QUESTION:  How can I encourage my learners to read English outside of class and how can I ‘check’ that they do read?

ANSWER:  There are two major language learning strategies, which we definitely want our learners to develop:  extensive reading and notetaking.  For both strategies to develop into continuous practices and  habits, our learners must do them outside of class.

Teachers need to provide learners with a purpose, in order to motivate them to do extensive reading and notetaking.  To get learners to read outside their required course material, teachers can create a pretext for ‘sharing what I’ve learned’. 

Here we’d like to suggest that you initiate Sharing What I’ve Learned sessions with your pre-intermediate to advanced teenage learners.  During these sessions, aside from developing their extensive reading and note taking skills, they will have increased opportunities for interacting in spoken English with their peers.

Sharing What I’ve Learned Sessions:

WHAT ARE THEY? These sessions allow for learners to present orally to their classmates descriptions, narrations and discussions of places, events, persons and topics of interest to them.

WHEN? HOW OFTEN DO THEY TAKE PLACE? Each weekly session and for sound time management, the teacher can choose one group of 3-5 learners to share with the rest of the class some interesting facts they  have learned.  The class groups will take turns at presenting during the sessions.  For example, the first group will conduct the session on the second Friday of March. The other three groups will take their turns in the consecutive weeks and Group One’s turn will come up again right after Easter.  The group’s presentation can be as brief as 3 minutes, followed by question-and-answer, peer-led discussion.  Therefore, only 10-12 minutes of class time is needed per week. 

The idea is a flexible one, so the Sharing What I Learned sessions can be held at the beginning or the end of a class session, once a week, once a fortnight or once a month as teachers and learners deem appropriate.

HOW?  Teacher monitors as her learners ‘teach’ each other or inform each other of topics which interest them…and their peers.  The sharing can be casual and informal, but we encourage teachers to ask the group presenting to do so from the teacher’s desk and/or the Board (white, black or IWB!)

TEACHERS’ DUTIES:  To ensure the success of the Sharing What I Learned sessions, plan to give marks as you might for homework assignments.  For these marks employ assessment criteria, such as: sources cited, attractive presentation of material, evident cooperation among group members, etc.

Encourage each group to choose the topic they will share with the others.  You can first select 5 topics based on what you know your learners’ interests to be.  Then, ask that the groups choose one of the topics from your suggested ones. This is only in the case that they cannot think of one on their own.

Guide the learners on sources to search through:  guided readers, websites, magazines, newspapers., blogs.

Suggest a format for structuring presentations:  a blog, glog, powerpoint, short video, mp4 recordings, a poster. 

Another stepping stone to success is to prepare a graphic for note taking.   Look at the example below for the topic  “Animals in Danger”

Suzanne Antonaros - Lilika Couri