Indirectly introducing a factual reader

- Bill Bowler
In past articles, I’ve talked about leading directly into reading. ‘Direct lead-ins’ I’ve shared include
using the front cover picture, the title, and the back cover ‘blurb’, together with pre-reading
questions and discussion, to get learners curious to read.
In this article, I want to do something different. We’ll look at how to use a factual reader – in this
case, the Oxford Read and Discover book ‘Wild Cats’ – as the basis for fun language activities centred
on a particular topic.
We’ll also look at introducing a reader into a lesson indirectly. This ‘indirect introduction’ can start
with personalization, visuals, and games before we even show the book to learners.

Introducing the theme

Did you know that the 8th of August is ‘International Cat Day’? I didn’t. You learn something new every
day! When a date has a special significance like this, you can use that as a springboard into a topic-
based lesson. We often do this with festivals like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. But we can
easily extend this to include days like International Cat Day (8th August), World Cat Day (17th February
in Europe or 1st March in Russia) and National Cat Day (29th October in the USA).
If you’re teaching on, or around, one of these ‘cat celebration’ days, a good personalized classroom
activity can be to discuss, ‘Who has a pet cat?’* A visual of pet cats can help to set the scene and pre-
teach the vocabulary. (See the downloadable picture.) You can write questions on the board for
students to discuss in pairs:
 What’s the name of your cat?
 Can you describe your cat?
 What are your cat’s habits?
 Where does your cat sleep?
 What does your cat eat?
*If learners don’t have pet cats, ask them to imagine they do, and to draw them. They can then talk
about their imaginary cats.
You can also play the game ‘Anna’s cat is an angry cat.’ (See the downloadable Anna’s cat game.) In
this game, learners list an English name and adjective for each alphabet letter. They then read out
and, from memory, repeat pattern sentences in a sentence chain, one after the other around the
class, like this: ‘Anna’s cat is an angry cat. Bill’s cat is a big cat,’ and so on. A variation is for learners to
list jobs and adjectives from A to Z. They then say sentences like, ‘The architect’s cat is an angry cat.
The baker’s cat is a big cat.’

Pre-teaching the vocabulary

Once learners have finished talking about pet cats in a personalized, playful way, you can introduce
the idea of ‘wild cats’. A visual of wild cats can help pre-teach this vocabulary. (See the downloadable
picture.)

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It’s good to get learners to brainstorm the types of wild cat they know in English. You can put a
silhouette, or outline picture, of a wild cat on the board and ask students to work in small groups to
write wild cat names on cards and stick these inside the outline. (It’s interesting how, with many
animal documentary programmes on TV, today’s children already know lots about nature even before
we teach them.) Here’s an example brainstorm:

Ask all learners to copy the class brainstorm into their notebooks. After this, show them the front
cover of the reader. Tell learners to number the types of wild cat they brainstormed in the order
they meet them in the book. It’s great for them to create their own pre-reading task like this! When
the groups are ready, have them retell their part of the story to the whole class. Encourage them to
include their feelings and opinions, phrases like, “I really liked it when …”, or “I didn’t agree when
they…”.

Extra activities
As I’ve mentioned before, we should pre-teach key vocabulary before learners meet it in a text. If
you like, before learners start reading Wild Cats, have them play a match-up game in small groups.
(See the downloadable vocabulary cards.) These 14 key words come in the first 7 pages of the book.
Give each group a set of cut-up and jumbled cards. Have a race between groups to match the words
and pictures. (If learners don’t know, they should guess.) Go over answers with the class to make
sure all groups know the correct match-up.
After this indirect lead-in to the topic of cats, learners should be very ready to read and listen to the
first seven pages of Wild Cats.

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 Anna’s cat is an angry cat….
Think of a name and an A B
adjective for each letter
of the alphabet…

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