Word Orchestra

There are many, many excellent ways to do some “pre-reading” activities to better prepare EL students for text. Here are two that I used for a story that I wanted to tell for Halloween called “Stingy Jack”. I decide to do an oral telling of the tale, rather than seeking out printed versions, simply because my class is focused on listening and speaking (they take another class that focuses a bit more on reading and writing, although as you can well imagine there is a lot of overlap).

I am also including a word orchestra that my more Academic Language Development Class did with a digital video I created: “Why Study World War One”, just to give a sense of how this technique can be used with any text.

I learned these two techniques at a week-long workshop in NYC with Project LEAD (learning english and drama) which is part of Lincoln Center’s educational programs. https://www.lct.org/explore/education/lead-project/

1. Word Orchestra

2. Story images

3. Retelling through scene creation

I realized as I am writing this I totally forgot to do one of my favorite pre-reading or pre-listening activities “Walk as if….” I’ll add that in a future post with another story.

This posting will focus on word orchestra

Here is the way I do it:

• Divide the text into chunks, either words, phrases or complete sentences. Have as many “chunks” as there are students in your class. See my example below for “Stingy Jack” In another post I will show you examples of using this same technique with a a more advanced text which I used with my Long Term ELs.

• Number each chunk.

• Cut each part into a strip.

• Distribute the strips to the students. This is where you can individualize, giving longer “chunks” to students who are more advanced and shorter ones to students newer to English.

• Have each student read to themselves (I have them walk around while doing this simply to avoid too much sitting). Students can ask you, or other students if you have a class with mixed abilities, what words mean, or how to pronounce them.

• Then have students sit back down and at the same time whisper their phrases (I demonstrate this in video 2). “1, 2, 3 Whisper”. The have them say their phrases in a normal voice (again all at once: “1, 2, 3 go….”. Then I have them shout it out “1, 2, 3, shout” —I cover my ears here.

• Next, you have two choices. In the first video example I had the students sit in order, to make things easier for my newcomers. In the other video example we are in random order. For both work as a “conductor” of an orchestra, pointing to different students randomly, who then say their phrases.

• You can ask here many questions—what do you think the story or article will be about? What do you remember from the word orchestra? What words did you hear that repeat themselves? What was one challenging word you heard?, etc. Many possibilities here depending on your students needs and your own style.

• Then, have them read it in order (that’s why we need numbers), either from where they sit or have them re-arrange themselves so they are sitting in order. (I once had the great idea of seeing if they could figure out the order from the text—as you would imagine it was chaos. Fun, but not the point of the exercise.)

I find this a good pre-reading activity and have used it with mainstream, non-EL students as well. Everyone practices reading and speaking a portion of the text. No one is passive. Everyone interacts with text. In the Stingy Jack example I broke the text into 3 parts—each part was it’s own word orchestra, and after we did each word orchestra I told that part of the story.