24 ¦ 11 zero-prep reading strategies for the language classroom

I'm named printer and this is the motivated classroom. Hello, bonjour, hola, falsche, and welcome to the Motivated Classroom Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me here on episode 24 already and today we're talking about reading strategies, building on last week's episode with the wonderful Adriana Ramirez about reading and novels and graded novels and how that builds motivation. There was a great response to that episode, lots of people getting in touch, asking about the novels where you get them, so I'm going to address some of those today. But first and foremost, I need to, of course, start with our little word osquilga in Irish, osquilga meets in Irish. And today our word is nice and simple because I got a poppy recently, our word for today is madra, which means dog. So the Irish word for a dog is madra and there's your Irish for today. I also want to say a big thank you to the patrons. There's now 18 of you who are patrons of the podcast makes a huge difference to me to the running of the podcast, the editing, the recording, all that stuff. So thank you so much. And we have some amazing guests lined up for the next few weeks. I'm not going to give it away just yet, but suffice to say I'm incredibly impressed with the caliber of guests who are willing to come on the show. It's amazing. And that's thanks to you guys downloading it and telling your friends. So without further ado, let's get straight into it. Reading and reading strategies. That is what a lot of you been asking about. And today we're going to go into some of that. I think one of the important things to start with is that reading is not just a tool that is going to boost acquisition, but it's also a tool that is going to motivate our students. And we saw that in last week's episode with Adriana when we were talking about novels and how much the students get into it and they get into the characters and they have the great feeling of competence when they finish a novel. Now of course, as you know, there is an abundance of research around the importance of reading. I think we could almost say it's an established fact. We never like to say that in social research, but we could almost say it's an established fact that reading is good for us. And those who read a lot, especially in another language, are going to boost their acquisition. And when we go back to Dr. Stephen Crashing's work on comprehensive input, reading is hugely important. But of course, it needs to be at a level that is understandable and comprehensible to us so that we feel like we are getting somewhere and we're motivated by it. And then we're going to learn and acquire so much more new language. Now there's lots of other research around reading. Of course, one of the most recent papers that really stood out for me is by Van Staden in 2016. And it's essentially about reading in a second language. One of the things I really like about this research is it's conducted in Lysoto and Sub-Saharan Africa. So it's really trying to show us that by exposing people to reading across all ages, backgrounds, contexts, ethnicities, financial economic backgrounds, reading is going to help. And in this study, one of the things that came out really strongly, which really stuck accord with me, is she sums up the research by saying results from this quantitative study demonstrated English learners in the experimental group. So this was a group who were shown particular ways and strategies to read. Essentially, we're told the simple view of reading how we can use certain strategies to help us in comparison to another group who were just given the books and given the materials. Those who were shown some strategies to read, well, they significantly outperformed those in the control group. And that was in regard to site word fluency, word recognition, syntactical awareness, vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension essentially across the board. And as I say, there are loads of studies out there to do with reading. In my thesis, I looked a lot at the work around comprehensible input readers, but when you look into it, there's so much research there to do with second language acquisition and the benefits of reading. One of the teachers who I follow a lot on Instagram and on other social media sound like a bit of a stalker there. But I do follow this person a lot because I love what he says is Bryce Headstrom. And he is a huge advocate for reading and the benefits of reading. And he often shares quotes from research studies and from books he's read and they're really nice. And they just really bring it home to me when I see those posts about the importance of reading in the second language acquisition classroom. So today, I want to share with you 11 strategies to engage and motivate our learners through reading or to instill love and passion for reading amongst our learners, which we know is so important. I don't know why I always have 11 things. I had 11 retrieval practice strategies in episode six as well. I don't know. I get to 10 and then I always think of one more, even though 10 would be nicer, I know. But we have 11. So it's kind of like spinal tap for those of you who are aware of that movie. When everything is on a scale of 1 to 10, but in spinal tap, it goes to 11. And if we go to 11 and reading, then we're going to be even better. Going to be crazy here, but it's all good. So we have 11 strategies for reading. Now the first two, we discussed a bit with Adriana in the last episode. And they're kind of grouped together. Number one is classroom novels. And number two is what we call free voluntary reading, F-V-R. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about the difference between those. So Adriana last week spoke about these classroom novels are essentially when we have a novel or a little graded book or text. So these are little books that have been written with a particular eye on the language learner. So they're written in a particular way with lots of repetition. And they're given in a certain way to the learner so that they can acquire the language naturally, essentially their comprehensible input novels at different levels. And a classroom novel is one that you would read as an entire class together. So for example, with my beginners in your eight, my Spanish students, we read a little book called "Tumba" by Miracanian, which is to do a day of the day at the Adelos Muertos. And we read that as a whole class and they'll act out little bits and will read bits alone. They'll read bits in groups. All of that, but it's done as a whole class together. And that is your classroom novel. And Adriana in last week's episode, if you haven't listened to it, please go back and have a listen. It's an awesome episode. Adriana has so much to teach us about instilling a love for reading in her classes. And she's written many of her own little books. And she talked to us about how she uses her novels in the classroom to teach culture as well. Now another part of that is what's called free voluntary reading. So these are also novels, but these are not novels that you are reading as an entire class. And Adriana last week gave us that lovely example of she's got some shoe boxes and she's got books in there. And when they've read one from level one, they can go and read one or two more from that box. And then when they're ready, they'll move on to the next box, which is level two. And they can then move up and they feel like they're achieving something. So free voluntary reading is a selection of novels that are written in this comprehensible way or some people call them graded novels that the students can choose for themselves, which ones they want to read. And they read it at their own pace. But usually we have a specific time in class every week or even every day, depending on how you look at it, when the students read in silence. And we as teachers should also read at that moment. We should sit down, not look at emails, not do any of our other work that we can do, but just for five to ten minutes, just read. It's not only great for the students, but it's great for your mental health as well. Get away from the screen and just read. And that could be a book in your own language. It could be a book in the target language of that classroom. It could be a book very similar to what the students are reading. The idea is that you are modeling the behavior to them. You are showing them I value reading. I value reading time. I love reading. And I'm going to take time out of my class to read as well. And when you first do this and you sit down, if it's out your desk, I sometimes sit amongst them and read my book, they'll kind of look at Jingle, what's he doing? Why is he sitting down here? Why is he not as a computer? And you're trying to show them that you value reading. And they'll get a lot out of that as well. So lots of teachers have their own way of doing this free voluntary reading. For me personally, how I like to do it is, whenever I have a double period with a class, we always start that class with 10 to 15 minutes of silent reading. So the students line up outside the door, as always, they give the class password to the controller who lets them in. They go in and they turn left immediately. Now all of my books, I'll share a picture on my blog and in the program notes about this. I have a wall of all of their books. And now how I created that was, I used those, what are they called? Polly pockets. We used to call them in Ireland. They're the little plastic sheep things that you have in a folder. Plastic envelope things that'll do. So they're all cello taped on the wall. You'll see what it, what it looks like when I share the photo I promise. So they're all cello taped on the wall and each student has got a little sticker and they've put their name on it and their book is inside. So it looks like a big book, a big wall of books, I should say. So they walk in, they take their book out of their little plastic envelope and they go and they sit down and they start reading. Now I got this idea from the wonderful Margarita Perez Garcia. I saw her share a picture of this and I was like, that is great. Yes, it took me a half an hour to sell a tape, all of the plastic things up on the wall. But to be honest afterwards, I thought the students could have done that themselves and they did their own name tag and they stuck their own name tag on their own envelopes. So they all did that themselves. Of course, I was explaining all of the instructions in the tiger language. They're getting more comprehensively input but they stuck their own names onto the little envelopes and all of that. So they walk in, they get their book, they sit down and they read. Now where do we get all the books from? This unfortunately takes time unless your school has an enormous budget that they want to give you. I am now teaching in this particular school I'm at right now for six years and every single year we have a bit of a budget that we can spend on a variety of different things. And I always max mine out. with books. So I essentially buy any of the books that have been published in that year. I'll have a quick look online, see what they're like, and I'll buy one or two copies. Sometimes when I read a book, I'm not a big fan of it or sometimes I might read it and think, "Oh, that book jars up me a little bit," or maybe there's some stereotypes in there. There's some stuff that I don't really like, so I'll put that one to the side. They're usually quite affordable. They're only between $5 and $10 a book. They're not hugely expensive. But most of the time, I find the books are great. There's some brilliant authors out there, and I can share some of their names on the program notes afterwards. I have a selection of these books, and I break them down into level one, level two, level three, level four, and then my diploma students are almost like native speaker level is five and six. They can choose any book they want, but they can choose a level underneath usually. I don't mind if they do one or two underneath, but what I don't want is a student who's in my level four class, picking a level one book, because one will just be way too simple for them, and they'll find it really boring. I want them to be challenged a little bit. So they often ask me, "I've got a list of all the level one books, level two, level three, level four," and they are all on a Google Doc or a Google Sheet, kind of like an Excel Docs. They have their name, the book, the author, and then on the other side of that, they have the number of stars that they would give it, and a comment. So to start off, each student will get a book, and they'll read it, and when they finish, they will say, "How many stars out of five they give it?" And they'll write a comment in Spanish. Once they've done that, they can put it back and get a new book. What if they get a book that they really don't like? Well, the one rule is, you're not allowed to swap your book on that day. So let's say I finish my book, I go and I pick out a new one according to the list, and I start it, and I'm four pages in. I go, "Oh, this is really boring. I'm not into this book." You have to stick with it for that day, but in the next class, you can exchange it and take out a different one. It's rare that they do that, to be honest. It only happens now and again. I encourage them just to try and get to the end of it and see what they think. And they can read each other's comments and see, "Oh, this book has got five stars from lots of people. I'm going to get that one next." And that works really well, and of course, they're interacting with the book. And I've seen an enormous difference in my students since I've put this into place, this free voluntary reading. Gadriana shared some websites last week where you can buy these books, and I will put those on the program notes again today. So that, my lovely listeners, is novels and free voluntary reading to absolute mainstays for your classroom. And one of the other things that I learned from Margarita when she posted her reading wall, and it was really inspired with that idea. She has this great idea called the Reading Marathon. So she's got 26 little numbers around the class, one to 26, and then she's got little stickman running, and she's got the students' head in the place of the stickman. And every time that they read a book and they put it back, they move along to the next number. And the idea is to see can anyone run a marathon, which is 26 miles, 26 books. And I've introduced that this year as well, and it is wonderful. I've some students who are on eight or nine books already, and we're only three, four months in. And they're loving the fact that they can see themselves move around the class, and some run number nine, some run 10, some run 5s, and run 4. And the idea is to see who can get to 26 first. And it is, they love it. They really like it, and they like to kind of show it off. And what they did was I allowed them to bring in any picture they wanted themselves. And the pictures are quite funny as well. Some of them are pictures of when they were little tiny babies. It's hilarious. I can't tell who's who. So they have to move each other forward. And they really enjoy that. It's a nice way to instill this love of reading, and you can see who's where. The other thing, of course, with free voluntary reading, as we know from the podcast so far, autonomy is hugely important in motivation. And in free voluntary reading, they're choosing the book themselves. Then they're learning some stuff about the characters, there's some relatedness, and they're getting to the end of a novel. There's a real sense of accomplishment with that. So it's hitting autonomy, relatedness, and competence, which as we know are the keys of motivation. Okay, but what other ways can we try and get our students involved for in reading? And not just reading because you're telling them to read, which is extrinsic motivation. And we want to get towards intrinsic motivation, because we know that the long-term learning outcomes and benefits are so much better with intrinsic motivation. How do we instill this love of reading? Well, one of the ways I try and do it is, as I said earlier, the modeling is huge, so that they can see that you as a teacher read a lot. But also, I like to name it and say it. And what I mean by that is, I constantly say it to the students. Reading is, and they go, "Power, now it's in Spanish." So I say, "Leir is, and they'll go, "Poder." So, "Leir is, Poder." And they know that phrase. They know reading is important to me, and I constantly say it in the class. If we're reading a text, I'll stop and I'll say, "Guys, why are we going to read this text?" And then they'll go, "Leir is, Poder." And I'll be, "Yes, look at what we're going to take from this text, and I'll show them just how much we can acquire and learn from one text, and I'll constantly bang on about that." You really need to keep naming why you're doing something, and why you put value in this, and then talk about the research, say that there's so much educational research out there that shows the benefits of reading, and especially reading in a second language, and they will listen to that. And once you get that majority of your class that are starting to really be involved in reading and loving it, and like in the books, well then there's that really nice positive peer pressure when they all start to do it. So what other strategies do we have? Now, novels and free voluntary reading are mainstays, as I say, they're huge, but we do have some other strategies we can put into place as well. The first I want to share is called Embedded Readings or Extended Readings. So an Embedded Reading is when you have done, let's say you've invented a little TPRS story, or you've developed an invisible character like we've talked about, or you've done anything created like we talked about that, disgusting milkshake competition. Any of these things, especially a story though, and you have then a reading that is essentially the story. It is the story, but maybe there's some slight changes to it. Maybe one of the characters names is different, maybe they go to a different place, but the skeleton and the structures is all the same. And a great strategy is to ask them to find the differences between your classroom story and this other story. And the reason that works great is because I realized I would often create these readings in advance. And then, of course, when you're getting their ideas in a story, well, the person's name is different, the place is different, how many dogs he has is different, whatever. And I'd be like, in class, you know, going crazy on my keyboard, trying to change all these things. And I thought, no, that's silly. I'll just give them my original text. And then they have to come up with spot the differences between this text and the story that we invented. And it works really well. An Extended reading is a different story, but using the same structures. So it might be longer, have more detail going to like the colors and the ages and the backgrounds a bit more, but it's using the same three to four target structures of your story. If you're not sure what I'm talking about here with the stories, go back and listen to episodes 21, 22 about TPRS teaching proficiency with reading and storytelling and how we co-create a classroom story and it'll make sense. The next one then is what I like to call volleyball readings. This is number four. Volleyball reading is you give a text to two students and they work as a group. So they stand up usually around the classroom. So you've got a big circle of students all around the class in little groups of two. Now I realize in the current situation in some schools that might not be possible, but we will get to a stage when we're allowed to do these things again. And you can be creative and you could do it across Zoom as well, this would work. So volleyball reading is I have a text. It's quite simple. Now me and my partner, let's say there is me and my partner's name is Alice. So Liam reads sentence one and I read it in the target language in Spanish. And then Alice has to translate that sentence into English, which is our common language. And then she reads the next sentence in Spanish. And now I translate and read the next sentence and it continues like this. Now the students really enjoy this because they're getting a huge amount of competence from it because they're understanding the entire text. And when I do my feedback forums and I ask them about strategies they're enjoying in class, activities, they often come up with this reading in pairs, the volleyball reading. Now of course one of the major issues is well what happens when one group finishes and the other ones are all still going. Now this is genius. This is how you avoid this. After every couple of minutes you clap your hands twice and then you say cambia, which means change. And one partner, partner one or two will change. And it's always the same ones who change partner. So let's say the teacher said all the number ones are going to change. And my name is Liam. I'm one of the number ones. So then I always have to change. And Alice will never change. She will always stay where she is. So I now go to the next group. And I am now talking to a new person, let's say it's called Jacinta. And I'm talking to her. And the first question I say is where were you? And she'll point and show where she was. And then I'll point and say where I was. And if I was four sentences ahead of Jacinta, I must go back up to where Jacinta was. So you always start to the highest point. And essentially what that does is level out the group. Every time you change, if you're gone to a reading group, it's a bit slower a bit further behind. Well, you're repeating three or four sentences while other people are catching up. And it means that if you do enough of these changes, everyone will finish almost at exactly the same time. And if they don't, I just get them to invent some questions from the story as they're waiting. It's usually about 30 seconds to a minute if you've done enough changes. Works really well, volleyball reading. Okay, the next one I've talked about before. Number five is reading to parents and translate. Quite simple. They take home the class story and they read it sentence by sentence and they translate each sentence individually. And the parents write a little comment at the bottom or whoever the adult is in the house. Students love this. Parents love this. And you'll often get these amazing comments from the parents going, wow, I can't believe that they can read this entire story and translate it. Remember, don't tell anyone. It's because it's a story. They can follow it. You've done this class story. You've co-created it. So they know the story, but they're reading it out and they've this great sense of competence from it. The next one is the reading diary. The reading diary is when students are reading a novel or a text. Usually it's with novels or with sometimes with articles for the more advanced students. And what they do is they read it and you say I wanted to do an entry in your reading diary based on chapter five or based on this article or based on this text. And they must pick out any sentence they want and reflect on it, why they chose it. So they write the sentence at the top. They're copy it. It can't be too long. You know, I always say about eight to ten words, something like that. They copy it in one color and in a different color underneath, they reflect and they say why they chose it. So I chose this sentence because I also used to have a pet giraffe when I was young and we used to go around together and I was also fascinated by how long it's neck was or maybe that they're reflecting on a grammar point or something they've never seen before. I chose this because I've never actually seen this structure before. It's up to them and I always say you can write as much or as little as you want. It's a private individual conversation between me and you in the form of writing and reading. So you're reading and you're writing your reflection. I read your reflection and I'm going to write you a comment. Now, of course, if you're doing this across your class, you'll have hundreds of kids and hundreds of reading diaries. I only take up four out of every class and I'll look at them and I'll quickly write my comment and it's usually, oh, really, it's really interesting. I never knew that you also used to go to school in Ghana. That's really cool. What was it like living there? Simple as that. And you're just starting to get to know the students. You're starting to build a relationship and they have to answer your question in written form before they do their next one. The key is you don't correct any mistakes, none, no matter how hard that is. It's just a conversation. I've talked about this reading diary before, so it's really, really worthwhile doing a highly recommended. You'll see a massive boost in the reading and writing level of your students. And then the next time I'll take up a different forer and so on. So you may not see one student's reading diary for a number of weeks and you might have four entries to read when you take it up. That's okay. And we don't do it every single week. It's now and again. The next one is number seven, which is reading with the laser and making new sentences. This is quite simple. Again, this is based from your co-created story or your invisible character or the content you're doing. Usually it's to do with the story though. And you will have on your PowerPoint or on your presentation a paragraph from that story. And all you do is you use a laser and they have to read every word as you point to it, but they can they can't get carried away and go ahead. So you might point and what you're trying to do is use the laser to make new sentences. So their first sentence might say there was a boy. He used to live in Nairobi, but now he's moved to Spain and he has a pet dolphin, right? That's the beginning of your story. Well, then you might say there was a and then you move the laser to the word dolphin and they'll go there was a dolphin. And he was his name was Nairobi, for example. So you're moving things around to make new sentences and it's to show them that when we read we can change word order to make completely new things and it's short. I usually do it as a recap and they enjoy it. The next one, number eight is reading and underlining essentially now that sounds really basic, right? But this is a good strategy. You give them a text and we were just doing about New Year's Eve. And I gave my year 11s this text and it's quite difficult actually. And I just said to them underline everything you understand and they all looked at me and went what? Like everything. And I was like, yeah, and they were like, well, we'll be underlining almost the whole thing. And I was like, yeah, that's good. That's fine. So they underline everything you understand. And this is to show them confidence that they're getting a huge amount. And then there may be six or seven words they don't know and we go back and get it. An extension then to this is with the same text they have to invent questions that have no answer in the text. So why is his name? Nairobi. Why did he get that name? Where did that come from? Another extension to this same text would then be highlighting one key phrase. And I always say it can only be eight words long and it can be two phrases the crossover or it can be one phrase or a part of it. But only eight words and they almost be in a row. And you have to tell me that why you highlighted that as for you being the most important eight words in a row in the whole text. Maybe it sums it up. Maybe it gives you some key detail, but that is another one that works really well. We're nearly there. Number eight. Readers theater. So readers theater. Have I got the numbers wrong? Oh, I think I have. Well, I think I'm on it. Maybe I'm on nine. Anyway, I'm not a maths teacher. I'm a language teacher. I got myself confused. Anyway, readers theater is essentially you reading stuff out and then acting it. I often like to put in things which are called emotional reading with it. And this is another one. Number nine. So emotional reading is you read the same text, but then you you just kind of pick out an adjective like stressed out or you might pick out a word like climate crisis or you might pick out a word like test tomorrow. And they have to now act out the same test, but with that in mind, or happy or sad or anxious, whatever. And it's so funny. And again, what students do use for this? You're extroverted students, but you can have some of your more timid students. The ones who are good at reading reading out the text, but they have to act it out in a way that is anxious or sad. Or they have to read it out in a way that is anxious or happy or sad or test tomorrow or the climate crisis or whatever it may be. And it can be really, really good fun. And then the last one, which is number 11, but let's just say I got my numbers right. Okay. The next one is boys and girls reading quite simple. Now, of course, you need to be careful and sensitive about this. If you have students in your class, who are battling a little bit with the right entity or who maybe don't define as a girl or boy, you need to be careful with that and think about it. But up until now, it's usually worked quite well, but you could do it in a different stuff. Students whose names begin with eight M and then the ones with N to Z something like that. And they will all read one part and the other person will read another. So it means you have like 15 students all reading the part of John and then your 15 students all reading the part of Markle, whatever or narrating and they enjoy that and it's fun as well. So that was 11 strategies, I think. I'm pretty sure it was looking at my notes here. Yes, thank you so much for joining me all. I love doing this podcast. I love hearing your comments. I love chatting to every week. And I'm just so glad that so many of you are tuning in as well. Next week, we have a great episode coming up, which is essentially frequently asked questions about teaching languages through storytelling. After I did the episodes on TPRS, I got a lot of questions, which is wonderful. It's hard to get back to the model. I promise I will try my best, but it can be tough. And I just decided I'm going to do an episode, there's so many of these questions are often very similar. So next week is going to be a whole episode on the most common questions about teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling. Finally, a huge thank you to all those patrons. And if you do feel like supporting the podcast, that would be wonderful. Head on over to the Patreon page, look for the motivated classroom. If you want to buy me a coffee or a nice bag of crisps once a month, I'd really appreciate it. If not, no problem whatsoever. If you're not in a position to do that, keep listening, keep sharing, keep telling your friends. As always, we need to finish with that Irish word for today, which was nice and simple. It was Madhara, meaning dog. Thank you for listening to the motivated classroom Guru Mahagat Aga Sloanawaiya. The motivated classroom podcast is an original production by Liam printer. I'm at Liam printer on Twitter and my YouTube channel is Liam printer the motivated classroom. Full podcast notes with links to resources are available on my website, Liam printer.com. For more, find and follow the motivated classroom podcast on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Graphics and music are provided by Paul Mahan. Intro clips are thanks to the wonderful multilingual staff at the International School of Lozanne. [Music]