Once a month, I plan to share a reading unit some of  which you can print out and share with your students.  I’ll also be making some available on a different site where you can preview and download them.

The Features of these units

• High-interest articles at the intermediate level that usually include references to some research study that students can relate to.
• The information is often counter-intuitive. Students gain some new insights from them.
• Study guides involve a variety of comprehension questions and scaffolding paraphrasing ones and vocabulary exercises.
• Each unit includes at least one “Reflection” exercise in which students write:

• Other uses of the articles:
  as a prompt for discussions.
  as a prompt for writings.

The Reasons Why these Units are Not Being Sold as a Book.*

Requiring students to buy textbooks can be stressful for teachers, especially if we only want to use part of the book.  We are faced with a dilemma: require students to buy textbooks that might be used minimally, or illegally photocopy from a textbook.  Thus, I’m offering these free to give others the flexibility that I have to use them completely or partially.

How I’ve used these readings:

• I’ve used all of them (along with study guides) in reading-skills courses.
• I’ve also used some of the articles (without the study guides or with brief study guides) as stimuli for discussions in speaking-skills courses and …
• as prompts for essays in writing-skills courses.

I couldn’t justify making the students in the speaking-skills and writing-skills courses buy complete textbooks since they weren’t going to use the study guides and weren’t going to read all the articles.

The first unit is:  Reading Unit. Reading for Insights: “Does Social Media Make People Sadder?”

See Categories: Reading Units for links to all the Reading Units.

David Kehe

*About the free-download materials. During my 40 years of teaching ESL, I have had many colleagues who were very generous with their time, advice and materials. These downloads are my way of paying it forward.