Below The Surface (short fiction for ELLs)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

(Lesson ideas to follow shortly in comments)

Total Words: 563

Words within first 1000 of GSL: 89.05% (not including proper nouns)

Words within second 1000 of GSL: 8.82%

Outside list: 2.13%

Flesch Kincaid Grade Level: 2.99

Flesch Reading Ease: 90.63

Thomas wanted someone to give him a nickname.  He wanted people to call him Tommy or Tom-Tom or Little-T.  But nobody ever did.  Everybody just called him Thomas.  He lived with his mother in three small rooms close to the ocean.  He didn’t know where his father was and his mother never talked about him.  When Thomas felt lonely, he went to the ocean and swam. 

The summer he turned seven, Thomas discovered he could hold his breath for a long time.  He liked to stay down under the waves and count.  By the time he was ten, he could count to two hundred without coming up.  Eventually he stopped counting.  He just took a long breath and swam as deep as he could.  There was coral down at the bottom.  There were blue fish that swam over the rocks like little flashes of lightening.  There was even a lionfish, with long whiskers around its face.  Thomas thought it looked very wise.  Sometimes Thomas asked it questions which had no answers.

While he was swimming, Thomas could hear the waves moving above him.  It was like someone singing a song that changed with the light or the wind.  One day, when Thomas was fifteen years old, he took a deep breath and swam down until his ears began to hurt.  The water got dark and the current felt like a cold wind.  There, at the bottom of the ocean, was a telephone box resting in the sand.  It leaned slightly to the left.  Inside the box was an old phone, the black kind with a round dial.  Thomas picked up the receiver.  Even in the water, it felt heavy in his hand.  He held it to his ear.  There was noise coming from the receiver.  It was an even hum, like an invitation to make a call.  But Thomas had no one he wanted to call.

The day Thomas graduated high school, it was cloudy.  When he got to the beach, it started raining.  The raindrops hit his skin like the tap of small drumsticks.  He took a quick breath and dove down into the water.  He was about to head back up when there was a sound, like a faint bell ringing.  It was a call.  It was a phone call for him.  But the phone box was still far away.  As he swam,  Thomas started counting the rings.  Ten rings.  He kicked faster.  Twenty rings.  He stretched out his arms.  Twenty-five rings.  He pulled himself down.

When Thomas reached the phone, his head was getting light.  He grabbed the receiver and held it up to his ear.  There was a noise, like a cough, from the other side.  But it was too late.  The ocean was a hand wrapped around his chest.  There was nothing left in Thomas' lungs but the ache to breathe.  He let go of the receiver and kicked for the surface.  As he swam up, he thought he heard a man call out, “Tommy, is that you?”  But he wasn’t sure.  And even if someone he knew from long ago called out to him, what could he say?  He was a young man who talked to lionfish.  He listened to the song of the waves.  What he needed was a new language, a language to share the things he had come to know now. 

     

Have I got a story for you…and a favor, a big one

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

(There is now a page on this blog dedicated to this project.  It even has a name, "Your Voice: short stories by teachers for learners."  Thanks for the feedback and helping push things to the next level.)


I wrote my first story for English language learners in March of this year.  I had about 30 minutes of time to kill before my day ended and was complaining about the lack of suitable short fiction for my English classes.  I’ve been using literature in my classes for a while now, but I wanted something different.  I was looking for a story of under 500 words, something that my students and I could work through in one class, and after some meaning based exercises, that would still have a good chunk of text, maybe 50 words of so, which we could work with in-depth.  I had searched through some flash fiction collections sitting on my bookshelf, but none of the stories was quite right.  The problem with really short fiction is that most of them work by drawing on a reader’s knowledge of fiction itself.  Flash fiction works because it is often written to a reader’s expectations, and the target audience is usually people who read and love literary fiction.  The vocabulary is dense and filled with low frequency words.  The themes can be highly abstract one side or incredibly specific on the other.  The amount of time it would take to explain the background information to make the stories accessible to my students made them unusable in the classroom. 

As I was wasting the last 15 minutes of my day complaining, Michael Griffin of ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections fame, suggested I write my own.  So I did.  I knew I wanted students to get a bit more practice using, “there is…” and “there are…” as well as exposure to the simple past tense.  I sat down and a few hours later (15 minutes was way passed at this point) I wrote, “How to Float.”  But I wasn’t finished yet.  I ran the story through Joyce Maeda’s Vocabulary Frequency Checker and swapped out lower frequency words for higher frequency words until I thought, at least vocabulary-wise, my students would be able to understand about 98% of the story.  Then I checked the story’s Flesch-Kincaid grade level and Flesch-Kinkaid reading ease score.  You can do this in Microsoft Word, but there are also a number of sites which provide a similar service.  Some, like this one at Online-Utility.org even provides suggestions for improving the readability score of the text.

When I used the story in class, I was pleasantly surprised that students were not reaching for their dictionaries.  Instead, they simply read the story from start to finish.  And instead of the usual comprehension questions, I was able to ask the kind of questions I had always wanted to ask in my English class.  Questions like, “Why do you think this character felt this way?” and “How did the story make you feel?” and “Does the town in the story remind you of your own town?”  I wasn’t checking to see if students understood the story, rather I was exploring with my students how they had understood the story.

Lately, some of the members of my PLN have been writing short stories for English Language Learners.  Josette LeBlanc at Throwing Back Tokens has a short story about matchmaking and Michael Griffin has put posted one about summer love at ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections.  Their stories, like mine, were written to meet the needs of a particular group of learners.  And each of their stories provides a window into a particular learning situation, a particular teaching style, and even an underlying belief on how language might work.  When I read Josette’s story, I realize how fiction could be used to help train teachers on various ways to explore and teach vocabulary in the classroom.  When I read Mike’s story, I see that fiction can be used as a tool of personalization and the main driver in a conversation based class.  But I think that both stories could be used in a wide variety of classroom. 

Which got me thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to put together a collection of short stories for language learners.  I’m not talking about literature with a capital “L”.  I’m talking about short stories of under 500 words with a beginning, middle and end, that meet the needs of our particular students.  And along with each story, a detailed description of who the story was written for and how it will be used.  The collection of stories could be used as is by any teacher who was looking for fiction better suited to the language classroom.  But it could also be used as a kind of how-to book on writing stories for ELLs.  And, it would be filled with activities which could be used with any stories a teacher might want to use in their class. 

So here is the favor I want to ask: would you write a short story for your learners and let it be part of my dream.  Because that’s what I realized this is.  This is my dream.  I love a good story and love to share it even more.  Mike and Josette’s stories have convinced me that there’s a bunch of teachers out there who feel the same way I do.  And if we could get all those stories together in one place and share them with our students, we would might find that our students feel the same way as well.  You can send the story to me by email kevchanwow[at]gmail.com.  Eventually, we will have a book, a book of stories by teachers for all kinds of learners.  And at the start of class, we would be able to start our lessons with the kind of smile that comes from being able to say, “Hey, have I got a story for you…”

To Gather Up (A Short Story for ELLS)

 Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Photo by David Sky



I live in Lone Temple, a small town surrounded by a ring of mountains.  I am the town's station master.  Not that it’s much of a train station.  Just two tracks, one platform, and two freshly painted benches.  I paint the benches myself twice every year.  This year in the fall I painted them sunrise orange.  Last week, I painted them tear drop blue.  Sometimes someone will notice and say something nice about the color, and that makes me feel pretty good.  

During a Lone Temple winter, there is snow and more snow.  Every year the neighborhood children build a snowman in front of the station.  Each year there are less and less children, but they manage to get the job done.  This January they built a real giant of a snowman.  It took them all day and it was already dark when they finished and ran home.  It was a cold evening and there was a touch of salt in the wind. Suddenly, I felt sorry for the snowman.  He was out there, left behind, and probably already forgotten.  So I dug through the Lost and Found box and pulled out a bright red knit cap.  I had to stand on a step ladder to put the hat on the snowman’s head.  The snowman had a strange half smile made out of grey rocks.  I thought he looked a little more comfortable with the hat on.

There is always something to do at a train station.  There's always a floor to sweep, a weed to pull, a sign to straighten.  But there is also nothing that must absolutely be done right now at a station.  And this is also good.  I can make a cup of coffee and watch the steam curl up towards the ceiling.  I can set a small plate of smoked fish down behind the worn row of lockers and wait to see which cat comes to eat it first. In this way time passes.

It was a long winter and the snowman didn’t really start melting until the beginning of April.  He got a little smaller every day and by May first, he was gone.  I went out, picked up the bright red hat from the ground, and started to put it back in the lost and found box.  I looked at the long pair of soft leather gloves, the folding umbrella with the bent handle, the pack of faded playing cards, the loose collection of keys and broken watches and I changed my mind. I put the hat in the bottom drawer of my desk instead.  It wasn't a lost thing anymore.  At least, not for a little while longer.  Not as long as there were still enough children to gather up the snow that was sure to fall in the winter.


470 words total
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 96.2
Flesch-Kincaid Grade level: 3.2
Words contained in the GSL: 96.63%

A Name for All Things (short fiction for ELLs)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

556 words total
98.19% of words within GSL
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 2.89
Flesch Reading Ease Level: 93.47

My grandma could give a name to anything.  On the corner of the one small park near my house, there was a strong looking walnut tree.  My grandma always hit its trunk and called it ‘Big Daddy Caramel’.  Soon, so did everyone else.  One summer, a great cloud of butterflies landed in the empty lot behind our house.  A few hours later they flew off, leaving one behind.  One bright orange butterfly with round wings.  My grandma called it ‘Little Lost Tomato-Chan’.  Even now, when I walk through a summer garden, I wonder if that butterfly ever found its way home.

My grandma was old before I was born.  Her hair was silver.  Her eyes were light blue with a touch of white here and there.  But I never thought of her as old.  She called me ‘Sugar’, ‘Spring a Whistling’, and ‘Bitter Tea’.  Whatever name she used, it was always right.  The right name for how I was feeling deep on the inside.  

My mother was a nurse.  She was a good nurse.  She came home at night and could hardly stand.  She worked for 16 hours in a row.  And my grandma called her ‘Keep on Walking’ and ‘Cheer Full of Empty’.  But sometimes it was all too hard.  On those days my mother came home and went right to bed.  Sometimes she didn’t even say hello to me or my grandma. She just pulled the covers to her chin like a curtain coming down on her day.  On those nights, my grandma would sit next to my mother’s bed.  She would stroke my mother’s hair. She didn’t call my mother any fancy names.  She just called her ‘Baby’ and my mother would cry and fall asleep.

The only name my grandma gave I didn't like was to my first boyfriend.  She called him ‘Mr. World Of Trouble’.  She said it right to his face.  He was a big boy with almost no brains.  He got so mad, I thought he was going to hit my grandma.  But he just walked out of the house.  And I stopped seeing him.  He ended up killing two men in a bank robbery.  He sure was Mr. World of Trouble.

When my grandma was 84 years old, she got sick.  The doctors tried to find out what was wrong with her.  They checked her heart.  They checked her lungs.  But she got thinner and thinner.  Her skin was so pale you could see right through it.  She was in the hospital for three days and her breathing got soft, like falling snow.

The day she died, she was talking to me. The sunlight was falling into the room like a promise. My grandma was telling me how the doctors were all wrong.  For a while she had been lost.  She hadn't known how to put a name to what was happening to her.  But she had had some time to think about it.  Time to think about her life.  84 years of life.  And she had a name for this thing that was happening to her now.  She looked at me, little spots of white floating like a hint of something far away in her eyes.  ‘Cracked Tea Cup Full of Joy’ she whispered to me.  The secret name of the slow goodbye that is life.