Imagine a classroom where students are actively discovering new vocabulary and grammar through the immersive world of stories. Story-themed lessons captivate, educate and inspire—transforming English language learning from abstract concepts and boring worksheets into the gateway to new adventures. What’s more, they inspire students to explore their own creativity, coming up with their own stories and developing narrative writing skills.
Why Short Stories Are So Effective for Teaching English
Research shows that incorporating short stories into English lessons helps improve all English skills, particularly vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension.1 By presenting language in context, short stories make learning more engaging and enjoyable.2 Children feel motivated to develop reading comprehension and discussion skills in order to better engage with the story.
Short stories also serve as a great way to develop cultural awareness and teach moral values, helping learners analyse texts on a deeper level and expand their horizons.3 Additionally, stories can be easily linked to other activities and creative projects for wider learning.
Whether you’re teaching beginners or advanced learners, stories are a versatile and engaging way to boost language skills and enrich your ESL lessons, making learning more fun and effective!
Ready to unlock this dynamic approach to ESL teaching? Let’s learn about guided reading lesson activities and explore how Abridge Academy’s new story-themed lessons can revolutionise your lessons to bring language learning to life!
Pre-Reading Activities
Before starting a short story, teachers can engage students in a variety of warm-up activities to activate their prior knowledge and review vocabulary / grammar. These activities help students feel more confident, setting the stage for a successful reading experience. Here are a few ideas:
- Ask questions to elicit existing knowledge / understanding.
- Use flashcards and images to review keywords visually.
- Brainstorm in small groups what students think new words might mean, along with synonyms or antonyms.
It is often best to keep pre-reading tasks relatively short – just to introduce key concepts and assess existing skills, which will then be mastered more fully in later stages of the lesson.
Activities to do While Reading
After the warm-up, it’s time to jump into reading the story! Don’t just read straight through while students passively listen though… Here are some ideas of how to keep your students engaged in developing their English skills throughout guided reading activities:
- Ask high-quality questions such as comprehension checking, predictive, inferential, language, and personal connection questions throughout.
- Use questions to prompt students to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words or grammatical structures in the text.
- Encourage students to act out facial expressions and actions to immerse them in the story and develop comprehension skills.
- Use choral reading strategies, in which the whole class chants key phrases commonly repeated throughout the text (e.g. “knock, knock, can I come in?” in The Three Little Pigs), thus reinforcing language chunks and grammar.
Post-Reading Activities
After completing the story, use this as an opportunity to reinforce key English language learning objectives. Possible activities include:
- Ask overview questions about the storyline, characters and morals.
- Complete gap-fill exercises, sentence-sort activities, or multiple-choice quizzes to practice new vocabulary and grammar.
- Ask students to find examples of specific grammar usage in the text, identify patterns, and create their own questions for the class.
- Encourage students to summarise the story in their own words, supported by comic strip drawing tasks or scene sorting activities.
Struggling to think of activities that link stories directly to language learning? Check out Abridge Academy’s pre-made story-based lessons – designed specifically for ESL learners, with interactive activities built-in.
Follow-Up Activities
The lesson doesn’t have to end there! Support students developing wider language skills in more open-ended or creative contexts through activities such as:
- Role-plays acting out the story or pretending to interview the characters for a TV show / police inquiry.
- Creative writing tasks where students write their own stories inspired by the text, or re-imagine the story with a different ending or unexpected twist.
- Non-fiction writing tasks such as writing a book review or newspaper report about the events of the story.
- Artistic projects, including making posters promoting the book, drawing the characters, or origami activities.
- Presentations in which students must campaign for a key change or promote an important moral from the story.
Top Tips for Incorporating Stories into your ESL Lessons
Having reviewed the stages of a typical guided reading lesson, let’s consider some wider tips for using stories in your English classes:
- Choose stories appropriate to your students in terms of their length, difficulty, and themes.
- Link stories directly to language learning objectives, thus consolidating and extending their progress.
- Combine stories with a variety of different activities to practice using English in different contexts and maintain students’ interest.
- Be consistent, making stories a regular part of your curriculum plan.
- Follow-up guided reading focused lessons with creative writing or storytelling lessons, thus further extending learning.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel! Use Abridge Academy’s pre-made story-themed lessons to take all the stress out of lesson planning.
Save Time and Teach More Effective Guided Reading Lessons
Do your students love reading cute stories and having fun in class, but you’re struggling to find suitable books for their level or link stories to measurable learning outcomes? Maybe you want to stretch their creativity a bit, helping them tell their own stories?
Take the stress out of finding high quality guided reading materials adapted for ESL students with Abridge Academy’s pre-made guided reading lessons! Our ever-expanding library includes everything you need to teach engaging, fun and interactive online ESL classes, including:
📚 Levelled reading lessons based around traditional fairy tales and fables.
📝 Creative and narrative writing lessons to develop storytelling skills.
🎁 100s of printable worksheets, flashcards, certificates and creative projects.
Designed specifically for ESL students, these lessons are fun and engaging, link directly to language learning objectives, and are packed full of interactive activities! They can be used as stand-alone lessons, added in to supplement your core curriculum lessons, or taught as a full guided reading or creative writing course. Get started for free today →
References
- Murdoch, G. (2002). Exploiting well-known short stories for language skills development. IATEFL LCS SIG Newsletter, 23(9–17). ↩︎
- Garvie, E. (1990). Story as vehicle, Clevedon. Multilingual Matters, 59–76. ↩︎
- Pathan, M. M. (2013). The Use of Short-stories in EFL Classroom: Advantages and Implications. Labyrinth: An International Refereed Journal of Postmodern Studies, 4(2). ↩︎