On Thin Ice - the graded reader (not the state of Greenland)

Reading for detail - Read & Imagine

As you can easily see, there's a lot of text on the page, which most learners in Japan would baulk at immediately!

Our 'can do' learners at Luna have got used to this psychological barrier & can jump it with ease.

• Quiet reading? Yes
• Reading independently (at home)? Yes
• Overcome 'new' words? Yes
• Familiar with characters? Yes
• Enjoy the storylines? Yes
• Recycle language? Yes
• Personalisation with 'after reading' projects? Yes
• Work together with comprehension tasks? Yes
• Gain confidence with pronunciation of longer words? Yes
• Notice direct speech markers (punctuation)? Yes
• Read ahead for markers? Yes
• Look back in the story to refresh? Yes
• Travel in time & space, around the world? Yes
• Learn really cool stuff? Yes
• Put proper intonation into longer utterances (taking turns 'in character')? Yes
• Listening skills explored? Yes
• Gain confidence spelling? Yes
• Volume of vocabulary? Yes
• Expanding vocabulary sets beyond limited textbook content? Yes
• Yes.Yes. Yes.

There are so many benefits to our dedication at Luna to incorporating graded readers into our students' language learning careers. One of them is our adoption of Oxford's Read and Imagine + Read and Discover series - designed for young language learners with audio and activity books to enhance the learner experience. In our opinion, Oxford's Reading Tree is not fit for purpose, and the Extensive Reading Foundation's continued idolisation of that culturally loaded & unsuitable series is frankly annoying - driven by 'experts' who lecture from their high perches at universities without any idea what they're talking about wrt young learners, accessibility, learning styles, affordability. You never saw Oxford's Story Tree, which WAS ideal for the EFL classroom & independent home-readers?

Rant over? Not really!

Touching the Void

After I'd finished the book, it's hard to believe the book is fact-inspired, and I felt like what was really exciting about this story was not its attractiveness, but the fact that it's a true story. All of comment and thinking carrys a lot of weight.Story in the climbing generally tends to place more emphasis on excitement and less on psychological-descriptions. The book I've read has a lot of psychological-descriptions and these word are impressive even though it's abridged edition book.

The story was move into the movie which called "Unmei wo waketa zairu". I knew the title and it previously didn't attract me, however now I want to see the movie.