Hello colleagues, We are hearing a lot about the importance of including nonfiction in our teaching. Teaching language through meaningful nonfiction content is both motivating and effective. I'm wondering what sources you are drawing upon for interesting nonfiction, especially for lower level learners.
Thanks for sharing some useful resources!
Cheers, Susan Finn Miller
Moderator, AELL CoP
Comments
Susan and others,
There are several good, mostly free, nonfiction resources for lower level adult readers included in the Literacy List. (Scroll down to Easy Reading for Adult Learners) .
For example:
California Distance Learning Project
CNN Learning Resources
Center for the Study of Adult Literacy's free online library for adult learners (Choose Library) The Center for the Study of Adult Literacy (CSAL) offers a great free library of adult literacy readings. The readings have three levels: Easier, Medium and Harder, and include these topics:health; food; babies; children ages 2-12; teenagers; families; advice; non-fiction (real life) stories; fiction (made-up stories); jobs and work; money; history; science; and other.
Newsela
Simple English Wikipedia Wikipedias are places where many people are working together to make encyclopedias in many languages. Writers use simple English words and simple writing structures. There are over 6,000 pages in the Simple English Wikipedia. All of the pages are free to use.
The Times in Plain English A newspaper written in plain English for adult new readers. Adapted stories come, for example, from: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Arizona Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Daily News, and The Toronto Globe and Mail. This newspaper is not affiliated with The New York Times.
David J. Rosen
djrosen123@gmail.com
I've decided to start "teaching" community flyers/brochures more often. This authentic material can fit into the REEP lifeskills curriculum. For example, I've identify a reading objective for tomorrow's lesson with students learning how to read a brochure and specifically read the public library's schedule and description of the technology classes offered in Sept/Oct. The offerings are super valuable to the students but the text is quite dense. We'll break down the sections of the brochure and read it jigsaw style. It's definitely too difficult for beginners but I think my intermediates can meet the objective if I group the students carefully with each group having a strong and more advanced leader. Hopefully, we can make the brochure more accessible to this group.
Using brochures in the classroom is a great idea. In addition to the ideas listed, what do you think about previewing the brochure by having the students predict what they will read about based on the images selected. Additionally, you could discuss the order of content - what does the company or organziation who produced the brochure really want you to know and how does the placement of content in the brochure tell you the organizations priorities? These could produce very interesting discussions among students as they prepare to study the brochure.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Kathy, I completely forgot to incorporate all the pre-reading activities into this lesson plan. It happens to the best of us. This particular brochure doesn't have any pictures but definitely predicting what the brochure will be about - based upon the title of the brochure - is doable. Predicting based on images is an excellent idea. I like to go back after completing the jigsaw to review the predictions. I've added a Kahoot! quiz to this lesson as an informal assessment and opportunity to review key content when incorrect answers come about. Kahoot! has added a group feature that allows students to work in teams to complete the quiz. It's just another opportunity for collaborative learning and communicative teaching. .
Hello Ellen, Kathy and all, Great idea to teach reading with authentic brochures related to students' interests and needs. Free technology classes are surely a valuable opportunity for learners. Like you, Ellen, I appreciate Kathy's reminder about the value of pre reading. When students predict before reading, they read with a clear purpose. In addition, using a jigsaw technique should work well for this lesson.
In case some readers are not familiar with jigsaw, this is when we divide a reading into meaningful chunks and assign students to become "experts" on their chunk. They usually work in a small group to plan how to present their section to other classmates. The Read,Write,Think website has an explanation of the steps for expert jigsaw.
Ellen, can you tell us a few more details about how you plan to structure the jigsaw sharing part of the lesson?