Texts for an Early Learner of English

[frozen_fields]

Hi everyone,

I'm going to be tutoring a 12-year-old kid in English and I'm looking for some texts that might be suitable for that. The texts would need to be fun, memorable, creative, and preferably short. This book is a nice example of a creative approach, though it's not really for reading and it's certainly not for kids. This one is an even

Comments

[shanrina]

Maybe the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series or Goosebumps books? Also, they're not short, but the Harry Potter series could be fun if you went chapter by chapter, although they're a little heavy on the wordplay.

What's his native language? You could also look for English translations of folktales/children's books/whatever that he might have already read and enjoyed in his native language and do a comparison.

[frozen_fields]

His native language is French and yes, I've asked his dad to find out what his favorite books are.

The books you've suggested sound good though, TY!

[oh_meow]

Asterix or Tintin maybe? The UK English translation of Asterix is pretty great.

[ihcoyc]

Comic books in general - at least the classic ones, contemporary versions can be rather dark and gory - are a solid choice. Comic book style prose is fairly rich in vocabulary, because the pictures help with unfamiliar words.

[shizuku_san]

You could try Encyclopedia Brown stories. Encyclopedia is the kid's nickname and each short chapter is one "case" that he solves. You are supposed to be able to solve the cases on your own based on the information from the chapter, and then you can turn to the back of the book to see if you were right.

[orange_fell]

This might just be me, but if I were 12 years old and working my way through a homework assignment in a foreign language, only to find the first sentence is something like "Imagine peeling an apple in your mind," I would be frustrated and even angry that I had put so much effort into decoding something that seems essentially meaningless. I know it's NOT meaningless, but what I'm saying is that there's a reason language textbooks usually put a great emphasis on vocabulary about fun and relatable situations.

I think the other commenter had a great idea in the Goosebumps series: their reading level is probably somewhat below where this boy is in French, but that's great for your purposes. Selections from Harry Potter or Percy Jackson are also good, and short biographies of interesting people, like actors, singers, and sports players.

[whatifoundthere]

I have to agree with this comment. I work with ESL adults and they have an immense amount of difficulty with things that are not "real" -- not because they have no imagination or traditions in their native languages of dream or fantasy, of course, but rather because their English reading is so weak that they assume that they misunderstood an idiom or missed the secondary meaning of a word they should know. Ask me sometime about the time I had to explain the title of 1984 to a recent immigrant. "Okay, so it was the future for the author, but he lived in the past in real life, but then the year passed also for us so the title sounds like the past but he's imagining a future that never happened but COULD have happened for HIM..." It was like 20 minutes of total frustration for everybody, and this was before we even started reading the book.

That said, the books you linked look delightful and I might pick them up for myself!

[la_dy_ashley]

I don't think Harry Potter or any original kids literature will work. You might want to try graded readers ("macmillan literature collection", for example). You'll just need to figure out what his level is, from Beginner to Upper-Intermediate. The macmillan series features great assignments for learners, and there's a variety of books to choose from. The pre and post reading tasks consist of vocabulary work and grammar exercises, as well as discussion questions.

[lareinemisere]

If he likes gaming, Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I remember enjoying as a kid, or similar gamebooks might be worth a try and should have some practical vocabulary. (I can't link from here, but Wikipedia has an entry explaining them and how they work, and an Amazon search shows that the brand still exists).