[Mr. E English]

Hi Jeremy,

I don't regularly use readers in class, partly because using a reader can be time consuming and partly because the national group I teach have a very poor reading habit in their L1 and therefore a reluctance to read in English.

But on the occasions when I have utilised a class reader I've always thoroughly enjoyed it, even if the students have been less enthusiastic.

One activity I like to do is to take a passage from the text which contains lots of speech and act it out in class. I assign roles to the students including one as the narrator. We practice together at first by the students shadow reading as they listen to me, then they work on the text alone. Once we're ready we act it out - speech and actions. The students can still read the text (it's not a memory test) but they can not read and speak at the same time - they can look at a sentence, then look up and say it.

I find this activity is good fun, a change of pace and focus, great fluency practice and a good opportunity to work on pronunciation - particularly intonation and stress.