Only fair to share with you some of this blog’s regular contributors - “inspired” by their extensive reading hobby.
We have recently chosen OUP Bookworms as well as Scholastic titles for this term. Students chose the titles themselves, and avoided murder & ghost stories! I hope they will enjoy reading for fun - they have been ploughing through graded readers for a couple of years now (we’re auditing their total word count at the moment) and are very good at sticking to their goals.
The written work you read from them here is prompted by considered ‘after reading’ tasks that are intended to reflect Cambridge Assessment English writing paper exam tasks (ie chose from a variety of different writing tasks - an essay, a memo or a letter etc) with a suggested word limit, intended audience (such as a teen magazine readership, work colleagues or persons unknown to require consideration of tone & formality, as well as format & style).
As students are in-work, time demands are obviously pressing & they’re often unable to proofread each other’s first drafts - so what you see is what you get!
We try to read a book a month; we provide students with Google Forms to encourage pre-reading (looking through the pictures, reading the blurb on the back cover & maybe checking out the cast of characters...and crucially, getting their teeth into the glossary using dedicated Quizlet sets for each book, lovingly created by our teachers in preparation). Without this getting ready stage, we know the actual reading phase can be slowed, stalled, or even derailed.
We really enjoy reading our students’ original and thoughtful contributions - I thought you, gentle reader, would like to know a little bit more about how the blog sausage is made. Your encouragement motivates them to be brave & push “publish”!
And yes, we love graded readers :)
Thanks for reading.
