Hi! My name is Vaida and I’ve been a teacher of English for 14 years. During my teaching career I’ve encountered with a lot of problems caused by different triggers. One of them was the lack of students motivation. When I finally realised that if I don’t change the way I teach, students won’t be motivated. I did a lot of reading on innovative approaches, participated in the seminars, asked more experienced teachers to share their methods. I think that I need to put a lot more effort into work, but the situation changes. And most importantly, it has become way more interesting to work using innovative methods.
Sometimes we find it difficult to create those new methods. Come to think of it, we don’t have to invent something which has already been invented. I’ve been using the method I’m going to share with you for 5 years now and each year it is different. I found it on the internet, check here and over the time adapted to my students’ needs.
Reading is one of the four communicative skills that are developed in the language lessons. There are a lot of ways and strategies which help students analyze, interpret and understand the text. Students can read the text on their own or listen to a recording, underline the words they don’t know and finally complete the assigned task. And the job is done. All are happy. The text is ‘analysed”, the tasks are completed and even evidence for the answers is provided. But sometimes we need something more than that. We should try to make students not only understand the words of the texts or find the answers to the given answers but encourage them to express their opinion, share their experience, not to be afraid of speaking in public.
For this reason I’m more than willing to organise reading club lessons for my students. We do this with 15-17 year-old teenagers but wisely chosen short stories could be analysed with all groups of students of all ages (and not only in English lessons :) )
What do we need for this lesson?
Material: A short story, reading lesson schedule, role badges.
Innovative methods: Task-based learning, learning through argumentation, building social skills.
Goal: To encourage students to analyse and discuss a short story from different perspectives.
Aim: To help students express their opinions by giving arguments, summarise a short story by highlighting the main events, understand the meaning of the words and look for cultural connections.
(Teachers should do some preparatory work because students need some explanations how the Reading club works. In order to have a very smooth discussion, we do have to think everything through, foresee all possible problems and etc.)
The Reading Club consists of students who have several roles: Discussion Leader, Summariser, Word Master, Passage Person, Connector And Culture Collector. There are 14-15 students in my English classes, so several people can play the same role (here some cooperation is needed).
Discussion Leader should be responsible for the whole discussion. He/she has to be very attentive, encouraging and organised. He/she asks story-related questions, which are asked at any time of the discussion, and guides the discussion almost independently. My advice would be to choose two students for the role of a discussion leader. Working together they’ll be able to lead a successful discussion, substitute each other and feel more confident. I think for this role it’s better to nominate a person who has got leadership skills who will know how to deal with difficulties during the discussion and could think of more questions and tasks spontaneously.
Summariser retells the story by highlighting the main events and the characters in the story. If a story is longer, it can be divided into two parts and retold by two summarisers. It will definitely help to cooperate with each other even in the future.
Word Master picks out the words that are meaningful to the story. During the discussion they define the words, translate if necessary and explain their choice of the words. As we all know students are very creative and can surprise us. This year my students are extremely creative. For every reading club lesson, word masters think of some tasks. It seems to me that they even started a race who will think of more interesting and appealing tasks. Some students create a crossword, prepare a quiz, ask other students to define the words and guess why those words might be important to the story.
Passage person looks for the passages in the story that are important, reveal the main idea or explain the course of action in the story. He/she shouldn’t forget to ask questions related to their chosen passages. As I have already mentioned, several students can perform the same roles. To avoid the same passages being discussed, the teacher can ask the students responsible for this role to work together, look for the passages together and think of the questions together.
Connector’s role is one of the least anticipated because students always find it difficult to look for connections between the story and their life. If it is difficult for them to relate the story with their own life, they can always look for the connections between the story and real life. And, of course, they shouldn’t forget to ask other students to think of any connections. This is how the discussion begins. Even though students hesitate and never choose this role unless they are assigned to it, they perform the role of the connector very well. They find small details in the text you could never think they are worth being noticed and connect them with their own experience.
Culture Collector is a person who is responsible for comparing cultural aspects of the story and our culture. It is advisable to pick out the passages which would explain cultural similarities and differences, think of the questions so that it would be easier to discuss the issues together with all the students in the group. At this stage I believe students get to know with different cultures and have an opportunity to compare our culture and at the same time become more tolerant. We analyse the stories where the main characters belong to different races, social status, nationalities. The behaviour that is described in the stories is sometimes heatedly discussed which proves that students can regonize what kind of behaviour or moral issues are acceptable or unacceptable.
During these activities it is easy to see how comfortable students feel when they speak in front of the audience. When the discussion starts, the students are asked to share their impression of the story, and everyone gets the chance to speak their mind. Students are honest and tell each other the truth. There are students who would never express their opinion in public or answer the questions voluntarily. Once they are asked, they are kind of forced to step out of their comfort zone and talk. In this way this activity encourages those quiet students to develop their social skills. Although, this doesn’t happen during one lesson. It’s also worth mentioning that during reading club lessons students can learn how to justify their opinion by providing arguments. And since there are no correct or incorrect answers, students can freely express their opinion and it will always be accepted, thus leading to a classroom discussion.
The most interesting part in this lesson is given to the teacher. He/she has to step back and allow discussion leaders to assume the responsibility of the discussion. The teacher becomes a silent observer, who never judges but might help the students by giving some hints or advice if necessary. My students like to sit in a circle and when a teacher becomes a part of the circle, all intimidation to speak publicly, express the opinions or even make mistakes disappears and as long as you encourage the students with a nod of your head or a smile on your face, students won’t feel any anxiety and will perform surprisingly well.
One more thing I have noticed is that the lesson and the methods applied help the students become tolerant and respectful of each other. Instead of laughing at those who have made a mistake or thought of some crazy ideas, they help them, correct them and encourage them. I believe that this is the best achievement the teacher could wish for in this demanding society that we live in today.
Tip. Reading a book can be accompanied with a cup of tea. This year my students insisted on bringing tea and cookies to the Reading Club lessons. Why not? Whatever keeps them comfortable :)
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