The Gift of the Magi for ESL students?
An ESL reading, writing, and speaking lesson using this popular short story by O’Henry?
I recently wrote a blog post about different winter activities you can do in your ESL classroom. Many of them included watching, writing, and creating.
In this blog post, I will show you how you can teach an ESL reading lesson to mixed level and proficiency classes. And you can do it with the help of the short story Gift of the Magi by O’Henry.
Why short stories for ESL students?
Short stories are a wonderful way to teach reading to ESL students. Besides being, well, short, they provide the anchor and the context for teaching vocabulary, grammar, and writing. In addition, short stories help ESL students practice speaking.
There are several authors that are a popular choice for middle and high school students and are frequently utilized in language arts classes.
For example, The Ransom of the Red Chief by O’Henry, Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl, All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury, and Charles by Shirley Jackson, to name just a few.
And since this blog post is published during the winter and around the holidays, The Gift of the Magi is a popular choice of reading for ESL students as well.
The challenges of teaching short stories to ESL students
When read in their original format and used for lessons geared towards native English speakers, short stories may lose their appeal and miss the mark with the ESL students.
As we know, to understand a story, one must understand and know at least 98% of the words in it.
That is a tall order for most English learners! Especially those who are only starting to learn English in middle and high school.
So what do we do?
We scaffold and make the story accessible to the students. And that is exactly what you find inside The Gift of the Magi lesson for ESL students.
- For ESL beginners, using frames of the story with pictures and words, is really helpful.
- For low intermediates, simpler sentences directly from the story will allow access to the text.
- Supplementing the reading with a video (if there is one available) is another great way to bring the short story and its life lesson to your students.
The Gift of the Magi ESL lesson
As I already mentioned, The Gift of the Magi is one of the most popular stories by O’Henry. The author’s stories in general are known for their unexpected endings and twists. And this one is no exception.
In addition, O’Henry’s own life was pretty interesting, which makes it even more captivating for the young minds.
The Gift of the Magi ESL lesson was created with ESL students in a mixed level classroom in mind. It can also be easily adapted to one level – either the ESL beginners or intermediate level students.
The Gift of the Magi ESL lesson covers all 4 language domains!
First, the students get ample opportunities to speak.
The questions that are presented in the warm-up and practice/extension section of the lesson allow for great variations.
For example:
- If you are teaching students in person, they can talk to a partner;
- If you are teaching students online and have a bigger group, you can create break-out rooms for 3-4 students and have them discuss their answers for a couple of minutes.
The speaking tasks inside The Gift of the Magi ESL lesson involve not only those English learners who are able to readily retrieve words and form sentences.
It also considers ESL beginners, and provides sentence frames, and word suggestions.
The reading part of The Gift of the Magi ESL lesson can also be adapted to mixed level classes.
Here are several ways you can do it:
- Provide visuals for each section of the reading. Here is an example of the story in pictures.
- Go over the vocabulary that is necessary to understand the story before reading.
- Frontload information about the author, which is always a great way to get the students engaged
- Read in small groups separated by proficiency levels, or read it to all students at the same time. You can check in after each paragraph or so by asking comprehension questions (which are provided inside the Gift of the Magi ESL lesson!)
If the Gift of the Magi is for ESL students, how can we move on to writing? Especially in a mixed level class?
I’m glad you asked. Because I have ideas for this too!
- ESL beginner writing task can be scaffolded using more prep work. For example, they can do a Jamboard activity to collect their ideas, use word banks and sentence frames to answer an open-ended question that they can connect to the story.
- Higher proficiency level students can write a paragraph or two answering the question about the reading.
- In both cases, it would be helpful to provide word banks and sentence stems.
And did I mention speaking?
Since we start The Gift of the Magi ESL lesson with speaking, why not end it with that?
If you are working with your students in person, you could have them deliver their answers to your question right in class.
But how do you teach The Gift of the Magi to ESL students online?
I have found that using Flipgrid or Padlet (yes, it has a voice recording feature. It is especially helpful if the student is not ready for a video) work beautifully.
In any case, it is important to give the students more specific parameters.
For example, what question do you want them to answer about the story? How long should they speak? Should they use any newly learned vocabulary or grammatical structures?
And there you have it.
Simple yet powerful. You can find the copy of the lesson inside my TpT store by clicking right here.
And if you are a teacher who has ESL newcomers in middle and high school, no scripted curriculum, and is tired of trying to piece materials together, take a look and join our membership community The ESL Teaching Roadmap, which was created specifically for teachers like you!
Do you teach reading to your ESL students with short stories? If so, what is your favorite way to do it? Share with us in the comments!