David Livingstone - The Pathfinder : A reading Journey

David Livingstone is perhaps one of the easiest to biograph missionary. We have most of his journals still intact and many family and friends whose records have perdured to give us a clear image of who he was. 

We use Abeka reading books at my school in Brazil, and this year he advanced English class has been reading their biographic account of this great man. 

To make the reading process more impacting, and to ensure that the kids are actually doing the reading and understanding the story, I created some basic quizzes to give them as they read each chapter.  I'll be posting these quizzes here in case anyone would like to use them with your book. 

As I said, we are using the Abeka version, and we use a 4th grade reading level for the advanced B2 EFL students in 8th and 9th grade. 

After going through many trials, and trying many different kinds and levels of books, we have come to this structure. Our students, while pretty good language learners and users, don't have enough vocabulary and upper level grammar, to handle books at their age level. This is because the structure of languages teaching books use a specific system that will only introduce certain structure in the high-school years. Another reason is that these students do not live their lives completely imbued in English speaking context .They don't have access to the language models basically. 

When choosing books for your EFL class, it is important to see the context of your students. I love using leveled books,  they are great! But, sometimes, using a lower age-level book, without any grammatical and vocabular leveling will help give a certain level of accomplishment, while also giving new spaces of growth.