I have a lovely new review from Amanda Kendle, on her Not a Ballerina travel blog, called ‘Learning English in Australia: ESL books that sound like we do‘. Here she’s describing Six Stories from Hope Street:
They are simple (and all told only in simple past tense) but manage to be interesting – very tricky to achieve! There are stories of late buses, young love, doctor’s visits and missing keys and what I like most is that they are identifiably Australian without being full of “yobbos” and “sheilas” – but instead with typical Aussie phrases like “No worries” and “Sorry, love” used in natural ways.
This is so much what I was hoping to achieve: to write stories that make students want to keep reading – stories that feature natural language that they’ll hear in their lives outside the classroom. And yes, that’s not so easy at beginner level…
I often think of that student who asked me what his workmates expected him to reply, when they called out the mysterious word: “Owyergoin?” Perhaps there was more of a gap then between the English of English class and the English of the real world? Let’s hope that reading can help bridge any gap that remains…
Full disclosure: I’m an eager beginner myself at Amanda’s social media workshops, though not very good at doing my homework…
