Writing and Narrating Stories for English Learners: A Guide

This guide is for people who write or record stories for English learners: professional writers and narrators, and teachers who write stories for their own school. It explains what a learner story has to do, what the research on graded readers says about language control, and what a narration adds for a reader who is still slow on the page. It is honest about where the evidence is thin, and it sends you on to shorter articles that go deeper.

The guide follows one argument. Learners need a lot of easy, interesting text, and the ordinary book market does not supply it. A good learner story is a real story with its language controlled. A narration is part of the text for many learners, so how you read matters as much as how you sound. And a writer who understands how levels are described can write for many levels, not one.

Who this guide is for, and what a story for learners has to do

This guide is for you if you write stories, record stories, or teach English and want to write for your own pupils. A story for learners has one job: to be read, fluently and with pleasure, by someone who knows only part of the language. Everything else follows from that. The words must be ones the reader knows. The events must be easy to follow. The reading, or the listening, must feel like a story and not like a test.

Why does the job need doing? Because learners need far more easy text than exists. Hu and Nation (2000) gave learners a short story with different densities of unknown words and measured comprehension. They concluded that fiction read without help needs about 98% of the running words to be known: one unknown word in fifty. Almost nothing written for native speakers meets that standard for a learner.

Nation and Deweerdt (2001) measured the gap. They compared a level-two simplified version of a classic novel with the first 7,965 words of the original. In the simplified text, 98.6% of the words were in the most frequent 2,000 word families or were names. In the original, the figure was 91.3%. For a reader with 2,000 words, that is one unknown word every seven lines against one in almost every line. The original is not readable for that learner. The simplified version is.

Day and Bamford (1998) give this kind of writing a name: language learner literature. They treat it as a genre in its own right, like children's literature, with its own craft and its own readers. That is the right way to think about your work. You are not making a lesson easier. You are writing for a reader, and the reader happens to be a learner.

Supply is short in the places where it matters most. Claridge (2012) interviewed commissioning editors at four major publishers of graded readers. She found that most titles are published for intermediate learners, and that if pleasure reading is the purpose, it would be logical to publish far more at the lowest levels. A teacher with a class of A1 or A2 readers knows this from the shelf. That is where new writers are needed.

The Council of Europe (2020) describes what those readers can manage. At A2, a reader can understand enough to read short, simple stories involving familiar, concrete situations in high-frequency everyday language. At B1, a reader can follow the plot of stories with a clear linear storyline and high-frequency everyday language, given regular use of a dictionary. Both descriptors describe a story. Neither describes a grammar point. The rest of this guide takes the three jobs in turn: writing, narrating, and bringing a storyteller into a classroom.

Writing for learners

The most common mistake is to write the language first. A writer who starts from a word list produces sentences that fit the list, and the result is what Claridge (2012) reports a long-time reviewer calling thin: a simple plot with weak characters. The fix is a change of order. Write a real story, then control its language. How to Write a Story for English Learners sets out the whole method, with a table of common faults and a passage before and after control.

A story for learners needs the same things any story needs, held a little tighter:

• One clear problem, known to the reader by the end of the first page.
• Few characters, with names that start with different letters.
• Events in order. Claridge (2012) reports one publisher's rule for its writers: linear stories, with no flashbacks, no confusion and no multiple narrators.
• Dialogue that sounds spoken, in short turns a reader can hear.
• An ending that pays off the problem, through something the main character does.

Then comes control. Control means keeping most words and structures inside what the reader knows, without breaking the text. Nation and Deweerdt (2001) summarise the standard criticism of simplified texts: told to use short, simple sentences, writers produce choppy, unnatural discourse with poor links between sentences. They accept that this is true of poorly written simplifications and note that many others are a joy to read. The difference is whether the writer rewrote passages or merely cut words.

Writing to a level

Levels are described in public documents, and a writer who reads them can write for any of them. The Council of Europe (2020) describes what a reader can do at each level. Capel (2010) describes the English Vocabulary Profile, which assigns words, and the separate meanings of words, to levels A1 to B2 on the evidence of learner writing. Its rationale is what learners demonstrably know, not what they ought to know. A writer can check a draft against it word by word.

The lowest level with real stories is A2, and it is the level with the least room. Writing at A2: Vocabulary and Grammar Control explains what an A2 reader knows, which public lists describe words and grammar by level, and where names, cognates and deliberate repetition give you room. It includes one scene written at A2 and again at B1, with the differences listed.

The rows in the table draw on the Council of Europe (2020) reading descriptors and on the coverage target from Hu and Nation (2000). The last column is the point: the level changes the words and the grammar, not the story.

Writing a moral without preaching

Many stories for schools carry a value: honesty, kindness, courage, perseverance. The temptation is to state it in the last line. Narvaez (2002) reviewed the research on whether children take the moral from a story, and the answer is sobering. In one study she reports, third-graders chose the author's intended theme 11% of the time, fifth-graders 45%, and adults 91%. Children generate themes, but often not the one the writer meant.

That does not mean the moral is pointless. It means the moral has to live in the plot, where a young reader can see it, and be talked about afterwards, where a teacher can draw it out. Narvaez (2002) notes that extracting a theme is hard for children and easier with familiar topics, which is one more reason to set stories in familiar, concrete situations. How to Write a Moral Without Preaching shows how to build a value into what a character does, and how to end without a sermon. The values through reading pillar covers the classroom side.

Narrating for learners

For many learners, the narration is the text. A reader at A1 or A2 reads slowly, and slow reading loses the thread. When a voice reads the story while the learner follows the words, the voice sets the pace, joins the words into phrases, and shows how each written word sounds. That changes what a narrator is for. You are not performing for a listener. You are carrying a reader through a page.

The evidence for reading while listening comes from a small number of studies, and the most relevant for schools is Chang and Millett (2015). Sixty-four Year 10 EFL pupils read 20 graded readers over 26 weeks, for 90 minutes a week. One group read silently. The other read while listening to the audio. Both groups improved in reading rate and comprehension, and the audio group improved substantially more, with gains still present three months later. That is one study of 64 pupils, so treat it as promising rather than settled.

Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008) explain why the audio helps. Their 35 Japanese university students met stories by reading, by reading while listening, and by listening only. Reading while listening was the mode most of them found comfortable. In interviews, some said why: the narrator segmented the text into chunks for them, so they did not have to. The graded reader in that study was at the 400-headword level, narrated at 93 words per minute. Learners who listened only, with no text, gained the least vocabulary.

Those two findings set the narrator's brief. Read slowly enough that a learner's eyes can keep up with your voice. Pause where the sense pauses, so that each phrase arrives whole. Pronounce every word clearly, because the learner is matching sounds to letters as you go. Keep the voice warm and steady, and save the drama for the moments that need it. How to Narrate a Story for Language Learners covers speed, pauses, dialogue voices and how to check a recording against the text.

Four checks before you send a recording

1. Pace. Time one minute of your reading. For beginners, aim well under a conversational speed; the 93 words per minute in Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008) is a useful reference point, not a rule.
2. Phrases. Listen for places where you ran two phrases together. A learner following the text needs the join to be audible.
3. Words. Every word on the page is in the recording, in order. A skipped word breaks the match between voice and text.
4. Room. Record somewhere quiet, close to the microphone, at one steady distance. Clarity matters more than the equipment.

Audio is a support that the learner should outgrow. Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008) found that their more proficient students were not always drawn to reading while listening, and the aim of every reading program is silent, independent reading at the learner's own pace. Reading While Listening: What It Does for English Learners sets out the research in more detail.

Guest storytellers in class

A guest storyteller is a writer, narrator or other visitor who tells or reads a story to a class. Schools use them to make reading feel like something adults do for pleasure, and to give a story a face. The research on graded readers does not test guest visits directly, and nothing in this guide should be read as evidence that a single visit improves reading. What the research does tell you is how to make the visit a reading event rather than a listening one.

Give the pupils the text. Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008) found that learners who only listened to a story, without the words in front of them, gained the least vocabulary and recalled none of the target words three months later. Learners who read while listening did better and found it more comfortable. A guest who reads while every pupil follows the page is doing what a narration does, live.

Match the story to the class. Hu and Nation's (2000) figure applies as much to a story heard as to a story read: if a fifth of the words are unknown, the pupils will not follow. Choose a story at the class's level, or one level below, and let the storyteller's voice do the work of pace and phrasing. A story the pupils have already read once is a good choice, because the visit then adds a voice to something they own.

Plan the talk afterwards. Narvaez (2002) shows that children often do not extract the theme an author intended. A guest storyteller who then asks the class what the story was about, and listens to the answers, does more for the moral than a closing sentence would. How to Host a Guest Storyteller in Your Class sets out how to brief a visitor, what to give the pupils beforehand, and how to run the session. For the questions to ask, see Discussion Questions to Draw the Moral From a Story.

Putting it together: from idea to a story a class can read

Here is one way a story moves from a writer's head to a class's hands. It is an example of the sequence, not a rule about the days.

Step five is the one writers see least and should understand best. How Is a Story Levelled to the CEFR? describes what an editor checks, and What Are Graded Readers? explains the headword counts that publishers print on the cover. Claridge (2012) found that publishers' headword lists differ widely from one another and that editors treat their own lists as guides, neither prescriptive nor proscriptive. A writer who knows that will not panic at a single word above level.

Three habits keep the work honest across many stories:

• Read your own stories aloud before anyone else does. Every sentence you stumble on, a learner will stumble on, and a narrator will too.
• Keep a learner in the loop. One real reader at the target level tells you more than any list. Ask them to retell the page, not to rate it.
• Write the same story for two levels once. Writing one scene at A2 and again at B1 teaches you what a level is faster than any description.

How iRead works with storytellers

iRead takes original stories from writers, and its editorial team levels each accepted story by CEFR band. Narrators record themselves reading with a phone, and the recording is transcribed and synced to the text automatically to build the read-along. Writers and narrators are paid for accepted work and credited on the story. Schools then read the stories in packs levelled from A1 to C2.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Day, R. R., & Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press. www.cambridge.org/9780521568296
2. Claridge, G. (2012). Graded readers: How the publishers make the grade. Reading in a Foreign Language, 24(1), 106-119. doi.org/10.64152/10125/66668
3. Nation, I. S. P., & Deweerdt, J.-P. (2001). A defence of simplification. Prospect, 16(3), 55-67. eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ637434
4. Hu, M. H.-C., & Nation, P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403-430. doi.org/10.64152/10125/66973
5. Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Companion volume. Council of Europe Publishing. rm.coe.int/common-european-framework-of-reference-for-languages-learning-teaching/16809ea0d4
6. Capel, A. (2010). A1-B2 vocabulary: Insights and issues arising from the English Profile Wordlists project. English Profile Journal, 1(1), e3. doi.org/10.1017/S2041536210000048
7. Chang, A. C.-S., & Millett, S. (2015). Improving reading rates and comprehension through audio-assisted extensive reading for beginner learners. System, 52, 91-102. doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2015.05.003
8. Brown, R., Waring, R., & Donkaewbua, S. (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2), 136-163. doi.org/10.64152/10125/66816
9. Narvaez, D. (2002). Does reading moral stories build character?. Educational Psychology Review, 14(2), 155-171. doi.org/10.1023/A:1014674621501