I found an effective way to engage students in reading is for the teacher to write about them and their classmates. In my Literacy/CLB 1 class, I wrote about 9 to 10 sentences about each student essentially a paragraph. The day before and the day prior to that, we had discussions about what they do on the weekend. From there I created a handout with all the possible things they could do on the weekend, accompanied by pictures.
Another day we had conversation circles with topics such as, “Where are you from?” “What language do you speak?” “What job did you have in your country?” “How do you get to school?” “Do you have brothers, sisters, or children?” “How long have you been in Canada?” They each took turns answering the questions, so by the end of the two days they knew each other pretty well. The next day, I took that information and created stories about each of them. The stories had all the same grammar, such as “My name is…” “I am from…” “I speak…” “I have been in Canada for…” “I have…” “On the weekends…” “I…” etc.
Each student proceeded to read aloud each paragraph about their classmate. They loved it! Not only were they learning common grammatical structures and phrases, but they were also reading about a peer — someone they were already familiar with. In addition, it was flattering to the person the paragraph was about. I assume everyone likes to hear about themselves. The feedback from the class was, “Teacher, I like this,” and I saw smiles, or maybe smirks when they realized these paragraphs were about each of them. I just thought this might be a creative way to approach a lesson, as opposed to photocopying a random paragraph from a book about a person they don’t know.
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