True Stories in the News: A Beginning Reader (True Stories)

Rating:
Summary: A Text Which Leads to True Stories in the Classroom
Review: I used this book and _More True Stories_ with conversation classes for Japanese adults and found they worked very well to spark conversation. Once in awhile I used the exercises which follow the story, but usually I made up my own speech themes related to each chapter. We read one story every two weeks. The first week, we read the story aloud, and talked about it. The second week we read the story aloud again, and then students gave short speeches about the theme. The stories them selves are intriguing, but it was my students' own related stories which made them like the book. I prefer these two texts to _Easy True Stories in the News_ because that one is written entirely in the present tense. My students had a lot of difficulty using past tenses, so I wanted to use texts which featured those forms.