It’s all about THEM: Exploiting learners’ stories for adult ESOL beginners’ literacy development

Abstract or Summary

Regarding literacy development for lower level adult ESOL learners, finding the right teaching materials could be a challenge due to learners’ diverse cultural, educational, and personal backgrounds. Then, why shall we bother searching? Why don’t we, together with our learners, create our own resources, of them and for them? In this presentation, I will report on my experience of teaching English reading and writing to groups of adult beginners using their personal stories. All the learners are domestic students of migrants background, many refugees and some having received no formal education at all. The approach we employed is speaking and writing ‘out’ learners’ stories for them to read and further write about. It adopts the following procedure: Starting with a real life situation related to one or most learners, talking with learners and co-constructing a story about it, teacher drafting up the story as well as creating quick follow-up exercises, learners reading the story and doing the exercises (individually and collaboratively, silently and verbally), and finally learners following the pattern and writing up their own stories. I have been using this approach, with modifications based on reflection, for three circles with a hundred students or so, and have found it effective, desirable and feasible; and feedback from students has been much positive and encouraging.