After 40 years of teaching, I have retired from the classroom with many lovely memories, a few embarrassing regrets, and loads of acquired insight into what teaching is really about.
In short snippets, I am sharing some of these insights with you in the coming weeks. This is #4.
If I Could Start All Over – We’d Read More Books
The idea was often there, but I never quite dared take the plunge. At the time when I was still using School Books, I used to play with the idea of choosing a Real Book and reading it like a School Book one chapter at a time. We’d listen and read it several times, check the students’ understanding, work with the vocabulary and write about the thoughts the reading brought to mind, just like we would with a “normal” chapter in a textbook.
I am sure that would have been nice at the time and probably given the students as much if not even more enjoyment and learning in my classes. Note that I had thrown out the Workbooks long before this.
Once I learned about the importance of reading Real Books in Second Language Acquisition, I started planning a book period, normally 5 weeks, into the term plan. For the first few times, I chose a book to be read in the whole class but realised very soon that this was futile. The book was always too easy for some and too difficult for others.
In the next step, I presented two books, an easier and a more challenging one. At the time, I was lucky enough to have a group room adjacent to my classroom, and the students could choose which group to join. I was mostly reading the easier one out loud in the group room, while the others would tackle theirs in the classroom: Volunteers would read out loud for part of the lesson, and the students would read by themselves for the rest. Some pages were left to be read at home, as we always counted the pages and divided them with the weeks to know how far we would have to read each week to get the book done.
Still, these books were never everyone’s cup-of-tea.
Finally, for the last decade or so, I let the students choose their own books. They would find them at the school library, at the town library, or even at home. Some needed help choosing, some swopped several times before they found the one they wanted, but most enjoyed their books in the end. At first, I let them write a traditional book review, but too many resorted to plagiarism. So I started giving them a list of tasks that couldn’t be found on the net.
During the last few years, the students could not only choose their own books but also how much was to be read at school, and how much at home. With the progress of digitalisation, we created various new individual book tasks, too. Most classes chose to have one reading lesson per week. They would always start with a group discussion where each student presented their book, what they thought about it so far and what they thought would be happening next – in a new group every week.
If I could start all over, I would have Reading Real Books as the main activity in my English classes. I would let the students choose books for the whole class and others to read by themselves. We would use Audiobooks to listen and read, and others just to read, read and read. Then we would take some time to present, talk, and write about them. My new students would excel even higher than my old students ever did.
It makes me very happy to know that at least one of my former students at Teacher Training is doing just this. I’d love to visit his class one day.