Have I got a story for you…and a favor, a big one

(There is now a page on this blog dedicated to this project.  It even has a name, “Your Voice: short stories by teachers for learners.”  Thanks for the feedback and helping push things to the next level.)


I wrote my first story for English language learners in March of this year.  I had about 30 minutes of time to kill before my day ended and was complaining about the lack of suitable short fiction for my English classes.  I’ve been using literature in my classes for a while now, but I wanted something different.  I was looking for a story of under 500 words, something that my students and I could work through in one class, and after some meaning based exercises, that would still have a good chunk of text, maybe 50 words of so, which we could work with in-depth.  I had searched through some flash fiction collections sitting on my bookshelf, but none of the stories was quite right.  The problem with really short fiction is that most of them work by drawing on a reader’s knowledge of fiction itself.  Flash fiction works because it is often written to a reader’s expectations, and the target audience is usually people who read and love literary fiction.  The vocabulary is dense and filled with low frequency words.  The themes can be highly abstract one side or incredibly specific on the other.  The amount of time it would take to explain the background information to make the stories accessible to my students made them unusable in the classroom. 

As I was wasting the last 15 minutes of my day complaining, Michael Griffin of ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections fame, suggested I write my own.  So I did.  I knew I wanted students to get a bit more practice using, “there is…” and “there are…” as well as exposure to the simple past tense.  I sat down and a few hours later (15 minutes was way passed at this point) I wrote, “How to Float.”  But I wasn’t finished yet.  I ran the story through Joyce Maeda’s Vocabulary Frequency Checker and swapped out lower frequency words for higher frequency words until I thought, at least vocabulary-wise, my students would be able to understand about 98% of the story.  Then I checked the story’s Flesch-Kincaid grade level and Flesch-Kinkaid reading ease score.  You can do this in Microsoft Word, but there are also a number of sites which provide a similar service.  Some, like this one at Online-Utility.org even provides suggestions for improving the readability score of the text.

When I used the story in class, I was pleasantly surprised that students were not reaching for their dictionaries.  Instead, they simply read the story from start to finish.  And instead of the usual comprehension questions, I was able to ask the kind of questions I had always wanted to ask in my English class.  Questions like, “Why do you think this character felt this way?” and “How did the story make you feel?” and “Does the town in the story remind you of your own town?”  I wasn’t checking to see if students understood the story, rather I was exploring with my students how they had understood the story.

Lately, some of the members of my PLN have been writing short stories for English Language Learners.  Josette LeBlanc at Throwing Back Tokens has a short story about matchmaking and Michael Griffin has put posted one about summer love at ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections.  Their stories, like mine, were written to meet the needs of a particular group of learners.  And each of their stories provides a window into a particular learning situation, a particular teaching style, and even an underlying belief on how language might work.  When I read Josette’s story, I realize how fiction could be used to help train teachers on various ways to explore and teach vocabulary in the classroom.  When I read Mike’s story, I see that fiction can be used as a tool of personalization and the main driver in a conversation based class.  But I think that both stories could be used in a wide variety of classroom. 

Which got me thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to put together a collection of short stories for language learners.  I’m not talking about literature with a capital “L”.  I’m talking about short stories of under 500 words with a beginning, middle and end, that meet the needs of our particular students.  And along with each story, a detailed description of who the story was written for and how it will be used.  The collection of stories could be used as is by any teacher who was looking for fiction better suited to the language classroom.  But it could also be used as a kind of how-to book on writing stories for ELLs.  And, it would be filled with activities which could be used with any stories a teacher might want to use in their class. 

So here is the favor I want to ask: would you write a short story for your learners and let it be part of my dream.  Because that’s what I realized this is.  This is my dream.  I love a good story and love to share it even more.  Mike and Josette’s stories have convinced me that there’s a bunch of teachers out there who feel the same way I do.  And if we could get all those stories together in one place and share them with our students, we would might find that our students feel the same way as well.  You can send the story to me by email kevchanwow[at]gmail.com.  Eventually, we will have a book, a book of stories by teachers for all kinds of learners.  And at the start of class, we would be able to start our lessons with the kind of smile that comes from being able to say, “Hey, have I got a story for you…”