Reading is Fundamental [304420]

Using stories

to achieve meaningful interactions

in the ESL classroom

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reading is Fundamental

Literacy has always been one of the great challenges of education. [anonimizat]. [anonimizat], to slap a ‘stupid’ label on a person struggling to decipher a text, [anonimizat]. However, [anonimizat] a sure recipe for disaster. [anonimizat], [anonimizat], again and again. ‘Street smarts’, a [anonimizat], restricted and restrictive. ‘Book smarts’ [anonimizat] a chance to experience a wider range of situations and acquire a wider perspective. [anonimizat] a [anonimizat] a [anonimizat]’s reasoning in the evening. Gardening, poetry, [anonimizat], [anonimizat] – [anonimizat]. [anonimizat], [anonimizat].

[anonimizat]: [anonimizat], how many of them abandoned school. Residence is taken into account too: [anonimizat]. Gender, [anonimizat], [anonimizat]. [anonimizat] a decline in the number of students that mirrors the general trend (economic migration and financial difficulties being the main reasons for a [anonimizat] 22 million people to 19.7 million, according to the National Institute of Statistics) Furthermore, they indicate that a [anonimizat], [anonimizat] a [anonimizat].

[anonimizat] 2009, ‘approximately one in five 15-year olds in the EU-27 countries had difficulties using reading for learning. The proportion of struggling readers was especially high in Bulgaria and Romania (ca. 40 %).’ ’ [anonimizat]. [anonimizat]. However, international survey results suggest that engagement in reading has the potential to balance the reading achievement differences between boys and girls or students from various social backgrounds.’ (idem)

How does a student: [anonimizat], though?

[anonimizat], [anonimizat], grant access to the ranks of the ‘enlightened’. It is rather the dissemination of a concerted set of values and beliefs intended to support the continuation of society as we know it. Respect for the other, the value of individual free thinking, rights and duties, a love of beauty and basic training in the rigours of scientific thinking, this is what formal education should try to offer its charges. It is every teacher’s duty to encourage our students’ natural inquisitiveness, to find ways to open their eyes to the problems of the day, and seek answers to the challenges of tomorrow. Books can never replace experience, but they can help our understanding of our experiences, giving them context and perspective.

[A] book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

Indeed, ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’ is no less true today than it was in 1819; and yet ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ remains just as true. Our job, then, is to educate the eyes of our students, encourage them to read, to speak about their experiences, to think about them. By reading in class, we begin to train their minds to find the beauty and value in books, and, what’s more, to become familiar with common patterns, using reading and writing effectively in each particular situation.

Stories tell us who we are. They caution against strangers, set out clear moral values, detail the hardships of life, talk of failure and loneliness, glorify love, deplore mortality. They are part of our social DNA, opening our eyes to other places, other beliefs, other ways of being.

Taking all these into consideration, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of reading and especially of literature in the acquisition of a foreign language. We started from a very specific set of challenges, given the nature of a vocational school, with its grueling physical training regime, the frequent leaves of absence and all the other constrains on our students, and looked for a way of making English classes enjoyable and effective. We did not invent the wheel, or discover fire, all over again; our discourse starts with outlining the problem of functional illiteracy, which is, unfortunately, widespread in Romanian schools, and how during English classes we can try to tackle the problem from another angle. We discuss the opportunity of favouring graded readers over original texts, and over classical format textbooks, drawing from our experience in the classroom but also from a large variety of methodical texts, from outlines of national strategies , to texts written by reputed methodologists and world-renown authors , . The first chapter, The Need to Read, deals with stories as one of the most enjoyable and easily understood vehicles for information. Chapter Two, What is a Story?, refines the concept: we do not propose teaching English Literature; our goal is to offer our students characters they can relate to, in situations that they understand, in order to foster an emotional investment – in other words, motivation. The more interested they are in the story, the more they care about the characters or the plot, the more they pay attention and the easier language acquisition becomes. Chapter three, Textbooks or Graded Readers, explains why we prefer to use graded readers over the reading fragments offered in the ministry-approved textbooks, which are sometimes outdated (in English, My Love, a child receives a camera from his grandmother, as a present, and takes it to school where another child boasts about his having a better model at home, with a flash-light – My Camera, p. 68; Front Runner is full of images of people listening to a Walkman or using similarly antiquated technology, other times awkward – in Snapshot Pre-Intermediate , the characters start to be interested in having a boyfriend or girlfriend, and the dialogues are painfully unrealistic; for instance, Louise and Nicola talk about making Louise’s boyfriend jealous in order to make him pay more attention to their relationship (p.80) and mostly uninteresting. Chapter Four, Publishers and Series, describes the books available at the moment and discusses the strengths and flaws of each series, from our point of view. Since not every child wants to read books in the classical, printed, format, Chapter Five, Paper or Pixel, deals with the challenges of using technology in class and offers suggestions about how to overcome a series of problems, such as cheating, messaging or going online for entertainment and not education. In chapter 6, Google Translate, we argue in favour of embracing the technological advances available, and pushing our students to learn how to take every advantage they possibly can from it. In Chapter Seven we discuss the Transformative Effect of Reading, concentrating on how reading together helps our students build a cultural identity, form critical skills and build self-confidence. Chapter 8, Grammar in Context, explains how reading helps students better understand the grammar notions learned in class, by offering a plethora of examples used in a natural-sounding context, instead of a collection of unrelated samples. Chapter 9, with all its subchapters, deals with building communication skills with the help of graded readers. We also included a number of lesson plans, in order to illustrate how stories can contribute to understanding the present tenses, taking a test or getting ready to write a composition. The final chapter, Life in Colour, reiterate our conviction that school, as a necessary stepping stone in a successful personal and professional trajectory, must offer its charges much more than information; it must equip them with a cultural background, a sense of shared values and an ever-present curiosity.

This paper is not divided into sections: theoretical and practical. Instead, the practice is supported by theory, which, in turn, suggests novel approaches and methods to use in class. Thoroughly convinced of the value of story-telling in any endeavor that is connected with education, we have written this as a story, and not as a report. The story of Reading as Fundamental.

Chapter 1: The Need to Read

We read because we want to know that we are not alone; we read because we need to know that someone, somewhere, went through the same things we’re experiencing; we read to share countless lives and innumerable experiences, dreams and victories and failures of others. A quest for information, a search for facts, a longing for poetry, a thirst for thrills… there are as many reasons to open a book as there are readers.

And yet… people don’t read very much.

More worryingly yet, we are not only talking about a decline in the number of people seeking to become cultivated, refined and articulated individuals – we are talking about a worldwide crisis in alphabetization, a reluctance to engage in any cultural pursuit, a stultification of the general populace. In an age of easy access to information, it seems like more and more people are giving up their privileges as thinking, rational individuals and are satisfied with bite-size, pre-digested opinion, covering any and all aspects of reality. Fake nails, diets to die for (literally), make-up tutorials, cures for cancer, motivational platitudes – this is what clutters the mind of the young (and not-so-young) today.

It seems then foolhardy to introduce reading as the main ingredient of an English as a Second Language course. If reading is such a chore, why compound the torture by asking students to read in a language that is foreign and difficult?

For one thing, this teacher loves literature. Talking about Shakespeare and Austen and Virginia Woolf may have gone over the heads of over-worked and underprivileged kids, but Kipling and Twain and Frances Hodgson-Burnett have a way of insinuating themselves into any mind and of opening the gates of imagination. Secondly, charming as teaching Present Perfect may be, the reading of a story will provide the students with a more profound sense of achievement. Discovering the story together, finding out ‘what happens next’, making sure that you haven’t missed any clues… these are the reasons why reading will involve students to a greater extent, make them true partners in learning more easily than any other method we have attempted.

This is not to say that reading stories is the best way to teach – or learn – a foreign language. It is but one of many, and it is the weapon of choice of this teacher, and the present paper will attempt to validate this choice, but it is by no means anything other than one part of the solution we have found to a very specific problem. To put matters into perspective, whereas a top-tier school student may have some 6-7 hours of study per day, a student going to a vocational school specializing in sports will have 2-3 hours of grueling physical training, a meal break, followed by courses – another 4-5 hours, totaling an impressive 10 hours spent at or near school. If the student in question is also a commuter, it becomes a losing proposition to assign lengthy homework, even in the form of reading assignments. To add to an already difficult situation, these kids often come from financially insecure homes, where food and drink are the main destinations of the family income, and books are rarities; more commonly, though, it is not a lack of funds but a lack of education that makes parents ignore the value of reading. The role the teacher – the school, in fact – plays in such cases is very difficult: for it is our task to open doors to opportunities that might otherwise remain unattainable, to expose the student to as many cultural experiences as we can, to allow them to choose a path and not just follow blindly in their parents’ footsteps. We believe in a school that is open to the world, in imparting values and cultural paradigms, not in dry recitation of facts easily accessible online. In fact, an overabundance of facts is counterproductive – what the school needs to provide students with is the mental apparatus necessary in order to judge each situation on its merits, to trust or reject hypotheses and claims after giving each due consideration.

However, with each new generation, we became aware of the huge difference in values and world view that stands in the way of teacher-student communication; on the one hand, a love of fine arts, of reading and theatre and discussing ideas and, on the other, hero-worshipping Messi or Cristina Neagu, discussing handball tactics and statistics. One could go as far as describing it in terms of culture shock; everything in our two worlds is different. Does popular culture mean films and contemporary literature, or Youtube channels and controversial TV shows? Comedy – is it Seinfeld and Brooklyn 99, or iUmor and Inpuiimei? Music, free time, vacation destinations… nothing seems to bridge this gap between teacher and students. What we need, then, in order to discuss and reconcile such different ideologies, is to reach common ground, to find a common language, one that will prevent us from getting lost in translation. The act of reading together bridges those distant shores, while not exactly bringing about a cataclysmic paradigmatic shift. It is one activity where the teacher’s demands are no longer unreasonable, where the student’s effort is rewarded instantly by gaining access to the meaning of the text, where true collaboration happens painlessly, with the better students helping their colleagues without rancor or scorn.

Basically, for the last five years, we have supplemented our charges’ exposure to English by challenging them to read one and even two stories per semester. In addition to the course book provided by the school, these stories offered students the chance to discover how to use the grammar notions and the vocabulary items studied in class. What is more, these stories opened a window that had previously been ignored – that into the culture of the English-speaking world. For students that came from houses deprived of books, or whose proclivities favored vigorous physical activity over sitting still and turning pages, reading “Tom Sawyer” or “Marcel and the White Star” in class turned out to be enormously rewarding. In fact, the act of reading together offered them not just a novel experience, but a welcome break from classroom routine.

What stories brought to our English class was more than “language patterning – the character types, plots, and norms important in our culture.”; they provided common ground, a mutual interest, a fictional agora, where teacher and student could learn to speak the same language, without the barriers of grades, evaluations or assessments. Curiosity, the desire to find out ‘what next’, a tendency to retell the story to others… suddenly the teacher can vacate the center of the stage, and allow students to take charge of their learning rhythm, since it is their turning of the page that dictates how fast we get to the climax, how fast we save the day.

We understand the need to impart information, to teach grammar, to stress patterns of pronunciation. Even the matter of literacy is not as simple as merely recognizing the words on a page. In the modern world, literacy refers to such a wide range of fields of knowledge as to come to mean ‘an ability to decipher and use competently information within a given functional context’. A Guide to Effective Literacy Instruction, Grades 4 to 6, published by the Ontario Ministry of Education, baldly states that

to be successful personally and professionally, today’s students need to be independent, flexible, creative, critical, and strategic thinkers and communicators. They need to be proficient in many “literacies” – that is, they must be able to understand and communicate with people from diverse backgrounds by means of a wide and constantly expanding range of texts, media, and communication methods. They need to be confident in their learning and motivated to continue to learn throughout their lives (3).

In order to “achieve multiple literacies, to become proficient at understanding and using a wide range of text forms, media, and symbol systems in order to maximize their learning potential, keep pace with changing technologies, and actively participate in the global community.”(idem), they must first accept reading, in any format, be it physical or virtual, as a worthwhile pastime, and form the basic foundation for literacy development – understanding the text at the literal level, engaging in group discussions on a given topic, communicating thoughts, ideas and feelings in speaking and writing. What happens in the classroom is then a very fluid blend of techniques, borrowed from such diverse methods as the communicative approach, the grammar-translation method, the direct approach. Our purpose is to read and find out; however, we take breaks to translate, to write (from one-word answers to full paragraphs, students need to demonstrate that they understand what they read and that they can express their opinions on given topics, related to the text), or even to do grammar (find tenses, re-write as negatives or interrogatives, imagine if-clauses that could negate or permit certain consequences). The aim is never JUST to read – it is to learn, to practice all basic skills, that is reading, writing, listening and speaking, and language areas (i.e. vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation). Moreover, by choosing judiciously, we can benefit from the Eureka! effect – that moment of discovery, when the student becomes independent, when the fundamental notions accumulated suddenly become relevant and useful, and the learner can make sense of the text by him(her)self.

Chapter 2: What Is A Story?

Stories are fundamental to our understanding of the world and can be a valorous teaching instrument in the ESL classroom. But what constitutes a story? Is just the narrative yarn sufficient, or is it necessarily “these words in this order”? In a vocational school, where students strive for excellence in sports, and academic performance is an after-thought… do we go for Faulkner, or for Reader’s Digest?

According to Joanne Collie and Stephen Slater, there are

four main reasons which lead a language teacher to use literature in the classroom. These are valuable authentic material, cultural enrichment, language enrichment and personal involvement. In addition to these four main reasons, universality, non-triviality, personal relevance, variety, interest, economy and suggestive power and ambiguity are some other factors requiring the use of literature as a powerful resource in the classroom context.

Literature deals with fundamental human issues; however distant in space or time, however outdated the political institutions or the fashion that a text has in the background, its message will transcend time and cultural boundaries and speak directly to audiences in another country or century. However, literary texts do offer glimpses into other cultures, other systems of values and behavior patterns, which make them invaluable tools in an age when cultural awareness and open-mindedness are essential. Literature becomes a means of cultural enrichment, as well as a treasure-trove of vocabulary not generally found in other contexts – we constantly advise students to watch films and TV in the ‘target language’ and to listen to songs, but they are miserly when compared to literature. Nonetheless, there is one other reason to choose introducing stories in the ESL classroom: personal involvement. Language teaching materials concentrate on how a language operates, both as a rule-based system and as a socio-semantic system. “Very often, the process of learning is essentially analytic, piecemeal, and, at the level of the personality, fairly superficial. Engaging imaginatively with literature enables learners to shift the focus of their attention beyond the more mechanical aspects of the foreign language system”. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, said the poet. Similarly, a good story will take over our imagination, and draw us in, to live within its universe, to become fairies and pirates and wizards and detectives.

The case for the study of literature in the ESL classroom has many defenders.

A welter of reasons for, or benefits of, teaching literature in the FL classroom have been proffered by a variety of authors. For example, Parkinson and Reid Thomas (2000: 9-11) list, with more or less approval, the following ten:

1. Cultural enrichment. Reading literature promotes cultural understanding and awareness. (see also Collie and Slater 1987; Schewe 1998; Sell (ed.) 1995; Silberstein 1994).

2. Linguistic model. Literature provides examples of “good” writing, linguistic diversity, expressive ranges, and so on.

3. Mental training. Better than any other discipline, literature trains the mind and sensibility.

4. Extension of linguistic competence. Literature stretches the competences of learners who have mastered the linguistic rudiments.

5. Authenticity. Literature is genuine linguistic material, not a linguistically contrived textbook (Duff and Maley 1990).

6. Memorability. Because literature, especially poetry and songs, is memorable, it can be a memorised archive of linguistic usage (Maley and Moulding 1985).

7. Rhythmic resource. Poems assist the learner in assimilating the rhythms of a language (Maley and Moulding 1985).

8. Motivating material. Literature is more likely to engage with and motivate a learner than artificial teaching inputs because it is generated by some genuine impulse on the part of the writer and deals with subjects and themes which may be of interest to the learner (Duff and Maley 1990).

9. Open to interpretation. Because literature is open to interpretation, it can serve as a basis for “genuine interaction” between learners (Duff and Maley 1990).

10. Convenience. Literature is a handy (photocopiable) resource.

Lazar (1993:15-9) suggests that ‘literature in the FL classroom motivates, offers access to cultural background, encourages language acquisition, expands language awareness, develops students’ interpretative abilities and educates the whole person in so far as it enhances our imaginative and affective capacities’ (see also Fernández 2003: 60-31). Burke and Brumfit (1986:171-2) state that literature ‘promotes literacy and oracy, critical and analytical ability, social skills and the use of the imagination; encourages liberal, ethical and humanitarian attitudes, respect for the imagination, respect for literacy and cultural tradition’; and ‘provides information about literature, literary traditions and language.’

The texts we use in class may not belong to the rarefied realm of Literature, but they respect the general storyline of the original text and, depending on the level, of course, adopt the same tone and style as the author intended, sometimes going as far as using entire recognizable passages from the original. Of course, this only happens in the case of upper-intermediate or advanced level readers, where the need to simplify the grammar and syntax of the original text occurs less frequently.

Take this fragment, for instance, from the beginning of Roald Dahl’s 1948 Man from the South:

It was getting on towards six o’clock so I thought I’d buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deckchair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.

I went to the bar and got the beer and carried it outside and wandered down the garden towards the pool.

It was a fine garden with lawns and beds of azaleas and tall coconut palms, and the wind was blowing strongly through the tops of the palm trees, making the leaves hiss and crackle as though they were on fire. I could see the clusters of big brown nuts hanging down underneath theleaves.

There were plenty of deck-chairs around the swimming pool and there were white tables and huge brightly coloured umbrellas and sunburned men and women sitting around in bathing suits. In the pool itself there were three or four girls and about a dozen boys, all splashing about and making a lot of noise and throwing a large rubber ball at one another.

These are the opening lines of the abridged version, published in 2008 by Pearson Education Ltd, in the Penguin Graded Readers series, level 6:

It was almost six o’clock, so I thought I’d buy a beer and go out and sit by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.

I went to the bar and got the beer and carried it outside and wandered down the garden. It was a fine garden and there were plenty of chairs around the pool. There were white tables and huge brightly coloured umbrellas and sunburned men and women sitting around in bathing suits. In the pool itself there were three or four girls and about a dozen boys, all splashing about and making a lot of noise and throwing a large rubber ball at one another.

The second text is visibly shorter; however, the tone is identical, and the atmosphere is the same. The change in pace dictated by the bits of description edited out does not change the story in its fundamentals.

When dealing with beginners, though, things are decidedly different. Compare The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in the original and the abridged form:

‘TOM!’

No answer.

‘TOM!’

No answer.

‘What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!’

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for ‘style,’ not service — she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

‘Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll —‘

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

‘I never did see the beat of that boy!’

And these are the opening lines from the reader published by Oxford University Press Bookworms in 2000:

‘Tom! Tom! Where are you?’

No answer.

‘Where is that boy? When I find him, I’m going to…’

Aunt Polly looked under the bed. Then she opened the door and looked out into the garden.

No matter how much they differ from the original, though, all readers have the potential to offer one essential thing to our readers: enjoyment. A story well told draws us in, captivates our attention and creates a level of emotional involvement no other type of language-learning activity can come near, while doing away with such difficulties as complex or unfamiliar vocabulary or grammatical structures, unfamiliar cultural references, complex text organization or unfamiliar text type.

What stories, though?

The experiment started in 2012, with two groups: one of them consisted of 28 6th graders, and the other of 30 11th graders. What the two classes had in common was a combination of very good and very poor students, with a smattering of average students that were too weak for the rhythm imposed by the ‘good’ kids, and too advanced for the remedial exercises needed by the ‘weak’ kids. It was the 6th graders who wanted ‘something interesting’ to do in class. Their start-of-year tests averaged around 4.3, which was actually an improvement over the previous year, but their workload was enormous. By way of consequence, their involvement in class suffered. The solution seemed to be a visit to our computer lab, where they could listen to a story. Marcel and the White Star, in the Penguin Readers Easystarts list, seemed to be a good choice. Written using 200 headwords and only the present simple, it nonetheless presents pupils with a fairly natural-sounding story, a lovable little protagonist and a ridiculous situation that could be made fun of, encouraging further discussion.

While the series does offer audio files to accompany the text, the ‘listening’ didn’t work. Tired, hungry, distracted, too far or too close to the speakers, pupils did not benefit from simply listening to the story. The majority did not understand anything, either because they did not care to stop fidgeting, or because they were too intimidated to try. The aim of the lesson being to improve listening comprehension and consequently confidence in their ability, it failed abysmally. However, when presented with the text they could follow while simultaneously listening to the recording, comprehension soared. Illustrations, sound effects, see-and-hear all combined to produce meaning.

What happened with the 11th grade, however, was a different story: the text they chose was a poem included in the Prospects Advanced course book – The Jaguar, by Ted Hughes:

“The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.

The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut

Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.

Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil

Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or

Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.

It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives

At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,

As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged

Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—

The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,

By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—

He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:

His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.”

Afterwards they admitted that they had taken one single thing in consideration: length. The alternatives were short stories (Saki’s The Storyteller, and O’Henry’s The Gift of The Magi). Short as it is, the poem posed huge problems, both in terms of language and of imagery. The students struggled with it, defined the ideas as ‘stupid’ and the poem as ‘uninteresting’ and generally regarded the whole concept of reading literature in English as idiotic. It was, alas, only the beginning; they suffered Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Kate Chopin’s A Respectable Woman, Saki’s The Open Window. Attendance was falling, a fairly short piece of writing was taking an inordinate amount of time to read… the situation was not getting better. At the same time, their young colleagues were thriving on a steady diet of graded readers, introduced as rewards after the completion of a couple of units in the course book.

According to the theory, literature in the ESL classroom is a wonderful tool, encouraging the “development of a positive attitude toward reading in a second language, offering intrinsic motivation to read more, leading to increased reading fluency, gains in vocabulary and grammar knowledge, improvement in writing in the second language.”

All very well and quite convincing, except for one thing: it depends. It depends on the age of the students, their proficiency (or lack thereof), their previous cultural exposure, their reading rhythm. In our case, as the unfortunate experiment with 11C proved, literature in the English classroom at high-school level was a losing proposition. The second semester saw a return to a more sane interpretation of the curriculum.

The problems with the high-schoolers stemmed from low self-confidence. Literature was something that happened at theoretical high schools, not at vocational ones – one had to be… not smarter, necessarily, but more academically-inclined to do it – reading was not a pleasant activity, the vocabulary was unfamiliar, the grammar of the pieces was too difficult, the ideas were obscure… even when asked to summarize the stories, which turned out not to be the impossible effort they were envisaging, every step along the way was taken grudgingly, and with little to no pleasure. If reading was to be attempted with any chances of success, a new approach was needed.

For the 6th graders, though, the madness continued, and soon turned into method.

Since graded readers are generally abridged versions of famous literary works, they provide a friendly and stress-free approach to high culture. Macbeth, level 3 Penguin Reader may not have “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”, but it is still an introduction to a timeless story of ambition, guilt and sorrow. 6th graders do not have the life experience to appreciate the Bard, though, so the reading material had to be appropriate not only in terms of its grammatical or lexical range, but also in subject matter.

From then on, extensive reading became a normal part of the English class. We have come to appreciate their numerous benefits, and advocate their use with both secondary school students, and with high school students. Because they are graded, it is fairly simple to choose one that is level appropriate. The vocabulary is controlled and recycled, its repetition giving students ample opportunity to internalize the meaning of the new words and their use. The grammar is limited and recycled too, which makes it easy to practice, for instance, tenses, comparisons or plurals. This makes reading an invaluable tool for learning grammar, too, not just vocabulary. One could also mention that such practice of grammar follows the ministry guidelines for the teaching of grammar issues to the letter.

Another benefit stems from the fact that, since our students have so little time for homework, the bulk of the work needs to be done in class. From listening to the recording to reading out loud, each lesson offers practice in listening and pronunciation. It also improves fluency and speed – simplified language allows faster understanding of the story, which, in turn, lessens anxiety and allows students to attempt a more natural rhythm when reading aloud or speaking. Reading in chunks, like in their first language, is one aim of each lesson. Another is the gradual familiarization with a different word order, and the acquisition of simple idioms and collocations. Writing benefits too – word order, paragraph formation, language in context – repeated exposure to lengthy reading material allows students to draw conclusions and to infer rules of composition that they can put to use in order to write or speak. Communicate, in effect, which is the whole point of ESL instruction: the ability to communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas effectively.

Chapter 3: Textbooks or Graded Readers?

We believe, and try to argue in this paper, that while textbooks can and are widely used as the primary teaching aid in Romanian schools and elsewhere, they do not engage students in the act of learning, and do not offer much in the way of satisfaction except by measuring degree of completeness (look, we’ve nearly finished the textbook, that means we’re doing well!) What textbooks fail to offer learners is a coherent narrative, an encompassing story arc that might involve relatable characters. Other than the Snapshot series that puts the same people into somewhat believable situations, all other series currently approved for use by the Ministry of Education follow, as far as we know, the same recipe: lessons organized around a grammatical point, followed by exercises covering both vocabulary and usage issues, and a variety of types of text samples.

Peter Brooks argues that “narrative is one of the principal ways we organize our experience of the world – a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long neglected by psychologists and philosophers”. Stories, says David Hermann, ‘constitute attempts to make sense of the world, and they do this to a large extent through a common pool of mental operations: comparison, distinction, deduction, induction, sequencing (whether events or ideas), and seeking explanation through causal relations.’further arguing that the “narrative involves the reconstruction of minds. But we perform this operation as a normal part of social life. Does it mean that we engage in private storytelling whenever we interact with human beings?” (idem)

We believe that we do, and we believe that it is very important to step out of the comfort zone, to look at the textbook as an aid, no more effective on its own at teaching than, say, grammar-focused exercise books, and supplement what it brings to the classroom by judicious use of literature, either original (possibly in bilingual, 5-hours a week classes) or, in our case, simplified.

Our arguments against textbooks?

Take English, My Love, the 9th grade EDP L1 course book, for instance. It is – or should be – fun to use. Its units cover Hobbies, Books, Food, Sports, Cinema, interspersed with bits of History and Culture- Invaders, the Elizabethan Age, Shakespeare … However, its pop culture references are dated, its technological information antiquated, the grammatical proficiency it assumes – quite rare outside philology classes. The learner this course book addresses is a lover of books and film, has a passing acquaintance with physical exercise, appreciates quotes from Winston Churchill, (for instance) and is, in general, quite fond of the language and the culture studied. For L2 classes, what the school library offers is either a slightly slimmer English, My Love, or a similarly contrived and unrelatable Front Runner. Furthermore, the listening exercises are simply a waste of printed page, since not one of the teachers consulted has been able to find the companion CDs.

We are not alone in rejecting textbooks as sole or even main source of material in the ESL classroom. Jonathan Sell:

Standard FL textbooks are fictions in a variety of ways. Not only do they tend to peddle a version of English which is abnormal in its normativeness, deviant in its purity, but they also use fictional storylines to introduce learners to various situations, points of grammar or lexical fields and often employ non-authentic recordings of actors with bogus accents for listening exercises. Apart from being fictive, this is all unconvincing and patronising and turns off the target learners, as any teacher who has laboured through the Open Roads photo-stories should know. Equally misguided are textbooks which try to get real by dropping names like Samantha Fox, Frank Bruno or the Spice Girls and instead only risk short-term ridicule from students with conflicting tastes and interests, and mid- to long-term obscurity (Who remembers Fox and Bruno today?).

Another way of ‘getting real’ is the one practiced by the authors of English, My Love: students get to read fragments describing famous landmarks in the British capital and about its history, and are asked to demonstrate their progress by talking about the selfsame places themselves.

What is the relevance of describing places you’ve never seen? How does talking about Trafalgar Square, or the British Museum, without having set eyes on them, help? What of life trickles in textbooks is sanitized, embellished, purified. It is never messy, and for students who may travel to Ireland to visit family, or to Scotland, for work, there are too many theoretical issues covered, and nowhere near enough practical ones.

“To put it bluntly, just as no one ever pissed in Enid Blyton stories, so is there little sex, drugs or rock ’n’ roll in FL textbooks, little about human relations, sexual relations, sexual orientation, drugs, alcohol, racism, loneliness, fear, bullying, violence, growing up, dying, etc. etc. This is where literature can step in to fill the gap, supplementing topic areas with material that is authentic and has a chance of engaging learners affectively, more so than other text types. Literary texts carefully chosen in accordance with the social and cultural environment, the level of psychological development, and the interests, concerns and aspirations of learners can, if used wisely, be an effective tool for stimulating and achieving language learning and equipping learners with relevant linguistic and socio-cultural competences. ‘

How to address this in class: we decided to use the textbook as a yard stick, a measuring rod, to help monitor what progress we make in terms of covering the areas demanded by each year’s curriculum. Both in terms of grammar points and of vocabulary index, a textbook is a very useful resource, albeit one that needs supplemented constantly. However, as the units progress, reading can take the place of ‘regular’ lessons, focusing on whatever the students need practicing: reading comprehension, creative writing, grammar exercises.

How to: For each class, the start of the school year brings a test, scheduled after the first two weeks of revision (clearing out the cobwebs that settled in during the long summer vacation). This offers the teacher a starting point, as it indicates the level the group is at. The subject matter is agreed on after some debate; whether we want ‘something funny’, ‘something horror’ or ‘something interesting’, if most of the group vote for a title, chances are that their curiosity has already been aroused.

At times, despite the testing and the talking, a title proves to be too difficult or too easy. It is unpleasant, but even so, some students will finish the story. As for the rest, a new selection has to wait for a while, until the aspects that raised problems have been addressed and worked on in a more traditional manner. This was the case of a group that started to read The Lost World, and had to abandon it after the second chapter in order to address huge gaps in their learning. The problems that the initial testing had not revealed, due to the students’ tendency to help one another and ‘cover’ for the weaker ones, were brought to light during the reading of the first chapter. Severely limited vocabulary made progress slow and understanding dependent upon step-by-step translations and explanation; and unlike routine cloze exercises, where only one, rarely two solutions are possible, tasks including questions that referred to the text were supposed to translate into some interesting results. Instead, there were one-two answers per class, mistakes included. Present Simple and Past Simple had to be explained again, by which point it had become obvious that a story employing verbs in the future tense, modals, complicated words like ‘fossil’, ‘allosaurus’, ‘extinction’, and concepts that had to be explained on virtually every page, was too difficult for this class. Nevertheless, the better students in the group finished the story and then reported with some pride that they noticed differences between the book and the cinematographic version. This prompted a reevaluation of the method of implementation; for groups that have such drastic differences in competence, a new approach was needed. Two stories, one at beginner and one at intermediate level, could be the answer; instead of trying to slow down the better students, allow them to read something just above their level of comfort (Stephen Krashen’s comprehensible input theory). This requires the teacher to spend more time preparing notes and materials for the same classroom, and concentration to juggle two different sets of problems. For the students, though, it is an opportunity to work on something more appropriate to their needs, and yielding better results.

In theory.

In practice, we discovered that the weaker students were not merely intimidated by the task, as we had initially surmised; they were downright adverse to the idea of reading voluntarily. Any activity that required more than rote learning was considered crude and unusual punishment; the most that could be done, in terms of ‘independent study’, was assign tasks that could be googled easily, and then presented to the class by each and every one of them.

And the better students? As a much-quoted, although probably entirely fictitious, social study experiment proved, students will only do the least amount of work they can get away with. Three or four students excepted, the rest of the class were happy to return to the classical textbooks, with their one-correct-answer exercises, and their familiar layout. For this class, the proposition fell flat. For the others, though, it went well. Mostly.

It seems that the younger the students, the more open they are to trying new things, to proving themselves capable; the happier they are of being in control. 6th graders are much more interested in choosing the title of the next story than their 10th grade colleagues; they are much more vocal in defending their choice, and will happily demonstrate why theirs is better than anyone else’s. If they become accustomed to reading in English, however easy the texts, by the time they are 10th graders they will have built a level of confidence that the students who have come from other schools in the 9th grade lack. It is the proportion of newcomers that decides how successful reading is going to be in any high-school class; if the ‘old’ students outnumber the new, they will gradually convince the newcomers of the usefulness of the endeavor; if the situation is reversed, reading becomes, perforce, an incidental and not one of the main ingredients of the English class load.

For most groups, then, the procedure is as described at the beginning of this section: testing, discussion, selection of title, pre-reading activities about the topic, with a view to familiarizing themselves with the vocabulary specific to the text at hand. As outlandish or quirky as the texts may be, the grammatical structures and the vocabulary used are in accordance with the CELTA recommendations and, by way of consequence, are in perfect agreement with the curricular requirements for each grade. What the readers lack in variety of functional styles, they make up for by the level of the students’ involvement; having successfully navigated a whole mansion full of ghosts boosts the students’ level of confidence enough that present perfect simple becomes just another tool in our language box, and not an insurmountable obstacle.

The following chapter will define and describe graded readers, and list some of the titles used in our school.

Chapter 4: Publishers and series

Readers come in all shapes and sizes, and all major ESL publishers have their own series. Graded readers are short books, often accompanied by a CD with a recording of the book, designed to be used by any learner working alone, or to supplement the coursework. From Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Stephen King and David Guterson, they span centuries and continents of English literature, and, more recently, translations. The ‘graded’ part refers to the level of each book – which approximately match the Common European Frame of Reference, A1 to B2. This was one of the reasons we chose to supplement textbooks with readers – even though they are outside the official curriculum, they follow the same guidelines and were designed with the same broad goals in mind. The gradual introduction of more complex grammar, starting with the simple present of the Level 0 series, then regular past simple, interspersed with chosen irregular verbs – Level 1, and so on. Likewise, vocabulary is recycled relentlessly at lower levels, allowing readers time to become familiar with the meaning of words and with their uses. The following page comes from The Well, published by Macmillan in their Starter level series (

The text associates summer with hot, family-related words appear together in a logical context, and on the next page, Lia and her mother feed grandmother and talk to her; for beginners, such a text will promote self-confidence and allow some measure of independence. Read in class, it is an opportunity to practice pronunciation and listening/reading skills. Assigned as homework, it can afford students a task they can undertake at their own pace, without presenting insurmountable obstacles to the novice taking up the challenge by his/her own. Easy enough to summarize in one or two sentences, such reading material is also useful for creating the first writing assignments where the students get to speak their mind about the topic at hand. Comments on the characters, on their reactions, on possible continuations, all require that the students have read and understood the text and that they make an honest effort at answering.

Some publishers (Macmillan, Penguin, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press) offer exercises and activities at the end of each book, and separately, as Teacher’s Guides; others, such as Black Cat Publishing and Iris Press, follow each chapter with exercises, internet projects, cultural or historical data relevant to the story. Depending on the time constraints, and the learners’ degree of confidence, these can become group projects, PowerPoint presentations or essays or, in the case of a group struggling with the story chosen, be mercilessly skipped over.Alien Alert in Seattle, for instance, an A2 title printed by Black Cat Publishing, includes a presentation of the city as introduction to the story, and suggests a virtual tour of the city, offering a dedicated website that can show curious readers the attractions mentioned in the pages of the book:

For the teacher that meets with the class only for two hours each week, such projects, interesting as they may be, are homework assignments at best, though. The five-minute comprehension quizzes, after each chapter, or the two-minute pre-reading vocabulary exercises, however, are hugely helpful and, as such, rarely skipped over. The following fragments illustrate the point:

The most easily available (locally, that is) series, published by Macmillan and Pearson Longman, have a fairly straightforward layout: an introduction, giving some background information in the case of canonical authors, or some explanations, the story itself, then some questions – “Points for Understanding”, in the case of Macmillan Publishing House, or “Activities” in the Penguin series published by Pearson Longman. Varied in tone and subject matter, they offer beginners the opportunity to practice the Present Tense Simple without it becoming an unutterable bore, and to get acquainted with the contrast between Present Simple and Present Continuous without it having to rain… The vocabulary used for these series is, also, perfectly adapted to the level of understanding one can reasonably expect from a student at each level, and without becoming condescending towards the learner. It is only in regard to the activities that a teacher may find something less satisfying: while undoubtedly useful enough for individual study, they need copious supplementing in order to be useful in class. Take, for instance, the following fragment, which opens Marcel and the Shakespeare Letters

The questions that begged to be asked are Who…? What…? Where…? When…? Why…? And it is the teacher’s job to either ask them, or prompt the students to do it. Naturally, the more sophisticated the story and more confident the learners, the fewer such questions will be asked, but the foundation of comprehension exercises, at any level, will always be the wh- question.

Consistent and reliable as the Longman and Macmillan Readers may be, though, sometimes the learners demand something different. A fairy-tale, they clamoured, in 2015, having conquered Marcel and his clever mouse-detective adventures, then plodded through Tom Sawyer’s brutally abridged Adventures.

Carlo Collodi’s Pinnocchio, edited by the Moscovite publishing house Iris Press, was a delightful addition to 6th grade English classes – so much so, that it was quoted and referenced all throughout 7th grade. With short chapters, written in a memorably jocular yet accessible tone, whacky adventures and eminently useful vocabulary, this story lent itself to role-playing, to re-writings (what if Geppetto had been a woman? What if the puppet had been a girl?), to summarizing and to memory games (for instance, name the objects in Geppetto’s room). This book came not from a book shop, though, but from one of the numerous English teachers’ websites visited in search of fresh ideas and inspiration. The text is written in a very accessible English, perfect for the learners’ needs; the cover and the vocabulary notes, on the other hand, were done with the destination market in mind, and were therefore written in Russian. While they were initially off-putting, the unfamiliar letters were quickly discovered not to go further than the copyrights page; therefore, they were happily ignored by all involved. Not forgotten, though.

An interesting side effect of finding reading material online is precisely this: the chance for exposure to other alphabets and other cultures. What we read is seldom produced in Romania. The students’ first reaction, upon seeing Chinese (?) ideograms, or Cyrillic script, was of rejection; gradually, the mysterious signs lost their power to intimidate, and became nothing more than an eloquent demonstration of how widespread ESL is, and, consequently, how useful.

The following list was employed during the 2016-2017 school year; the following year some titles fell out of favor, and instead of reading John Milne’s Black Cat, 8th graders preferred Mark Twain’s Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. The beauty of dedicating some of the class time to reading is the fact that students get to choose what to read; the teacher takes a step back, and the students can feel in control of their own learning, for a change.

SUGGESTED READING

5th grade:

Stephen Rabley: Marcel and the White Star, Penguin Easystarts (200 headwords)

6th grade:

Stephen Rabley, Marcel and the Shakespeare Letters, Penguin Graded Readers, Beginner Level, 300 headwords

Claire Craig, Land of Gold, Nuance Readers, Beginner Level, 300 Headwords

Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Iris Press, Beginner Level

7th grade:

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Oxford Bookworms Library, 400 headwords

Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich, Stargate, Penguin Graded Readers, Pre-Intermediate Level, (1200 headwords)

Jack London, The Call of the Wild, McGraw Hill Education, Pre-Intermediate Level

8th grade:

Washington Irwing, Rip van Winkle, Black Cat Publishing, Pre-Intermediate Level

M. R. James, Room 13 and Other Ghost Stories, Heinemann Guided Readers, Elementary Level

John Milne, The Black Cat, Heinemann Guided Readers, Elementary Level

9th grade:

Rosemary Border, The Piano, Oxford Bookworms Library, Stage Two

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Rudyard Kipling & E. F. Benson, The Locked Room and Other Short Stories, Penguin Graded Readers, Level 2

Stephen Rabley, The Eyes of Montezuma, Sorylines 2, Oxford University Press

10th grade:

Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, Black Cat Publishing, level 2;

Alexader McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Penguin Graded Readers, level 3

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, Black Cat Publishing, Intermediate level;

11th grade:

William Shakespeare, Three Great Plays of Shakespeare, Penguin Graded Readers, Level 4

12th grade: no suggestions; unfortunately, this is a time when little energy can be spared for anything other than preparing for the bac exam.

Chapter 5: Paper or Pixel?

Advances in technology promise miracles in all fields of human experience, language learning included, of course. Apps developed for the mobile phone promise mastery of the language ‘in 6 months, correctly, without memorizing’ (learnrealenglish.com); mysterious scientists ‘ have discovered 5 laws according to which everyone learns English’ (sogoodlanguages.com) and, most importantly, promise to do away with ‘boring vocabulary and grammar lessons’. With its interactive content and its tracking of what vocabulary you’ve been introduced to, FluentUEnglish seems ready to take the place of the musty old classroom and to replace the obsolete teacher.

The Rosetta Stone, while being just as ‘unique’ as the previous app, will also ‘teach you English through English’; for instance, ‘you might learn the English words “man”, “woman”, “park” through pictures. In the next step, Rosetta Stone might try to teach you “A man and a woman is sitting in the park”[sic!]. You might not know what “sit” means, but you can probably guess it correctly.’. Siveco Romania offers AEL, a great tool for integrated learning, and one of the most attractive collections of learning content in the world – at least according to the official website.

Kindle, Elefant Reader, Kobo, Nook… eBooks have come to stay, and they often have interactive features that young readers are especially supposed to enjoy. Digital books have begun to compete with conventional paper-based books. ‘ Some of the reasons for the popularity of e-books over paper books include space savings, cost cutting and reading ease; the possibility of increasing font size and backlighting in e-readers can help hypermetropic readers read more easily’

And, to be honest, one doesn’t need a dedicated device to read an e-book. Any smartphone can become a mobile library, allowing the reader to carry around thousands of volumes, any one of them just a few gestures away. Why not do this with our stories, too? Most readers are available as .pdf files too. It stands to reason that, once the story was selected, the students should be allowed the choice between a classical paper bookand the digital version.

The students who decided on paper had to carry around extra weight, true. However, the feel of a book, the act of turning the page, the writing you do in the margins, the little blemishes or the doodles that somehow appear on any text used intensively – they all add to the experience of reading. Students who chose paper over digital reported having an easier time finding relevant information in the text, since they could remember the layout of the page with more ease. They could also use their notes faster, as said notes were organized differently – new words or expressions translated in the margin of the text, grammar or usage on the notebook.

This seems to resonate with a study published in Norway in 2003, Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension, which indicates that ‘students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the texts digitally.’ This is attributed to the fact that ‘paper gives spatio-temporal markers; the feel of the paper and the act of turning pages serve as memory markers that are absent while scrolling down a screen.’

However, some students could not (or would not) acquire a physical copy of the book. For them, the option of reading on screen seemed preferable to having one more thing in their bag pack. Despite repeated warnings about the perils of technology and its addictive nature, they turned to the text in digital form.

How bad are pixels, anyway?

A study published in 2010 suggests that it is not the screen that decreases our learning effectiveness, but the distractors that it allows – text messages, interactive content, calls. When using your mobile phone as a screen, it is oh-so-easy to take a quick peak at that Instagram photo you’ve been notified about, or at that message that is surely urgent… However, this affects both the time it takes to read the same paragraph(s) – up to twice as long as students not involved in extraneous communication – and the ability to recall details such as time-frame or chronological order of events. Quite predictably, students ‘who are managing busy lives may think they are accomplishing more by multitasking, but our findings suggest they will actually need more time to achieve the same level of performance on an academic task’

In the case of a simple .pdf, though, things are different. For those students who prefer the digital version, ‘the electronic textbook is as effective for learning as the traditional textbook’ Furthermore, “mean scores indicated that students who chose e-textbooks for their education courses had significantly higher perceived affective learning and psychomotor learning than students who chose to use traditional print textbooks.’(idem)

Later studies and statistics suggest a reversal of the trend, with students preferring print to screen – but that is not the point of this chapter. In a nutshell, over 90% of college students prefer their textbooks on paper, despite being significantly more expensive than the digital version They see the digital medium as fit for light entertainment, but prefer traditional volumes when it comes to ‘serious’ reading – massive textbooks, notes, even bestsellers. Perhaps the preference may be due to differences in the concentration we bring to a digital environment, where we are accustomed to browsing and multitasking. Moreover, working your way through a print volume leaves tactile impressions that stick in your mind.

What we wanted to explain was that there are arguments both in favour and against using the mobile phone in the classroom. The overriding argument was not one mentioned in the studies cited above, though. We decided to allow and even encourage the use of technology in the act of learning in order to make it more accessible. At the end of the day, it came down to availability and accessibility. Most of our students own a mobile phone, and take it everywhere. Books? Not so much. Our experiment was concerned not only with what texts we got to use, but also with the integration of modern communication technology in the classroom.

As we mentioned before, a large percentage of our students are commuters. Having the story on their phone makes it easy to read even on the go, without having to rummage through their bag packs to find the book. The screen provides enough light to see, whatever the time or surrounding conditions, and its size allows for a minimum of gesturing, so no jostling the passenger next to you is necessary. Besides, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are part of our students’ everyday lives – why not try to use their quasi-addiction to technology to do some good?

Visually, the pages are identical. Whether one chooses the .pdf or the print version, the information is the same. It is what we do with it that separates students who will progress from those who will drag their heels and stagnate.

As for how it works: once we agree on a story – very democratically, since it is supposed to be a pleasant type of learning activity – those students who can’t purchase the book will either Xerox copy it or scan it. Sometimes digital versions are already available online, and in that case Facebook groups come in handy; everyone in the group can access the same file, and in case it is accidentally deleted, it can be recovered easily. At other times, a title will come from the teacher’s library, and be scanned or Xerox-copied, as needed, and distributed among the learners. Gradually, more students become familiar with the idea of sharing information online, and learn how to do it. Furthermore, (and this is not the drawback it first appears) reading on screen takes time, and most pre-installed apps close the screen after a period ranging from 15 to 45 seconds. A book that closes on its own every half minute is a nightmare to read – so the students have to find solutions online. Whichever eReader they choose, it needs to open certain types of files – and if not, they need to learn how to convert files online.

Yes, it may sound like it has nothing to do with the English class, but we cannot divorce learning the language from the real life situations we use it in. Even finding a reader is an adventure in communication: most readers are described in English, and so are the majority of online conversion sites. One needs to make sense of the information provided there in order to use it effectively. These are indirect results of using stories in the classroom, but they are, nonetheless, instances when learners take charge and step out of the tired but oh so comfortable role of recipient. Instead of vessels waiting patiently and passively to be filled with knowledge, they become actively involved in learning and engage in meaningful interactions – they learn how to learn, help each other understand and use what they learn.

Regardless of their choice, paper or digital, there are challenges that need to be overcome; however, those surrounding technology are still relatively new and merit a separate chapter for discussion. This is what the next section of this paper will deal with.

Chapter 6: Google Translate (THE BABEL FISH)

Once upon a time, the memorization of the multiplications table was encouraged by saying: “What are you going to do, carry a calculator around, everywhere you go?” As it turns out, yes, we do carry calculators around. And not just calculators: cameras, flashlights, alarm clocks… and the Internet.

If students are allowed to use their mobile phones during class, it stands to reason they will attempt to use the Internet to, well, cheat – find the translation to a word before his/her colleagues, find answers to questions, recall the correct past participle of an irregular verb. After the righteous rage has subsided, the teacher needs to ask herself: is using Google translate so bad? And how do we make it work for us?

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the difficulty of transspecies communication was solved by a fish.

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix.

Until the advent of such miraculous (and, let’s not forget, not entirely benign) equipment, one needs to admit that the institution of the ESL class is not yet to be discarded. Methods, however, have to keep up with the modern world, and technology should be integrated in teaching and learning on a daily basis. After all, demonizing smartphones will not cause them to be uninvented, and bemoaning les neiges d’antan will not turn back time. We must try, therefore, to keep up with the times, as difficult as it may be at times.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us, and there has been a dismal effort at best to prepare both students and the current workforce for upcoming jobs. Building upon the Third Industrial Revolution that among other things, first introduced us to digital technology, the Fourth will issue in an era of robots and automation, self-driving cars, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, quantum computing, and for the sake of time, let’s just call the rest ‘smart-everything’.

Learning to do more with their smartphone than Facebook and messaging seems like a good start.

Machine translation services, such as Google translate and Microsoft’s Bing Translator, are valuable tools when one needs to understand the gist of a text in a foreign language. For absolute beginners, using Google translate can make the difference between having an idea what the text (road sign, newspaper headline, article, cooking recipe etc.) is about, or shrugging and deciding ‘it’s all Greek’.

For instance, ‘if an English speaking user wants to read an article posted on a Chinese language news site, a machine translation may contain the following lines:

UK GMT at 10:11 on March 20, a rare solar eclipse spectacle will come to Europe.

This is the 1954 total solar eclipse once again usher in mainland Norway.

The next solar eclipse occurs recent times and the country was March 9, 2016 Sumatra;” These lines are taken from a Google translation of an article on the Chinese language version of the Xinhua news website (www.xinhuanet.com/) collected March 23, 2015, by Michael Denowski for use in his thesis Machine Translation for Human Translators.

While the essential information is accessible – we do understand that the what is a solar eclipse, the where mainland Norway and the when March 20, 10:11, the translation is riddled with grammatical errors and possibly mistranslations. One needs to take into account the fact that Chinese and English are the first, respectively the third language by number of speakers , which makes translations from one language into another relatively reliable.

In the case of Romanian, a language with limited economic potential, translations are even more tentative. Feminine nouns, the agreement of the adjective with the noun, proper names, all raised problems in the case of automatic translations, to such an extent that ‘you sound like Google translate’ became a commonly used comment. However, one needs to keep in mind the fact that the corpus available is ever increasing, and that soon everyday conversations between people who have no common language will be not only possible, but also very close to ‘natural’ – that is, as correct in terms of grammar, vocabulary and register as possible. Online communication, even job interviews, could benefit from it. Real-life, face to face communication, though, is different. And this is where we come in, explaining not just the benefits of automated translations, but also their shortcomings and how to make the best of them, without becoming totally dependent on the service they provide.

For beginner to pre-intermediate students (regardless of age), automated translations are a way of keeping up with the group, and of making sense of the fragment being discussed. Although they may try to use it during class, there is seldom time to type a whole block of sentences for translation, so, in effect, what GT does during class is act as a dictionary. Objectively speaking, this option is preferable to paper: students do not need to lug around door-stopper volumes, heavy and bulky; and the reduction of weight is by no means accompanied in a reduction in the number of words, or phrases available. Automatic translation services are easy to use, and offer answers nearly instantaneously, which makes them a powerful teaching aid. What is more, they can be used to check pronunciation too, when one is uncertain.

Touching the little ‘volume’ icon, in the top right corner, above the word and the phonetic transcript, is how students can check the pronunciation of unknown or difficult words. Again, it is not always permitted, but in some situations, for instance during group work, when they need to present their conclusions to the rest of the class, or to make sure that the motion they formulated can be clearly understood by the opposing debate team. Once the use of the digital dictionary has turned into a habit, independent study becomes simultaneously less tedious and more effective.

Different devices yield different results; the same word, looked for using a PC, has a significantly more complex definition:

For a beginner or elementary-level student, the first translation is sufficient; for more advanced students, though, nuances and connotation become gradually more important. A paper dictionary answers the needs of the learner at a given level; the digital one is upgraded by the needs of the user and at his or her speed. This is just one of the uses of mobile phones in class, which the practice of frequent reading has made relevant.

Again, this is not part of the official curricular papers, except in the sense that the use of mobiles in schools has been acknowledged to have some positive effect and be permitted, on condition that the teacher feels that it is the case.

We are not alone in recognizing the benefits of using mobile phones during class:

Teaching students to be effective technology consumers is a valuable lesson at any age, and its importance only continues to grow today. By banning devices altogether, this learning opportunity is lost, and students are less likely to use their devices productively.

Education should help prepare students for their future, and an important part of that is preparing them to be both effective listeners and highly intentional and efficient technology users. Enabling students to strike a balance between on and offline experiences will help pave their way toward success.

Another topic is that of access: not all students have access to a smart device, which may give those who do an unfair advantage over those who don’t; in some cases, having a smartphone can be tantamount to an invitation to cheat, by using internet resources or asking a friend to help with difficult passages. It is, again, a matter that needs careful consideration and judicious balance. In a nutshell, team or pair work can benefit immensely from unimpeded access to the internet and its reservoir of knowledge; on the other hand, tests are administered strictly offline….

How to use them in class: ask students about their options when they don’t know words, and let them bring up the matter of online translations. Discussing advantages and disadvantages will usually have no effect; what they are interested in are the results. Pointing out limitations, though, has more of an impact, and leads to a more cautious use. In the case of beginners, the tendency is to use automatic translation for whole paragraphs, when there is time. Online services work best on short fragments, though, so complex structures are unreliably rendered in another language. Asking students to read out loud the output of the machine helps them realize its limitations, and encourages them to do more themselves.

Take this fragment from Marcel and the Shakespeare Letters:

“There is a small, white button in the bookcase. Henry smiles at Marcel and presses the button. Suddenly, some of the books start to move.”

This is the translation:

“În bibliotecă există un mic buton alb. Henry zâmbește pe Marcel [sic!] și apasă butonul. Dintr-o dată, unele cărți încep să se miște.”.

While very close to perfect, the automated translation still requires proofreading; for longer fragments, errors or mistranslations multiply.

For pre-intermediate students, a nice exercise is to check their paragraphs by writing them in the to-be-translated box; occasionally, hilarity will ensue. The translation being instantaneous, every mistake is taxed, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In Land of Gold, the protagonists are followed by a tall, mysterious man wearing black; the students had to answer the question:

What did the girls see when they returned to the hotel?

This is a sample answer, and its translation:

‘The tow girls seed a tall man dressed in black who was folowed them.’

‘Fetele de vînător seamănă cu un bărbat înalt, îmbrăcat în negru, urmărit de ei.’

Not what the writer intended, certainly! The next step is to check the typing carefully; this activity is usually done in pairs, which helps both partners improve their writing, by reinforcing the rule write – proofread – edit. After the typos have been corrected, the translation is still horribly wrong:

Input: The two girls seed a tall man dressed in black who was followed them.

Translation: Cele două fete seamănă cu un bărbat înalt, îmbrăcat în negru, care îi urma.

It is time to check grammar; each step, done by student and not by teacher, is validated by a gradually improving translation into Romanian. When the translated text reflects the intentions of the writer, the task is finally complete.

Input: The two girls saw a tall man dressed in black who was followed them.

Translation: Cele două fete au văzut un bărbat înalt, îmbrăcat în negru, care le-a urmat.

Input: The two girls saw a tall man dressed in black who was following them.

Translation: Cele două fete au văzut un bărbat înalt, îmbrăcat în negru, care îi urmărea.

For intermediate and upper-intermediate students, Google Translate is used as a dictionary/pronunciation bank. Students at this level don’t generally paste entire paragraphs in the translation box; what they need translated are idiomatic expressions or collocations. Which brings us to the next tool in the arsenal of the internet user: define.

Simply typing define: followed by any word will return a classic dictionary entry, complete with synonyms, sample sentences, register, etymology and translations. For advanced students, it is like letting go of training wheels…

For those who still need the training wheels, though, there is the option of visual dictionaries. There are moments when no matter how detailed or accurate the description in the dictionary, one just cannot make sense of it, cannot picture it.

Seeing an image is a definite help at times like this. Again, carrying around a book is not always feasible, but searching for ‘pug’ and clicking ‘images’ will certainly clarify things for people who don’t know enough about dog breeds to understand ‘mops’.

But an internet connection may not always be available; working offline can be facilitated by using a number of bilingual dictionary apps, or, for more inquisitive minds, a monolingual, explanatory dictionary app. However, these applications suffer from the same limitations as paper dictionaries, in terms of number of headwords, lack of idiomatic expressions or collocations, no information on use and register. An interesting side-effect of looking for the right dictionary for your needs is finding the ‘learn by yourself’ apps and tutorials. Vocabulary games, simple cloze exercises and grammar questions may not have a dramatic effect on the learners’ proficiency, but we believe that every little step forward counts. And we admit that, despite the fact that this approach is not mentioned in the national education strategy papers, it is our strong belief that helping students to become more independent and to take responsibility for their progress is part of our duty as teachers.

Textbooks and, often, us teachers, focus on grammar to the point of distraction, trying to offer our students the structure, the scaffolding necessary to build their own discourse, but forgetting – or pretending to – that vocabulary, pronunciation and usage deserve the same attention in class. Reading together helps balance the skills we try to get our students to focus on. It also offers role models, patterns of behaviour, samples of reasoning, good and bad choices and their consequences. Living (vicariously, indeed) as many experiences as possible, changes people. This is the focus of our next chapter.

Chapter 7: The Transformative Effect of Reading

‘Reading is comprehending, that is, the construction of meaning. Readers construct meaning by interacting with the text (Pearson, Roehler, Dole, and Duffy 1990) on the basis of their existing or prior demonstrated through research based on schema theory (Anderson and Pearson 1984). According to schema theory, readers understand what they read only as it relates to what they already know. That is, their existing knowledge about a particular topic influences the extent to which they understand what they read about that topic. Because text is not fully explicit, readers must draw from their existing knowledge in order to understand it.’

What do we do with students whose background information is very poor in cultural experiences? Students whose range of familiar topics is painfully limited?

Reading in class is an excellent way to pool informational resources. Some students have experience with gardening, others with animal husbandry, or international travel. Many a lesson had to skip a beat in order to include a moment of relaxed, informal instruction, when one or more of the students explained for their peers how to execute a task or what it presupposed. If the teacher is careful to take a step back and just to corroborate what learners say or to ask for further clarification when it seems appropriate, a teacher-centric situation becomes avoidable. Learners like to get involved, they like to feel like they control the lesson, that they have something valuable to contribute. Sometimes it is the translation of a fragment that is not entirely clear to the class as a whole, or offering background information that makes a fictional situation more relevant, and sometimes it is just commenting on characters’ reactions and decisions.

These are the ‘meaningful’ teaching moments, the things both teacher and students take away from class. Building competence in communication is a lengthy process, but some moments will always stand out in retrospect.

One surprisingly rewarding teaching moment started out as a class discussion about classical stories: Snow White, Rapunzel, Harap Alb, Cinderella… Three of the four tales were familiar to the students as animation films, and the fourth from their Romanian Lit classes. While initially criticizing the secondary, supporting roles that the female characters had been cast in, gradually the discussion moved to decision-taking and the reasoning behind it, and a whole new reading of Snow White emerged. Apparently, to the girls of 12 B, class of 2015, at least, she was a courageous teenager who managed to form meaningful human connections after being betrayed by her home environment, who managed to find refuge in a place as protected as she reasonably could, and who decided against shutting the entire world out for the sake of security. It was also argued that the ‘happy ever after’ referred much less to her wedding than to the fact that her conflict with the wicked queen had been resolved and she could rule her people without fear of civil war.

What it taught this teacher was that it always pays to play devil’s advocate, and that cultural norms do not depend on what we read, but how we read it. Shutting out Shakespeare, Eminescu, Camus, because they are dead white males, supporting the views of a patriarchal system, leaves only a contrived system of values that has little power to convince anyone of its validity. If you take the established canonical authors out of the equation, what do you replace them with? If classical stories are biased and inappropriate for a 21st century audience, what do we use in their stead?

Stories by dead white males… does that mean that they are not true, not valid if read by girls? Do girls need a separate set of stories, to nurture their fragile egos…? or maybe, treating everyone the same, and asking girls ‘what would you do?’, ‘what could they do ?’ is a strategy as valid as any? If feminism and gender studies are to be of practical value, outside the academia, this is how we understand to put them into practice. Encourage girls to speak up. Encourage dialogue. Encourage thinking, and ask them to write their own stories.

This refers to other categories of students as well. Those from disadvantaged families, from marginalized ethnic groups, from broken families – they all benefit from exposure to varied situations and from living vicariously, trying to imagine cultures and situations remote from their own. Reading offers us the chance to challenge their world-view by establishing unfamiliar baseline values. Communication, trust, fairness, honesty. We condemn the villain of the story, root for the hero(ine), wish for happy endings. Life is never as simple as that; fiction offers both refuge and reasonably accurate patterns of behavior, reflecting the mores and norms of a cultural group during a given period. Occasionally, works of art transcend cultural and historical confines and reflect fundamental truths about human nature. Their value lies not in the information they provide about the outside world – a story set in the forests of Transylvania, no matter how detailed or precise the description, will never be a travel guide – but in what they reveal to each reader about him or herself.

Getting our students to read for pleasure is one of the goals of introducing stories in the classroom. When one follows the protagonist through a dark and dusty corridor, straining to hear sounds of pursuit and hurrying to find the treasure, the pace set by slower-reading colleagues becomes frustrating. And even though selecting the texts according to the comprehensible input theory means that they will be slightly above the level of the class, that doesn’t mean that the better students in the group won’t find them simplistic or too easy. The solution to their problem is one of the long-term goals of this strategy, and its benefits are multifold.

The key to making a successful choice is balance; no group of learners is ever perfectly uniform in terms of comprehension, understanding or potential. And even after administering the most comprehensive tests, one cannot count on a class being at the same level. Usually, some students will get excellent scores, others very poor ones, and hopefully the majority will be somewhere in between. It is on the majority that we need to focus, and their level will determine how complex the texts we choose and the tasks that accompany them are. This can lead to huge differences in type and length of text, from one group to another, regardless of their age and theoretical knowledge. What about the students who get bored?

For the advanced students in each group, the solution is never ‘read ahead’; it is ‘read in parallel’. A shorter, simpler text will have a short, simple story-line. The umbrella, by Clare Harris, is a romantic story of mistaken identity: a girl buys a new umbrella; the umbrella is stolen by a stranger in a cake shop, so the girl has to take the thief’s old umbrella instead. Because of it, she gets to meet a boy and they become friends. She then meets the umbrella thief, and is so happy that she forgives her.

Carnival, is another mildly romantic story, about a teenager on his first solo trip to London, who wants to see the Carnival on Notting Hill. He sees a beautiful girl, Maria, and wants a souvenir of her, so he snatches a tourist’s camera off the table to take a snapshot of the girl. When the police take him in, he apologizes to the tourists and they forgive him. The snapshot, however, gets Maria in trouble, since she is a policewoman who has lied that she needs to go see the doctor.

Simple though they are, level 1 stories offer, nevertheless, opportunities for dialogue and debate. Honesty, duty, luck, serendipity, love, friendship, greed or avarice – these straightforward narratives introduce the topic, and it is the teacher’s duty to prod students to go beyond understanding the language of the text and to react to the story, to interpret the message and offer their own judgement regarding the message thereof. The advanced students will answer the same questions and need to demonstrate the capacity to express themselves clearly, to speak their mind, but the starting point will simply be a different, more linguistically challenging text.

Students who read for pleasure have a richer vocabulary and a wider range of grammatical and rhetorical structures available; they are able to express their ideas with more precision, and can generally identify the main ideas in a text fairly quickly, leading to better communication skills.

In order to practice those communication skills, reading is followed by speaking exercises, and writing. After simply retelling the story, and trying to explain character motivation and chronology, students can play games.

Imagine the protagonist is a girl; what changes in the story?

The responses differ widely from secondary to high school; young girls don’t care about appearing a certain way, and have a fiercely competitive nature that will be tamed or at least partly disguised by the time they reach high school; the way they position themselves in the story will vary accordingly. For instance, in a detective story read in secondary school, girls will cast themselves as the heroine, saving the day and doing everything the male protagonist had done, only better, while older girls will either imagine a new character in the story (a journalist who recounts the events, a news anchor, a witness) or they will remain in a supporting role. When trying to write about each other, boys’ stories will have ridiculous discrepancies, and hilarious overreactions, based more on the image of girls from the media than that of the real-life girls in their class, which will naturally lead to girls enjoying pointing out unrealistic expectations or behaviors. Interestingly, girls writing about boys don’t elicit the same responses, even though the stories don’t necessarily sound entirely natural.

Take, for instance, Marcel and the White Star, a level 1 Graded Reader published by Pearson Education; when girls write about girls, the description of the protagonist doesn’t change very much:

Marcel is a French mouse. He lives on a beautiful old boat in Paris. (His home is under the kitchen floor). He likes books, restaurants and old films. He likes the opera too.

Daria Rusu, 6th grade, 2016, describing a girl detective mouse:

Marcella is a French mouse. She lives in a beautiful old house (her home is under the bedroom floor). She likes books, restaurants and movies. She likes music, too.

While the residence has changed, the new detective is allowed to like the same things as the old one, with some small changes in nuance: Marcella doesn’t like old films, she prefers modern ‘movies’, and ‘opera’ is not quite her cup of tea: later in the story, we find out that she has been to a pop concert, and that the thieves try to steal a diamond ring from the lead singer.

Andrei Baltag, 6th grade, 2016, describing a girl detective mouse:

Marcella is a French girl-mouse. She lives in a beautiful old boat in Paris. (Her home is under the kitchen floor). She likes love stories, cooking and make-up. She likes manele, too.

In Andrei’s story, Marcella has to love cooking and make-up ‘because she’s a girl’, her favourite music is popular among students regardless of gender but suggestive of inferior taste and lack of culture, and the thieves are only stopped by Marcella because they fall asleep before fencing off the heavy gold ring they have stolen from a jewellery store that our GIRL detective loves to visit every day…

Some changes are just a chance for good old fashioned teasing between colleagues; others reveal unconscious biases that inform the way we look at the world. Occasionally, the discussions triggered by such leaps of imagination lead to changes in mentality and behavior. Temporary or superficial as they may be, these moments of reflection have a cumulative effect; over the years, they can become internalized and lead to real change, to a more open-minded mindset and a more flexible concept of gender roles.

Similarly, if we change the story to happen in the countryside; students that grow up in an urban environment have no idea what chores their colleagues have, and the dialogue is healthy for everyone. The teacher gets to learn more about her students, they have the opportunity to take center stage for a spell, and learners who are otherwise timid and taciturn in class occasionally discover that they like the spotlight and strive to be in that position again. This can be done in speaking or in writing, and both types of exercise result in active learning.

Creative writing tasks are wonderful learning tools: they encourage students to use a more varied vocabulary, to apply their grammatical concepts, to practice persuasion, description or narration, in a nutshell – soft skills needed for everyday life, equally valuable in the workplace and at home.

Similarly, speaking, whether freely or following notes, may employ a slightly simpler vocabulary and more numerous grammatical inconsistencies as compared to writing, but it awards the learner self-confidence and a sense of accomplishment that has nothing to do with grades. These activities reveal, in time, hidden facets in our students’ character, and sometimes nudge them in a novel direction. Not everyone is made to be a champion, and while English will certainly serve those travelling to international competitions, the ability to express one’s ideas clearly and concisely will be equally useful to those that have to take a different path.

What reading does to our students, in addition to benefitting their language skills, is offer role models.

Role models are not always easy to find; families broken by economic migration, the death of a parent or simply leaving home to live in the school dormitory leave the child without the safety net of the home micro cosmos, and without an adult figure who could guide and instruct them. They fall completely under the influence of older children, an influence that having an adult in their lives could temper or reduce. This influence is seldom benefic.’ Studies of aggressive behaviour in children show that through a process known as vicarious reinforcement, we start to model the behavior of individuals whose actions seem to be getting rewarded. In vicarious reinforcement, your tendency to commit a behavior that someone else gets praise or attention for increases almost as much as if you were actually getting the rewards yourself. ‘

So, to the often-asked question, qui bono? To whom serves the teaching of literature, in this day and age? We get to answer: the world of sports is a valid source of role models for our students, where performance trumps financial or ethnic prejudice. Another one may well be that of fiction. After all, a ‘role model must be ‘available’ – salient and relevant to the individual – but they can be distant, such as a fictional or historical character’. It is our duty as teachers to act not only as providers of information, but rather as guides, opening the doors to another type of experience, to all the different possibilities the future holds.

Educating a person changes them. It also changes the educator. Day after day, year after year, generation after generation, we pour something of ourselves in our teaching, and in trying to open their minds to the future, we open ours as well.

Values, beliefs and ideas are long-term goals, however. In the short term, we need to focus on testable, measurable skills and competences. In the following chapter, we will explain how using literature helps contextualize the grammar our students need to learn, making it easier to understand and internalize.

Chapter 8: Grammar in Context

‘The grammar of a language is the description of the way in which words can change their forms and can be combined into sentences in that language. If grammar rules are too carelessly violated, communication may suffer […]. Once we know the grammatical rules of a language subconsciously, we are in a position to create an infinite number of sentences. However, while some rules are fairly straightforward, others seem to be horribly complex, and some grammatical patterning seems to have escaped perfect description so far.’

We teach grammar rules and conventions, we explain their meanings, we try to expose students to relevant grammatical patterns repeatedly, so that they become familiar with whatever it is we are trying to impress on them. Language in the grammar lessons is a sterile, ultra-correct and simplified construct, artificial in its extreme compliance with the rules taught. Real-life exchanges are very far from what descriptive, or even pedagogic grammars, require.

‘We ain’t at home” seems to be preferable “in many English-speaking contexts” to the norm, “we are not at home”, yet our job is to teach the latter while making sure that the former is still meaningful. Watching films and TV in the target language, listening to songs, trying to make sense of web-sites and memes all contribute to the assimilation of this vernacular side of the language, but it is in the act of reading, especially over an extended period of time, that grammatical patterns become internalized. They repeatedly come into contact with a variety of grammatical patterns in contexts that allow them to develop a better sense of how they can communicate meaningful messages. Not surprisingly, students who read a great deal develop a deeper sense of how grammar works, which makes it easier for them to then select and use successfully the proper patterns, depending on the situation.

From a learner’s perspective, the ability both to recognize and to produce well-formed sentences is an essential part of learning a second language. Reading offers students the opportunity to meet the same basic structure,Subject+Verb+Object, again and again, until it becomes familiar and they begin to employ it effortlessly. Stories will offer other structures too, though:

“The short man looks at the photo and laughs. “Not after tonight,” he says.”

'Er … yes, of course,' Rauchenburg replied, a little uncomfortable.

'Yes,' Daniel said. 'We make things much better today than,say, three thousand years ago, don't we? So why, then, didn'tthe science and language of the Egyptians change for threethousand years? And why, at the beginning of that time, did theirwriting suddenly change from cave paintings to a full writtenlanguage?'

“'Look! There's Madame Tussaud's! Can we go there?'

'Not today,' their mother answers. 'We're going to the carnival.'

'They're going to Notting Hill too,' Jake thinks.”

Occasionally, a text will offer part of a conversation, for example when transcribing what Marcel hears of a telephone call:

“Yes — two men,” she is telling the police on the telephone. “And they've got the White Star.” It is the readers’ task to imagine the other half of this conversation, what the policemen might have asked, what other information they may have required.

This is similar to the language used in everyday conversation by native speakers of the target language. At a coffee shop, one may overhear conversations like the following:

A: Coffee, please!

B: Milk?

A: Thank you.

C: Same here.

Reading in class allows our students to become aware of these one-word sentences, and of the possibility of transmitting information via a fractured sentence. The norm, though, is the classic structure, the ‘correct’ one. Coming across it again and again, and discussing differences from Romanian, helps cross the bridge from familiar to ‘natural’. This transition happens over time, and it is not generally the focus of an entire lesson. The readers focus on the message, ‘the story’, and not on its delivery; the patterns, though, stay with them and become part of the learners’ background knowledge.

During traditional grammar lessons, the focus is on the present tense simple, on irregular verbs, articles, the plural of nouns and so on. We discuss the theory, give examples of function, use various exercises to get used to the form, and when we encounter the same items in a story, they become noticeable, and can be understood more easily.

Using graded readers in the classroom, especially in conjunction with grammar, does not mean relinquishing the tried and tested methods of teaching, for instance verbal tenses, or pronouns… on the contrary, it is just another way of adding context to the rules that we have to explain in order to make our communication attempt work. Learning the rules of grammar may not be the easiest or the most pleasant part of learning a foreign language, but without them we would be lacking the capacity to express complex emotions, abstract thoughts or hypothetical situations.

The purpose of grammar seems to be to allow for greater subtlety of meaning than a merely lexical system can cater for. While it is possible to get a lot of communicative mileage out of simply stringing words and phrases together, there comes a point where 'Me Tarzan, you Jane'-type language fails to deliver, both in terms of intelligibility and in terms of appropriacy. This is particularly the case for written language, which generally needs to be more explicit than spoken language. For example, the following errors are likely to confuse the reader:

Last Monday night I was boring in my house.

After speaking a lot time with him I thought that him attracted me.

We took a wrong plane and when I saw it was very later because the plane took up.

Five years ago I would want to go to India but in that time anybody of my friends didn't want to go.

The teaching of grammar, it is argued, serves as a corrective against the kind of ambiguity represented in these examples.

Another, very important argument in favour of teaching and learning grammar the ‘traditional’ way, is that it fulfills learner expectations; not necessarily regarding language learning, but education in general as a process following certain reliable steps: simulation of specific problem (in our case sample sentences), discussion, explanation, rule-writing, exercises. The reading that we do only offer more sample sentences and a greater variety of examples than the textbook or the teacher by themselves. In the following paragraphs we will try bring arguments to support these assertions:

After teaching past tense simple, even though it is never problematic for students to understand, they have problems using it. However, seeing it used is another matter entirely, and helps turn theory into practice:

“Tom came out of his house with a brush and a big pot of white paint in his hand. He looked at the fence; it was three meters high and thirty meters long. He put his brush in the paint and painted some of the fence. He did it again. Then he stopped and looked at the fence, put down his brush and sat down. There were hours of work in front of him and he was the unhappiest boy in the village. “

This passage, and countless others, can be used as a means of drawing attention to the importance of memorizing irregular verb forms; students identify all the past tense verbs in the fragment, and underline them (if their copy of the book is on paper) or write them in their notebooks – regular verbs on the left, irregular on the right.

Tom came out of his house with a brush and a big pot of white paint in his hand. He looked at the fence; it was three meters high and thirty meters long. He put his brush in the paint and painted some of the fence. He did it again. Then he stopped and looked at the fence, put down his brush and sat down. There were hours of work in front of him and he was the unhappiest boy in the village.”

While writing, they also have to come up with sentences of their own using these verbs. Having the model in front of their eyes has both advantages and disadvantages: it is fairly simple to construct a correct sentence, but it will sound imitated, and most ambitious students are not satisfied to merely parrot an example, and they may be frustrated by the time it takes to come up with an ‘original’ sentence.

Here are some sample sentences, following the model quite closely:

came: I came out of the class. She came home. Grandmother came home yesterday.

looked: I looked at the fence. I looked at the blackboard.

was: The fence was big. The dog was big. The house was white.

Sometimes, the readers used have separate sections detailing grammar and vocabulary points after each chapter, in addition to the comprehension exercises common for all publishing houses. These are an easy solution to the problem of students who regularly finish ahead and become restless and bored. However, the teaching of grammar benefits from the use of readers in class for an entirely different reason: context. “Language is context-sensitive. This means that, in the absence of context, it is very difficult to recover the intended meaning of a single word or phrase. This is true of words taken out of the context of sentences. It is also true of sentences taken out of the context of texts.”

Take there, for instance. Students at intermediate level and below will automatically translate it by ‘acolo’; however, there are numerous case where the adverb becomes introductory pronoun, interjection, adjective or even noun. While not insisting on the change of morphological category, we will underline the change in meaning:

‘There are crowds of people in the street and Jake can't see Maria now.’ – introductory there, Carnival, p.9.

'Look! There's Madame Tussaud's! Can we go there?'(idem, p. 2) –the first ‘there’ is a pronoun, for it introduces a sentence in which the verb comes before the subject, translated by “Iata Madame Tussaud’s!”, and the second is an adverb.

'There! We have our camera now,' they say. 'He isn't a bad boy. Please, can he go?' (idem, p.12) –interjection, expressing relief.

Similarly, ‘there, there’ is much easier to understand in context, as are other idiomatic expressions:getting there takes less time when one reads systematically, and encounters ‘all there’, ‘that there’, ‘there and then’ in context.

‘Irregular verbs haunt learners of English from the beginning to the end of their studies. Full mastery of irregular verbs seems to be very rarely achieved. There are very few verbless sentences in English and irregular verbs belong to the core of English. In all types of texts, forms of irregular verbs outnumber those of regular verbs.’ In addition to that, they are frequently part of idiomatic expressions or collocations, which can be taught best in context.

‘After ten minutes Tom had an idea, a wonderful idea. He took up the brush again and began work. He saw his friend Joe Harper in the street, but he didn’t look at him. Joe had an apple in his hand. He came up to Tom and looked at the fence. […] Tom said nothing. The brush moved up and down.’

Teaching grammar in direct connection to a text has multiple advantages; reading the text in its entirety will provide both context and clues as to the culture underlying it. Tying grammar practice exercises to the story will avoid vaguely phrased or ambiguously formulated tasks, where multiple solutions can be offered, or where the ‘wrong’ option can function, given the right context. Depending on the students’ age and level of competence, grammar can be integrated in a reading lesson, or can be the focus of a separate lesson, but still related to the text by means of using the situation, characters and/or timeline of the story.

Grammar and vocabulary are the ‘background processes’ that make understanding and production of significant discourse possible. In the following chapters, we will discuss how reading literature, albeit simplified, helps with the acquisition of the major language skills that our students need.

Chapter 9: Reading and Other Skills:

Subchapter 9.1: The Act of Reading

The act of reading has two basic motivations: instrumental, when the information we gain is necessary for the achievement of an immediate goal, and pleasurable, when we read simply for the pleasure of the experience.

What happens in the classroom cannot be described as ‘reading for pleasure’, yet one of our goals is to instill a lifelong love of the printed word; another is to help our students become adept at deciphering the various types of text out there, from road signs and notices to cooking recipes and history essays. As noted ( “instrumental reading and listening can be pleasurable too; reading history textbooks or going to history lectures (or any other subject we are studying or which interests us) may be done for fun as well as for some utilitarian purpose”. This is the experience we try to offer our students – a material that, while used for learning, is still personally relevant and enjoyable. Keeping in mind that students put no textbook ever on a bestsellers’ list, and that the inclusion on a ‘recommended’ list often leads to automatic rejection of any given book, we maintain that graded readers offer more than just an opportunity to practice reading comprehension.

Reading stories begins with speaking about them; discussing what we like to read, why we do or don’t, how reading helps us. Again, as we stated many times in these pages, our purpose is to help these students grow: personally, not just in terms of knowledge of the English language. Before they pick up the book, they have to want to read, they have to feel like they need to. The teacher must stimulate their curiosity and encourage them to give free reign to their imagination. Empowering students gives them better motivation; it is the students, consequently, who choose what type of story we get to read. So what do they ask for?

We want to laugh!

We want to solve a mystery!

We want a scary story!

Well… why not?

A story that manages to make the reader laugh, shiver or guess is one that has captured her/his attention. A reader that pays attention manages to build a varied vocabulary, complete with a set of examples of good practice, and countless examples of grammar in context; not only does he/she get a sense of connotations and nuance, but they also begin to recognize tone and intention. A worthy enterprise, then, if done right.

How do we know our students will make the right choice, though? What if they choose something woefully inadequate for their age or their level of English? What if their choice is too controversial to deal with in class?

For starters, before we start reading a new story, students generally choose it from a list of propositions. What this list offers is the title and a short description of each book; in order to choose one, learners have to take a quick look at each description, identify the main idea, predict/ guess whether the text is interesting. Some students will look at the title and key words, while others will read the descriptions quickly in order to find the ghosts, pirates or whatever else may have captured their imagination. We try to encourage them to go for skimming as the best option for this type of classes, since it is fairly fast and once some of the students have reached a decision, they will try to convince their peers, thus engaging the entire class in the discussion.

Predicting, that is the next step in choosing a story. Without much interference from the teacher, just a few choice questions, the class will try to divine what adventures the protagonist will go through, and whether they want to follow.

Case in point: 6th grade, middle of the first semester; the teacher brings three-four titles to the attention of the class, and asks them to read the descriptions, and to choose (in pairs) the one they think is the most interesting. The purpose of working in pairs is better time management and additional practice in the target language – if students have to understand the presentation and select one title on the basis of what they have read, even the inevitable lapse into Romanian during the ‘negotiation’ between the members of each pair will not be complete, that is, they will still need to return to English to formulate their choice (and the reasons for it).

The information they have is the following:

Marcel and the Shakespeare Letters,byStephen Rabley

Marcel visits his friend, Henry, in London. Henry knows a professor and he has some very interesting letters – by William Shakespeare! Marcel and Henry want to see the letters, but they are not in the professor’s flat. Marcel is a detective. Can he find them?

The Missing Coins, by John Escott

Pete and Carla are students. One day they look at some very old coins and stamps in a shop. Pete wants to buy some stamps, but they are very expensive. Later that day some coins are missing from the shop – and the shopkeeper wants to find Pete.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne

This is the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus. One day, Nemo finds three men in the sea. For months the men live on the Nautilus. They find a town on the sea floor, beautiful coasts and a lot of gold. But they want to go home. Can they escape from Nemo’s submarine?

The Battle of Newton Road, by Leslie Dunkling

The houses in Newton Road are small, but people are very happy there. Then a civil engineer wants to knock down the houses and build a new road. The people of Newton Road are very angry. But can they win the battle?

Once the students decide which book to read, we move from skimming to reading for detailed information; the type of reading done in real life when one has to understand a complex procedure, or detailed instructions. At lower levels, though, reading for specific information can be an intermediate step; before asking them to tackle the chapter as a whole, students are required to identify certain things in the text.

The teacher writes on the blackboard the title of the chapter and three questions, before the reading starts. For instance:

The Missing Coins

Part I

Questions:

Where does the action take place?

Who are the characters (the people) that appear on page 1?

What do they like to do?

.

The students need only identify three pieces of information; having these as a starting point, the rest of the page becomes easier to understand.

For high-school students, of whom a better command of the language is expected, this kind of questions will be part of their tests, where they will have to demonstrate their ability to find specific data in a text; generally, they will get questions to answer after they have finished reading. Having gone over the text with no ‘before you read’ questions to guide their attention to this or that aspect, their response will be to the text as a whole:

Mr. Hiram B. Otis was American. He was very rich and very important. He wanted to live in an old house in England, so he decided to buy Canterville Chase, the home of Lord Canterville. Everyone told him that he was doing a very foolish thing. 'Canterville Chase is haunted,' they said.

Lord Canterville himself warned Mr. Otis about the Ghost.

'Many members of my family have seen the Ghost. My grandaunt, the Duchess, was dressing for dinner one night. Suddenly, the hands of a skeleton touched her on the shoulders. She has never recovered from the shock. My wife, Lady Canterville, cannot sleep at night because of the mysterious noises in the house.'

'My Lord,' said Mr. Otis, 'I will pay you extra for the Ghost. I come from a modern democratic country. If we find a ghost, we'll put it in a museum or a show for everyone to see.'

Lord Canterville smiled. 'The Ghost really exists. People have seen it many times in the last three hundred years, since 1584 in fact. It always appears before the death of any member of my family.'

'In my home,' joked Mr. Otis, 'the doctor appears before the death of any member of my family.'

'I am an American,' he continued. 'Americans don't believe in ghosts. They are an old-fashioned European idea.'

After we read the fragment – depending on time restrictions, it can range from a page to a chapter – it is time to ask and answer questions. They can be about the fragment as a whole, when the focus is on expressing the learners’ personal reaction to the text, or refer to details, when we need to work on comprehension. Usually, however, questions progress from the very specific to the more generous, giving students the chance to practice both skimming – in order to check that all relevant details have been mentioned in their answer – and the expression of their own ideas.

Example: Answer the following questions:

Who are the characters that appear on this page?

Speak about Mr. Otis. (3 sentences or more)

Speak about Lord Canterville. (3 sentences or more)

Does Mr. Otis say he doesn’t believe in ghosts?

What are the two men’s opinions about ghosts?

Little by little we progress beyond the literal meaning of words in a passage, and start to ‘get’ humour, sarcasm, melancholy, irony…

Reading comprehension is also one of the key components to most formal ESL tests, from the lowly national baccalaureate exam to those recognized worldwide. These are tests they may need to pass in order to graduate high school, attend university abroad or get their dream job with an international company. When it comes to testing, the story we read becomes a rich source of material, whether we need to test comprehension, grammar or vocabulary. Cloze exercises (usually with the list of words necessary given), rephrasing, correction – having the text at hand makes it relatively simple for the teacher to administer a test that is appropriate for this particular class at this particular moment in the school year. In addition to that, familiarity with the text can help lower anxiety for weaker students, hopefully helping them become comfortable with skimming and scanning texts during their competence exams, at the end of their twelfth grade. We are convinced, as we have tried to prove in this paper, that reading also helps our students learn how to listen more attentively, speak clearly and write persuasively.

Subchapter 9.2 Reading and Listening

Extensive reading is ‘the best possible way for students to achieve automaticity – that is the automatic recognition of words when they see them. It is by far the best way to improve their English reading and writing overall.

The benefits of extensive reading are echoed by the benefits of extensive listening: the more students listen, the more language they acquire, and the better they get at listening activities in general. Whether they choose passages from textbooks, recordings of simplified readers, listening material designed for their level, or recordings of radio programmes which they are capable of following, the effect will be the same. Provided the input is comprehensible, they will gradually acquire more words and greater schematic knowledge which will, in turn, resolve many of the language difficulties they started out with.’

Granted, the reading and listening done during an ESL class are intensive rather than extensive, given that they focus less on the pleasure of it and more on the completion of certain tasks, and done ‘with the help and/or the intervention of the teacher’ (idem), but since they occur systematically and over a relatively long time – the duration of a school year – they tend to have a markedly beneficial effect.

Recognizing the vital importance of authentic reading material and speech, we encourage students at all levels to try and make sense of the music, TV or films they come across, to tackle articles or reports in English; the more exposure, the more visible the effect. Even given the unavoidable misunderstandings and moments of awkwardness (‘But I know for a fact “my momma don’t like you” is correct, I heard it in a song! ‘) authentic material is an invaluable teaching tool. However, using it at low levels limits the range of activities drastically, which becomes demotivating for the better students, while not exactly helping the weaker students’ progress. It stands to reason then that such listening lessons will not occur very frequently.

What we can do to increase both word and word-pattern recognition, and overall listening comprehension, is listen to the recording of the story we read in class. As mentioned previously (chapter 2), most readers are sold together with a recording of the entire text on a CD. At lower levels, the recording is punctuated with sound effects. These add to the pleasure of the story, while making it easier to understand too. When stairs creak in the text, a creaking sound is heard in the recording; when a character utters a shrill yell, the students hear it recorded.

Stomping, grunting, whispering – the recording models them, providing the explanation at the same time as the question arises. What does whisper mean? To speak very softly, so as not to be heard by a third party or so as not to disturb someone… when you hear fireworks going off, the word fireworks is understood instantly.

How to use recordings in class: the following passages describe a typical lesson at secondary level, and one at high school level. These lessons take place in the IT lab.

5-6th grade: Students read the text and listen to the recording at the same time; the recording is paused, after each paragraph, in order to check comprehension. The point is not to ask for details, but to check whether the flow of the story is unimpeded by too many unknown words or phrases. Usually the students will offer the gist of the fragment; occasionally, though, phrases will be translated or words underlined to be discussed later. At the end of the page (either turned or scrolled down) the teacher asks for more detailed information: students get to use the phrases they have just heard, and unconsciously try to mimic the same pronunciation and inflection.

10th grade: the point is no longer to ascribe a certain pronunciation to this set of letters; the students don’t follow the page anymore. The drill is somewhat similar: listen to a fragment, then pause, elicit the gist, continue. At the end of the page, however, the students get to open their books and look for specific details in the text. Typically, while answers to the questions regarding the text are quick to come orally, conscientious learners are reticent to write them down without checking the spelling.

The success of the listening activity depends on the engagement of the learners. If the story has not captured their imagination, if the topic is ‘boring’, ‘uninteresting’, ‘daft’, their lack of commitment will translate into inattention, fidgeting, uncooperativeness. This is one of the reasons why we prefer to use listening tasks connected to the story we are currently reading. If the characters and the plot are interesting enough to read about, they are certainly worth listening to.

The second reason is that, while all ministry-approved textbooks have listening sections, not all of them provide the recording necessary. Editura Didactica si Pedagogica (English Agenda, English, My Love), Corint Publishing House (Front Runner, grade 9 and 10), surprisingly enough, Oxford University Press (English Factfile, grade 5 and 6) have all filled school deposits with textbooks without audio support. Our problem was providing students who are not English-enthusiasts with at least some practice in listening; readers proved to be the solution.

Similarly, readers help students develop a more natural-sounding pronunciation; this is not to say RP, North American or New Zeeland accent – our focus is to achieve communication that flows effortlessly and that is easily understood both by a native speaker and a listener for whom English is not the first language. Our next chapter will treat the topic of reading as a tool to learn better pronunciation.

Subchapter 9.3: Reading and Pronunciation

Teaching pronunciation involves a variety of challenges. To begin with, teachers often find that they do not have enough time in class to give proper attention to this aspect of English instruction. When they do find the time to address pronunciation, the instruction often amounts to the presentation and practice of a series of tedious and seemingly unrelated topics. Drilling sounds over and over again (e.g., minimal pair work) often leads to discouraging results, and discouraged students and teachers end up wanting to avoid pronunciation altogether.

There are also psychological factors that affect the learning of pronunciation in ways that are not so true of studying grammar or vocabulary. For one thing, the most basic elements of speaking are deeply personal. Our sense of self and community are bound up in the speech-rhythms of our first language (L1). These rhythms were learned in the first year of life and are deeply rooted in the minds of students. Therefore, it is common for students to feel uneasy when they hear themselves speak with the rhythm of a second language (L2). They find that they “sound foreign” to themselves, and this is troubling for them. Although the uneasiness is usually unconscious, it can be a major barrier to improved intelligibility in the L2.

‘The areas of pronunciation which we need to draw our students’ attention to include individual sounds they are having difficulty with, word and phrase/sentence stress, and intonation. But students will also need help with connected speech for fluency and the correspondence between sound and spelling.’ (Harmer, 2005).

The easiest way to correct a learner’s pronunciation is to let him or her speak, and gradually and systematically help them achieve an intelligible, ‘natural’ sound. Speaking, however, especially at some length, is difficult for many learners. They may not feel they have something interesting enough to say, they may be afraid of using the wrong word or the wrong verb tense, they may even get frustrated by the effort it takes to find the right words.

It is very important to get them to communicate, and there is a whole range of exercises to stimulate them.

As for their pronunciation?

Reading aloud, as dated or obsolete as it may seem, allows our learners to practice their sounds. Listening to one another helps too. If you can’t understand what your classmate is reading, you get to ask him or her to repeat; or, in secondary school, you get to correct their pronunciation, sometimes quite loudly. While it may seem aggressive and intimidating, in practice it is anything but. Students get inured to correction and get over the fear of making mistakes, which, in turn, makes them more willing to communicate in the target language. Many A students are petrified at the idea of speaking outside the classroom, afraid of making mistakes, of being branded as ‘ignorant’ or ‘stupid’. Running the gauntlet of reading aloud removes some of the fear and reinforces the idea that mistakes are a normal part of the learning process, and unavoidable, to boot. Students who are corrected will shrug, repeat the word or the phrase, and move on.

The focus of the lesson, though, in terms of pronunciation, is not individual sounds, even though there may be lessons that include a bit of opportunistic teaching – a sound or a group of sounds that need practiced, because they raise problems for a significant number of students. What we try to emulate is the natural rhythm of speaking the English language, its variations in pitch and intonation.

A friend watched him and said, 'Perhaps you'll have better luck in the second half.'

'Wait and see,' Willie answered. He wanted to play well for this important game but everything went wrong in the second half, too! He lost more balls, he hit more trees, and then he hit the ball near a river. He walked up to the ball and hit it again.

Expressing doubt, support, frustration, surprise – pitch, stress and intonation are the key to conveying information effectively. The classroom setting doesn’t offer many opportunities for genuine surprise or frustration that can find expression in the target language. Characters in a story, however, experience a whole range of emotions. When Marcel, the French detective mouse hears the two thieves speaking about stealing a million-dollars diamond, he listens to them gloating. Tom Sawyer is thrilled to hear that dead cats can be used to conjure ghosts, horrified to witness a murder, terrified of Injun Joe’s revenge. Intonation tends to be flat during classroom interactions, but with a bit of cajoling, our students’ theatrical abilities come to the foreground, making the entire exercise more pleasant for everyone involved.

Similarly, stressing a key word or phrase in a sentence comes naturally in speech; when one is surprised, it is not only intonation that changes: ‘WHAT are you doing?’ rises towards the end of the sentence, but stressing the first word, here capitalized, will add to the meaning of the sentence a nuance of exasperation, hurt, amusement – and the examples could continue. Moreover, ‘natural’ sounding English does not happen naturally, it requires repeated exposure and raising awareness of intonation patterns that get to be duplicated. Listening to the recording of a story provides good practice for more than just comprehension, and the possibility of listening to the same passage repeatedly gives each learner the change to progress as much as they want.

Hearing a text read by a native speaker will allow our learners to realize that words in isolation – in the dictionary, or an index list – sound differently from when they are used in sentences. The native speaker part, though, is not essential. The teacher or another competent speaker can read aloud a fragment of text, and by varying the speed of speaking, draw attention to the way words change when they come into contact. The tendency, for learners up to intermediate level, is to pronounce words very carefully, with little pauses in between. Our goal is to achieve intelligibility, and a speaker that pronounces each word very clearly is certainly easier to understand than one that speeds through the utterance. Nonetheless, a certain fluency is necessary for communication. Speaking too slowly, too carefully, often makes one seem uncertain or irresolute, and makes communication more difficult. When it is the students’ turn to read aloud, they will use the patterns of intonation and stress that they have heard as their reference. Besides, because they are not required to read sentences, but full paragraphs – and sometimes more – they will have ample opportunity to practice their sounds and patterns.

After we read – trying to sound ‘natural’ and be easily understood, we also talk about the story. Having a starting point everyone is familiar with encourages conversation and makes taking part in the discussion accessible to most learners; and the building blocks of our discourse (thematic vocabulary, verbal tenses, patterns of pronunciation for a series of helpful phrases) are there, in front of our eyes. The next chapter deals with the way we can use graded readers as stepping stones on our way to becoming independent, articulate speakers of the English language.

Subchapter 9.4: Reading and Speaking

Reading for an extended period of time will have other beneficial effects; students who read systematically are more likely to notice and understand how the discourse is structured, both in terms of cohesion and of coherence. Discussing anaphoric and cataphoric reference, for instance, is counter-productive at lower levels, but we can try asking students to find ways to avoid repeating themselves. Stories offer examples of every cohesive device, and even though the theory should be avoided, coming across conjunctions, transitions, substitution and synonymy day after day, will show learners how a text can be organized.

At the simplest level, speaking practice means just summarizing a paragraph a student has read and that everyone has understood.

Tom came out of his house with a brush and a big pot of white paint in his hand. He looked at the fence; it was three meters high and thirty meters long. He put his brush in the paint and painted some of the fence. He did it again. Then he stopped and looked at the fence, put down his brush and sat down. There were hours of work in front of him and he was the unhappiest boy in the whole village.

S1: Tom didn’t want to paint the fence.

S2: Tom had to paint the fence but he was unhappy about it.

S3: Tom hated that he had to paint the fence.

Paraphrasing, telling the same thing with different words, works when students try to explain what happens without translating:

That night Tom went to bed at half past nine. He waited for Huck's meow, and at eleven o'clock it came. He climbed quietly of the bedroom window, and then he and Huck walked out of the village with the dead cat.

S1: Tom waited to hear Huck make cat sounds, and then he jumped out of his window. They left the village together. They had a dead cat.

S2: Tom was waiting for Huck; when he heard the signal, he jumped out of the window and they left together.

The purpose of these paraphrasing exercises is to increase students’ confidence in their ability to speak ‘properly’, that is, to transmit the intended message with a minimum of mistakes. The less correction necessary, the more confident and satisfied our students.

Engaging in dialogues with the teacher or with other students is another way of retelling the story, while practicing speaking. Very useful when the class is homogenous in terms of level, dialogue serves as a motivating tool for the weaker but ambitious students, and as a model for everyone. Even when the students are at different levels of competence, dialogues reinforce rules of usage, offer a pretext for the practice of moods or tenses, or for the use of newly acquired vocabulary items. We talk about the fragment we have finished reading, about the chapter, about the meaning of new words, we try to predict what our characters will do.

Role-playing, imagining yourself to be in someone else’s shoes, works very well when used in connection to the story we read. While the topic of such an activity can be any imaginary situation, activating functional language for a multitude of scenarios, 'At the restaurant', 'Checking in at the airport', 'Looking for lost property’ are not as rewarding, in terms of student involvement and enthusiasm. Even though they may have traveled by plane, eaten at restaurants and lost plenty of property, pretending to be Tom and tricking their friends into painting the fence for him works better – because it’s more fun!

However, that does not mean that the range of possible topics is limited; on the contrary, for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer alone, students can role play quite a number of situations:

Persuasive discourse: Tom convinces his friends to paint the fence for him

Meeting someone new: Tom meets Becky

Talking about beliefs and superstition: Tom and Huck discuss the possibility that cats can lure spirits

Debating safety versus justice: Tom and Huck need to decide whether they testify in Muff Potter’s trial, risking Injun Joe’s revenge, or stand by while an innocent man is convicted of murder

Debating going for help versus waiting to be rescued – Tom and Becky are lost in the cave.

These situations work very well as written assignments too; in the case of lower levels, the students work in groups, to imagine the position one character would defend, and then nominate one representative who presents their work to the rest of the class. At higher levels, these tasks are individual or for pairs of students, where usually one is better than the other. In order to encourage participation, the student who does most of the writing has to coach the weaker student to present their work; in this way, they both contribute to the final ‘grade’, which is always given by a committee of at least three ‘judges’, who have to give arguments for their decision. The final grade is the one that takes into account the presentation, progress made by the students, correctness and completion of task.

For younger students, the game is a reward in and of itself; for high school students, such speaking/ writing topics have ties with the dreaded baccalaureate exam; learning how to describe a character works in their benefit when the exam subject asks them to describe a person, be it a member of family, a friend, a public figure or a teacher. Making invitations, accepting or declining one, coming up with the argumentation for or against a given position – having practiced these tasks, tied to the imaginary world of a given story, they become easier to tackle at exam times. Take the following written assignment, for example; the same general outlines work for any subject that demands the description of a person.

Task: describe your favourite of the characters that appear in the first two chapters of The Canterville Ghost:

Introduction: WHO the character is – name, age, occupation

Main body – ADDRESS THE SENSES:

how he/she LOOKS

Is there a particular SMELL (perfume, mint, moldy etc) that comes to mind?

SOUNDS – are they quiet? Noisy? Soft-spoken?

BEHAVIOUR – relate an episode that you consider typical for the behavior of the character you have chosen

Conclusion – JUSTIFY your choice: this character is interesting/funny/unexpected/reminds me of my best friend, X/ is a role model for me.

All we have written here has been focused on the usefulness of reading, regarded as an invaluable tool for any educator. We want more, though; we want our students to grow to love reading, and to turn to books as precious friends, sources of inspiration and depositories of knowledge, be they printed or digital. We want them to read and understand, make connections, remember and use what they’ve read.

We have included a number of lesson plans for various grades and different objectives, for anyone curious as to what happens, more precisely, during one of these classes that use a graded reader as main learning material.

Lesson plan

Teacher: Dana Hanganu, grad II, august 2014

Class: 6th B;

Date: Friday, October 21st 2016; 13-13:50

Number of students:30; 1 new student, transferred at the beginning of the school year

Stage of the school year: beginning;

Type of lesson: Consolidation;

Aims:

to consolidate present tense simple and present tense continuous

to check reading comprehension;

to practice pronunciation the acquisition of vocabulary items;

Objective: by the end of the lesson, students will be able to use present tense continuous to describe events in progress, as opposed to repeated or habitual events;

Stages of the lesson:

Stage I. Roll call; set the mood (3 minutes)

Stage 2: Warm-up: Speaking: teacher asks, Students answer – oral activity, Students may slip into Romanian; monitor and correct (3-5 minutes)

Imagine you are on your own, in a big city; how do you feel? Excited/ anxious/ curious/ lonely?

What city would you want to visit?

What do you want to do?

Where do you want to go?

Are you alone or with friends?

Stage 3: Read the fragment:

Students read; teacher monitors and corrects pronunciation if necessary; after each paragraph, the student who has read it translates or summarizes; 10-15 minutes;

Stage 4: Answer the following questions: (oral activity, 3 minutes; the teacher asks, students answer)

Who is the protagonist of this story?

How old is he?

Where is he?

Where is he from?

What is he doing?

Where does he want to go?

Stage 5: Find the verbs in the text and underline them: once for the present tense simple, two times for the present tense continuous: (Students who use a digital copy of the text write the verbs in two columns in their notebooks; for each paragraph, one student goes to the blackboard and solves the task); 5-7 minutes;

Stage 6: Read the sentences where the tense is present continuous; replace the continuous tense with the simple; discuss the difference in meaning; (group work; oral; 3 minutes)

Stage 7: write a pair of sentences of your own to illustrate this difference; (individual work; 2 minutes; teacher calls on 2 students to check completion of task)

Stage 8: Speaking about vacations and trips: Imagine that you are Jack, and you want to film your experience in London; you must describe where you are, what you see, what you want to do; use the present tense simple or continuous, as necessary; (individual work, 10 minutes; students take turns to imagine what they would say; deviations from the text are expected and encouraged; in order for the task to be successful, speakers must be able to use the tenses correctly, and listeners must be able to understand the discourse and, should they happen, spot mistakes)

Final stage: feedback on the activities.

Connected task: if deemed appropriate, homework may be set:

Think about a place you want to visit, with or without your family; write a short composition telling the class where you want to go, who with and what you can do there. (5-7 sentences)

Lesson plan

Teacher: Dana Hanganu, grad II, august 2014

Class: 11th B;

Date: Wednesday , 18th of October 2017; 9-9:50

Number of students:32; 3 new students, transferred at the beginning of the school year

Stage of the school year: beginning;

Type of lesson: Evaluation;

Aims:

to consolidate past tense simple;

to check reading comprehension;

to demonstrate the acquisition of vocabulary items;

Stages of the lesson:

Stage I. Roll call; set the task (3 minutes)

Stage II. testing: students work on the task; individual work (35 minutes)

Test

1. Are the sentences true or false?

a. The story happens in December.

b. Holmes tells his friend about a tall man with an old hat.

c. The tall man left a yellow bird in the street.

d. A hotel doorman, Peterson, gave the bird and the hat to Holmes.

2. Write sentences illustrating the meaning of these words: walking stick, poor, shoulder, magnifying glass.

3. Write the past tense forms of the verbs: begin; catch; hit; have; go;

4. Explain how you form the negative in the past simple (example or model).

5. Explain how you form the interrogative in the past simple (example or model).

BONUS QUESTION: Write a short paragraph describing a visit you paid one of your friends around Christmas. (50-60 words)

Stage III. Discussion and self-evaluation:

2 minutes: explain the assessment technique

8 minutes: students give answers to the questions (one student writes answers on the blackboard, the class checks whether they are correct)

2 minutes: The teacher collects the tests; homework is set; feed-back on the activity of the day.

Materials used:

Dominoes One Sherlock Holmes: The Blue Diamond, Oxford University Press, Revised Edition, 2010;

(available at https://targmne.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/thebluediamond_book.pdf)

Scoring Grid:

1- 1p

2- 2 p

3- 2p

4- 2p

5- 2p

Bonus: 1 p

Results: out of 32 students, 4 were absent (2 for medical reasons, 2 unknown)

Exercise 1- 1 correct answer: 1 student

2 correct answers: 2 students

3 correct answers: 11 students

4 correct answers: 14 students

Exercise 2 – 16 students did not write sentences

12 wrote sentences; typical mistakes: omission of final –s in the third person, present simple (8 students); insufficiently illustrative sentence (word given can be replaced with any other noun or adjective and still be correct) – 7 students

Exercise 3- 1 correct answer -1student

2 correct answers – 1 student

3 correct answers: 4 students

4 correct answers: 7 students

5 correct answers: 15 students

Typical mistakes: confusion of participle with present tense simple, 3rd singular (have –has; go – goes)

Exercise 4: no answer: 3 students;

Example: 12 students; 3 sentences in the present tense instead of past simple; 2 students used the participle in conjunction with the auxiliary: he didn’t worked.

Model (Sb+ did not/ didn’t + vb I) : 13 students; 4 students wrote the model for the present tense simple instead of past tense simple;

Exercise 5: no answer 2 students;

Example: 12 students; typical mistakes: 5 students wrote sentences in the present simple instead of past;

Model: (Did + Sb + VbI ?) 4 students wrote the model for the present tense simple instead of past tense simple;

BONUS QUESTION: The purpose of Bonus Questions in tests is to help students review elementary issues: days of the week, numbers, short descriptions of people or places. It also aims to improve self-confidence for the weaker students, who may find writing too daunting a task. At the beginning of the school year, these bonus questions call for very short answers; later in the school year, the focus shifts on communication, asking students to argue for or against some idea, to compare two places or objects, to summarize the chapter read most recently etc.

Grades: under 5: 5 students

5-6: 5 students

6-7: 2 students

7-8: 3 students

8-9: 9 students

9-10: 4 students

Analysis of the results:

Reading comprehension and irregular verb forms are fairly simple for this group, as a result of frequent exercises;

Despite recent revision of the simple past, there is still confusion when students are to use it in sentences of their own, or to explain form; however, it is encouraging that most students did understand it and were able to solve the tasks given.

The biggest difficulty remains demonstrating the correct understanding of vocabulary items, since it requires not only the writing of a grammatically correct sentence, but illustrating the meaning of the words given. As the school year progresses, this type of task will be part of their routine, as a means of increasing self-confidence and encouraging students to communicate.

Lesson plan

Teacher: Dana Hanganu, grad II, august 2014

Class: 8th B;

Date: Monday ,December 11th 2017; 9-9:50

Number of students:31; 3 new students, transferred at the beginning of the school year

Stage of the school year: middle;

Type of lesson: Consolidation;

Aims:

to consolidate past tense simple;

to express their opinion on the events read about;

to describe a vacation or a trip away from home;

Objective: by the end of the lesson, students will be capable to speak about a vacation or their vacation plans;

Stages of the lesson:

Stage 1: Roll call (3 minutes)

Stage 2: Warm-up: Speaking: teacher asks, Students answer – oral activity, Students may slip into Romanian; monitor and correct (3-5 minutes)

Imagine what the boys did on the island;

What did they eat?

Where did they sleep?

Were they worried about their families?

Were their families worried about them?

Stage 3: Read the fragment:

Students read; teacher monitors and corrects pronunciation if necessary;after each paragraph, the student who has read it translates or summarizes; 15-20 minutes;

So that night three boys in a small boat went down the river to Jackson’s Island. They had some bread and some meat, and Huck had his pipe, too. When they got there, they carried everything on the island and made a fire under a big old tree. Then they cooked some of the meat over the fire, and oh, that meat was good – the best dinner in the world! Soon, they stopped talking, their eyes closed, and they slept.

The next morning Tom woke up with the sun on his head and a smile on his face. Then Huck and Joe woke up, and the three boys ran down to the river to swim. After that, they fished, and soon they had about six big fish for their breakfast.They cooked their fish on their fire, and ate them all. They were very hungry.

‘That’, said Joe happily, ’was a wonderful breakfast!’

After breakfast they walked through the island, swam some more, talked, fished and swam again. They came back to their fire in the afternoon. Suddenly Tom looked up and said: ’Listen, can you hear some boats?’

They listened, and then ran across the island to look down the river. There were twenty or more boats on the water. Every boat in St. Petersburg was out.

‘What are they doing?’ Joe asked.

‘They’re looking for a dead body, I think,’ said Huck. ‘They did that last summer when Bill Turner fell into the river and drowned.’

‘Who’s dead, do you think?’ asked Joe.

The boys watched the boats. Suddenly, Tom cried: ‘I know who’s dead! It’s us! They’re looking for us!’

This was wonderful. Tom looked at his friends. ‘We’re famous!’ he said. “Everybody in St. Petersburg is talking about us. And they’re sorry for us!’

Night came, and the boys went to sleep. But Tom did not sleep. […] At breakfast, Tom told his story. ‘I went home last night’, he said, ‘and listened at the window. Joe, your mother was there, too, and she and Aunt Polly cried and cried. I heard some very interesting things. On Sunday there’s going to be a big funeral at church – for us! And listen! I’ve got a wonderful idea!’

Stage 4: Grammar focus – Students work individually:

Find three sentences in the past simple tense;

Turn each sentence into a negative, then an interrogative one, without changing the tense;

If prompted, read your sentences out loud, then translate;

Work time: 5 minutes; teacher acts as controller, monitor and, if necessary, resource;

Stage 5: Discussion:Describe a vacation away from home; was it anything like the boys’ escape to Jackson’s Island?

Teacher acts as prompter and monitor: students work in pairs or individually, according to proficiency and affinity; work time: 10-13 minutes;

Stage 6: feedback and homework;

Students comment on satisfaction and completion of tasks, explain where/ if they had difficulties; homework is to write down 6-8 lines about a vacation; teacher gives feedback; work time: 2 minutes.

Of course, some stages may take longer, or students may be unable or unwilling to tackle one task or another; accordingly, the worktimes will vary from one class to the next, and in some cases one stage will take up the entire 50 minutes of our English class.

CONCLUSIONS: LIFE IN COLOUR

When it’s all said and done, learning is not something we embark on for the sake of grades, exams, prestige or even education itself. Learning is one of the tools at our disposal once we step beyond the school gate. Out in ‘the real world’, one’s ability or inability to communicate, to make sense of a road sign or a computer program, to give or follow instructions, replace and supersede grades and averages.

The stories we read, starting from childhood, shape our cultural background and bring about a shared worldview or, on the contrary, differences that we need to overcome in order to live and work together. For the students of a vocational high school, the chances for exposure to literature generally begin and end with the Romanian class. What wasted opportunity, though, when literature – be it in its highest, most rarefied distillation, or as humble simplified reader, has so much to offer our students!

Critical thinking, a skill that is gaining notoriety, is nurtured by long-term reading in an organized context. Asking repeatedly ‘why’, why did that character choose that, was there another way to solve the problem, was it really a problem, linking situations or characters on paper to those similar in their lives, trains our students to approaching problems with a cooler head. Occasionally, our protagonist will make an enormous mistake, or believe something blatantly wrong (Tom Sawyer and the ghost-summoning dead cat, Jake who steals a camera because he wants a photo of a pretty girl , Pinocchio and the selling of the school books) giving us a chance to acknowledge that mistakes are part of learning, and that one mistake does not define a person. Furthermore, finding these mistakes and missed chances and wrong choices on paper makes speaking about our own troubles easier, relieving, at times, the feelings of isolation and inadequacy that torment so many teenagers.

Recognizing that imaginary people make mistakes has one other effect, though: it brings home the idea that not everything printed must be taken for granted. The more limited a person’s education, the more will they perceive books, magazines and, in general, anything written, as true. Getting into the habit of reading – and thinking about what’s just been read – awards one not just a most pleasant pastime, but a reliable habit of assessing the veracity of what information we come across.

The immediate effect of reading in class over an extended period is the fact that our students become accustomed to asking and answering questions. Who, what, where…, used systematically during their EFL classes, bring about automatic response patterns. Said responses will be riddled with grammatical mistakes, or delivered in heavily accented pronunciation, but our purpose is to facilitate communication rather than chase grammatical (or phonetic) perfection. Learning to ask for clarification, to signal when information has not been understood, to rephrase an answer in order to get something across – these are practical notions, more useful to our students than Future Perfect or the Passive Voice.

How do we reconcile, though, the idea of usefulness and practicality, with the study of literature? Why read Shakespeare, even in simplified form, when one could glean the same measure of exposure to grammatical patterns and possibly more useful vocabulary by examining traffic regulations written in the target language? Why not take one of the various books written about word frequency and usage and rely on corpus information in our teaching, respectively learning of English?

For one thing, Shakespeare is never boring. Stories capture our imagination, evoking passion and emotion, while offering us the vocabulary to express them; they teach grammar simultaneously with humour, irony and longing. They open a window into the human soul, while being a depository of ideal language forms, a collection of snapshots of the language in action. Reading descriptions of people, we learn how to speak about a friend who needs a reference for a new position; reading descriptions of imaginary places, we learn how to speak about our home town to a new friend; learning how to speak to a potential employer, a love interest or a casual acquaintance can start in class, defending Tom Sawyer’s more harebrained schemes, justifying the Ghost’s actions or offering additional information about the American Revolution, as the backdrop against which Rip van Winkle slept his enchanted sleep. These are the reasons why we believe that reading, and especially reading fiction, can and must be at the core of our lesson planning, when it comes to teaching the English language.

Reading together, we help our students create their identity, to strengthen their sense of belonging, not only to the here and now, but to the human race. We help them grow up.

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