Carly and Kumar to the rescue…
Yesterday I had to find an activity for a young woman waiting for her husband to finish English language class… what could I offer her to make that couple of hours less tedious? I showed her a few ESOL reading books, and she grabbed Karen Barber’s ‘Carly and Kumar’, with a smile, though she had to admit she’d already read it at levels 1 and 2.
By chance I had a copy of ‘More Carly and Kumar’ sitting on my desk… yes, please, she would love to read that! She sat and read that book (and listened to the CD) all the way through with total absorption – I kept walking past and could see how intent she was. “VERY nice book – I learned so many things from this book,” was her verdict.
Yes, I thought – it’s encouraging to read in a new language and feel you’re improving your English, but it’s even more exciting to be able to read for the story (or the information) and feel you can’t stop reading; that you just want to know what happens next. And then the added bonus of learning about aspects of life in your new country that you hadn’t thought of before, of understanding more about how young people here conduct their relationships…
Extensive reading or Intensive reading?
This engagement is, of course, the goal of ER (extensive reading), as successful high-interest reading leads to greater reading fluency (and a host of other benefits – see the ER Foundation site). You might think that because I write ESOL readers with worksheets and ‘busy teacher’ instant lesson plans, I’m more on the side of Intensive Reading, but no – I love ER too, and am sad that I don’t see those boxes of class readers in use so much now. In fact I’m always hoping that IR will lead to ER – that students will enjoy reading in class and realise how much they’re learning from the experience, and that that will lead them to borrow more books from the library.
A teacher recently told me of a student who’d stayed after class in the library, so she could finish The Coat – because she wanted to know how it ended – and I felt like jumping in the air and cheering. Perhaps it wasn’t great for that teacher’s lesson plan for next week (though it could have been an opportunity to introduce the phrase ‘no spoilers’), but it was a happy piece of news for me – and hopefully, for that student…
