SEC: ESL non-fiction stories for HS students

[Rena Deutsch <renadeutsch@WORLDNET.ATT.NET>]

Coming very soon to NY State is the requirement that ALL students will have
to take -- and pass -- our state exam, the Regents, in order to graduate.
This requirement includes all Limited English Proficient students and all
special education students.  The first exam to fall under the new
requirement will be the English Regents exam, which is moving from a 3-hr
test to a 6-hr. test this June (yes, 1999!)

Without getting into a discussion of the stress this is putting everyone
under... here's my problem/query.

Apparently the exam (and the curriculum with which the test is (supposedly)
correlated) is now going to focus more on non-fiction than previously.
We're not all sure what this means (no one has actually seen the test yet),
but I know that some of the English teachers have assigned their students
biographies of one sort of another as an outside reading.

Now the ESL teachers have been asked to "parallel" the English teachers
efforts by having the students in ESL classes do outside reading of
non-fiction titles.

The first assignment that came into my library from an ESL teacher required
his students to read a "non-fiction title with a story" (I assumed this to
be a biography, not, for example, the story of how jazz was born).  I asked
the teacher and the dept. chair about this, and they were relatively vague,
since the teacher has not yet completely figured out what the accompanying
book report will entail.

The students in question are ESL 4 students, which means that they are high
beginners, possibly low intermediate ESL students.  The students were told
that they had to read a book that had a minimum of 100 pages. After
speaking to the teacher/chair, I got them to change this to 50+ pages for
these students.  However, after going through my collection,  I found very
very few books which I think these students could handle which meet this
50-page requirement.  (Having been a H.S. ESL teacher for 11 years before
becoming a librarian, I know that for many of these students, this
assigment will be a major problem, involving hours with a dictionary at
their sides looking up words)

I did find a few biographies which could fit the requirement, one on Maya
Angelou (Journey of the Heart), but a few in an easy series of science
biographies had only 32 pages, (even though these books had smaller print
and probably more text than the 70-page book mentioned above).  None of the
books specifically written for ESL students or beginning adult readers fall
into this category, all being too short.


While I work with this department on changing this assigment (for example,
I will try to get these low-level students reading a series of articles
about people rather than a whole book), as well as creating a hierarchy of
assignments related to the English proficiency levels of these students, I
am trying to createl create a list of books which are suitable for
intermediate level ESL students.

So (thanks for sticking with me so long in this long-winded query) --  Do
you have any suggestions of  non-ficiton titles of at least 50+ pages for
intermediate level ESL students in high school (aged 15-19)?  This could be
biographies or other non-fiction titles which you have found ESL students
capable of reading.

Thanks in advance.

Rena Deutsch, Librarian
High School for the Humanities
New York, NY
renadeutsch@worldnet.att.net

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