Story Book reading Project

I teach at a high school with a small elective English class with some mid level English students. This is a long project I did throughout the winter vacation (so students could practice over the winter break).

1. Students choose their novel and listen to the ALT read aloud an example Story book to them. I choose enough books for the entire class as well as a couple extra for them to have choices that were all around the same level of difficulty. These were chosen from the schools library.
2. Have students read their novels and take notes on parts they don’t understand, and have them ask you or the JTE to clearify.
3. There are two ways to check their reading comprehension: The easier less time consuming option is to have students summarize the books in both English and Japanese. The more difficult way is to have students translate the entire book into Japanese and have them submit that translation.
4. Then have student work on preparing their presentations. I gave students time in class to practice presenting in front of their classmates as well as me and the JTE. This allowed us to give them constructive feedback before the actual presentation.
5. While they were working individually, I had them meet with me one on one to read a small portion of the book for a practice round. During this I was able to give more individual feedback to students and help them better meet my expectations.
6. I then had students present their story book readings to the class.

Advice:
•This works best in a small class size.
•Providing lots of examples and feedback will really help them to better accomplish this project.
•This activity can be really challenging timing wise, so it is best to set firm deadlines and expectations up front so that students know what is expected of them.
•I even provided them with a rubric (though it was only written in English) on what expectations I had for their presentations.