Comparing opinions about reading

After reading my classmates’ blogs, I have seen that the situations we encountered were quite similar.

To begin with, we apparently started reading in English pretty late and it wasn’t a very pleasant activity for any of us.

Lorena mentioned that, as me, she couldn’t choose the books to read and that most of the time she didn’t like the books chosen by the teacher because she found them uninteresting. Similarly, Beatriz found these compulsory readings rather long and boring and, besides, she needed to turn to the dictionary pretty often in order to check the meaning of many unknown words to be able to do the typical summarizing tasks that every school asked the students.

These tasks are not motivating for the students and the challenge of new vocabulary can become really frustrating too. In contrast to these exercises, Beatriz explains how well storytelling works for her daughter and how much she loves it.

As a teacher, I use storytelling every day and I have been able to see that kids love it because the stories are adapted to their age and deal with situations they can feel identified with. Both Lorena and Beatriz have used this methodology in their teaching too and I believe we can all say that, by means of repetition and visual aids, kids rapidly integrate new vocabulary and basic structures in their foreign language knowledge.