submitted by Jason K.

You can use the newspaper in many ways but one easy way is to ask a student each day to begin class by reporting 3 things from the news. A new student each day. Ask questions afterwards and have the student write the 3 main “headlines” or stories on the board.

A great way to get students using English in a very meaningful way.

True Stories is also a good series with real news stories.

This presentation shows why current events are great for teaching English. Also, don’t forget the Current Events page on EFL Classroom 2.0. Lonely teachers around the world, also get www.livestation.com Free streaming of all the major news TV stations. Works great!

This post was submitted by David.

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.

The best and easiest way to “teach” a story is to tell it through prediction. Get the students in a comfortable area if possible and read them the book, showing the pictures. You can also use all the great stories on EFL Classroom 2.0, if you have a computer and screen.

Start telling the story and at a good point stop and ask, “What’s going to happen next?” Let students tell each other or the class. Then continue to see if they are right. Stop again, and ask them to predict….continue doing this until the end of the story.

A good extension would be to have the students rewrite the story in their own words. Or stop the story before the end and have them write their own ending! Then share the “real” ending. 

A great story for this, available is The Eyebrow Story. Students love this one!

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

1.  Photocopy these stories (I like to use funny stories with a punchline but you could use any stories, folktales work well too) and give one to a student (one of your better students). Ask the student to go out of the classroom and read it carefully.

2. Tell or read the rest of the students a story and tell them to listen carefully because if they guess the ending, you’ll give them a prize. Stop before the punchline and ask them if they can guess the punchline.

3. Bring in the student who is outside. Ask them to retell their story to the class, stopping before the ending/punchline. Students listen and guess the ending.

4. Then, the class takes turn to tell the first story, the teacher told. The student who went outside tries to guess the ending.

5. Give all students a story. Give them 3-5 minutes to understand and read, ask any questions about the text.  Then, put students in groups of 3-4 and each student tells their story to others. Stopping so others can guess the punchline.

6. Give students in each group a number. The “1s” form a group. The “2s” etc… They retell their story a second time (and will do much better!).

7.  Return to the first group. Students then must retell a story they were told by others in the last group!

8. Finish up by asking what were the best stories. Get some better students to retell to the whole group!

If you’d like to refer your student to similar stories with audio or use the audio in class – go HERE for my presentation Funny Stories. Lots more on the story page of EFL Classroom , all in audio!

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.