It is much easier to understand a word if you have a reason to. The advantage of the second method-teaching vocab mid-text-is that context is already established, so your students can engage much more actively with new vocabulary and you can use their extensive reading skills to elicit the meanings of words. I like to give the students the meaning (written and spoken) and use several visual aids to get the meaning and context across. In the first method, I will introduce the lesson and the themes, and then study the new vocabulary. Either I pre-teach the new vocab before reading the story, or we pause mid-text to address any words that the students don’t know or are struggling with. When I am teaching new words to my students using stories, I use one of two methods. When you are reading a new story it is very likely that your students will be coming up against new vocab. I like to let my students draw their stories as they write them. For higher level students, give them more scope for creativity. This can be a cloze activity in which they fill in the gaps (animals and adjectives in this case). Give a structure for lower level students.
The most simple method is to introduce a new topic by reading a short story. There are many ways to use funny short stories in lesson plans.
(Download) How to Incorporate Funny Short Stories into Your ESL Lesson Plans
This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬlick here to get a copy. These are the stories your students will remember, and these are the stories your students will love to learn about. Some of the best short stories are the ones that make you laugh.
The vast quantity of available stories covers a huge range of content, characters, plots and dialogue-containing anything and everything you could possibly need to teach in almost any language lesson. If that’s not enough, this tool is authentic and hilarious too.
There is a slick teaching tool which can be used as a filler, a full lesson or an introduction to a new topic. FebruLaugh Away: 6 Ridiculously Funny Short Stories for Memorable ESL Lessons