Elena Tonus
You know what a kaleidoscope is, right? It’s an optical tool that creates loads of symmetrical patterns using glass fragments. What makes it special is that it shows different patterns every time, so whoever looks through it can see constantly new structures, like an endless journey.
Cideb and Black Cat graded readers, which are made up of stories, do exactly this: they let you imagine plots, structures and twists that make each single story a whole world waiting to be discovered. Just like looking through a kaleidoscope.
The story that makes the language easier
The graded readers stories at every level guide the reader through the plot, character development, descriptions and dialogues to imagine what happens from one page to the next. And while this is happening, the foreign language you’re learning – which normally requires memorizing structures and vocabulary – gets acquired as knowledge and skill with less effort, because the story works as a sort of diversion and pushes the hard work aside thanks to the pleasure of moving through the pages and following the events as they unfold.
Obviously every language you learn has plenty of difficulties, no matter what level you’re at. The vocabulary gets more complex, the linguistic and grammatical structures get more intense and show variations that are often tricky to understand and even trickier to put into practice.
And this is where the kaleidoscope structure of graded readers comes to the rescue through aids that connect directly – again – to the pleasure of getting caught up in a story.
Looking, feeling, singing and learning
The book isn’t enough for your students? We can get help from videos: it’s a good way to change the structures of what a story offers us once more. Let’s take a classic of children’s literature: The Secret Garden. The story deals with important themes like family – or its absence –, friendship, differences between social classes and young people’s ability to look beyond and become friends. Let’s consider a B1.1 level, medium difficulty, with partly new vocabulary. During reading, watch a video with your students connected to the story and see what happens. In the video a voice and a person explain the vocabulary, highlight how and where to use words and sentences, where to place an adjective or a verb, and they do it by animating the words themselves, suggesting words to complete, explaining part of the story or the characters‘ roles, triggering the reader’s intuition to imagine what follows. This acquisition brings your students back to the story itself even more quickly, because seeing words take on a life of their own is fun and memory holds onto what it enjoys. So going back to the book then becomes more interesting, a less difficult challenge to win.
Let’s try another fragment of our kaleidoscope: singing, becoming protagonists of the story itself. Let’s use a rap video that summarizes the story you’re reading, for example The Call of the Wild, and let students learn out loud, entering the story by singing the guided verses, finding the rhythm, getting familiar with the words, „becoming“ the words and naturally finding the way to remember the plot, the characters, the events and above all learning the deep meaning of the story and remembering it.
Talking with characters and guiding them: rewriting the story from another point of view
But that’s not all: one of the aspects that most sparks readers‘ imagination and prepares them to tell the story from different perspectives is the characters. Each of them has their own role from the beginning to the end of the story; if it’s a coming-of-age novel, like for example David Copperfield or Jane Eyre, they evolve and their story is incredibly rich with events and reflections. A class or individual activity on how their character could have evolved if at some point in the story they’d taken different paths is a way to develop critical thinking, go deeper into the narrative and write creatively to offer your own vision of the story, but at the same time it’s a way to train the student-reader to reflect on how their way of restructuring characters and events is guiding them to understand themselves in their own growth and so once again how a story has created a new world and brought out a way of feeling and perceiving reality, the present and has definitely opened a door to the future too.
Every story has many facets within it, many fragments that allow it to become a real experience every time, one that doesn’t stop at the first reading but gets richer and richer with elements that make it an important part of each student’s academic, human and ethical growth journey.
This experience is what Cideb and Black Cat graded readers offer to teachers and students at every level. It’s the mission of loving stories and learn from them.
