• 06 Feb, 2023
• By: Alastair Graham-Marr

Using Literature Circles to Better Scaffold Academic Speaking Activities

      Summarizing, comparing and contrasting texts are typically activities that students find very difficult. Student support, above and beyond what the textbook provides is often warranted.
      An effective activity to bring in added support is Literature Circles. Although often thought of as a full class activity, this approach can be used as a 20 minute support activity. Secondly, Lit Circles allows for task repetition, which promotes both accuracy and fluency. Accuracy is enhanced through peer feedback, teacher feedback and the additional opportunities for noticing. Fluency is enhanced through task repetition.
     Literature Circles is an activity that adds structure to student discussions. Having a clear structure and defined roles helps students participate more actively in group discussion. That is, if students know exactly what they’re supposed to do, discussions can work well. It’s an activity that works well, even with lower level CEFR A2 students.
     Students are put into groups of four. There is a Leader, Summarizer, Detail Master, and a Vocabulary Master. Details are as follows:

• Leader: asks the other three people questions 
   about gist, details and vocabulary.
• Summarizer: summarizes the main points
• Detail Master: answers questions about details
• Vocabulary Master: gives English explanations about the meaning of various words.
     Obviously, you will NOT always have student numbers divisible by four. So, you can combine the roles of Detail Master and Vocabulary Master when necessary. So, for example, if you have 15 students, you’ll have 3 groups of 4 and 1 group of 3.
     When you put students in groups of four, this is best done in a random fashion. For example, if there are 24 students in the class, number students from 1 to 6, so there are six groups of four. It is important that you mix up the students from the start. I wouldn’t advise letting students choose their own groups.
     Once the students are in groups, do the following:
1. Have the students chose their roles. You can have them do "rock-paper-scissors" etc.
2. Give them 5 minutes to prepare for their roles. The Leader will need to write down questions, so have the Leader write at least 8 questions. The Summarizer will need to make a short summary. The Detail Master should read the story carefully again, and think of all the who, what, when, where and how details. And the Vocab Master should think of how to explain the meaning of key words in English
3.  Eventually, preparation will be easy and automatic. However, for the first few classes, prepare a Question Cue Card for the Leader, as it will make the activity run more smoothly. 
4.  If the Leader has a cue card, give the group just three minutes of preparation time. Without a cue card, a little more time is needed.

     For teachers using our Academic Listening & Speaking series, we definitely recommend this approach. You might be surprised by all the engaged time-on-task that this approach generates. To help teachers get started with this, we have included Leader Cue Cards in our online Teacher's Book.These cue cards allow teachers to use Lit Circles with both the lecture summaries, and the integrated text comparison activities.
     Given the added student support that Literature Circles engenders, it is possible to teach Academic English to slightly lower level students. While perhaps not appropriate for CEFR A1 or low A2, academic English can be taught to students from a mid CEFR A2 level on.