How to Teach a Novel to English Language Learners

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How do you teach a novel to high school ELL students?

How do you do a long read with students accustomed to spending up to 10 hours on their phones each day with micro-sized messages? You find all kinds of learners in our classrooms, with a range of abilities and interests. All are saturated in the social media environment. Why bother to teach a novel, which seems like an antediluvian endeavor that may be doomed to failure?

I don’t have THE answer, but I have thoughts about my experiences with teaching novels to ELL students, with mixed but possibly positive results. I have many answers, some of which may work for others. The first answer, which is my answer to all teaching questions, is NOTHING WORKS. NOTHING. On the surface, this is a discouraging message. THROW THE SPAGHETTI ON THE WALL. The spaghetti is any possible method, approach, input/output.

Be sure to go multisensory – don’t rely only on one mode of input. Students need to see, hear, feel, touch, smell, the story.  Humans crave novelty. Don’t do the same thing twice. Try lots of different things. As soon as students see the same method coming to them again, shortly after the first, they can anticipate how to wiggle away from it. Humans are designed to avoid strenuous work, like reading and writing thoughtful reflections. If they can, they will do it. That is why we have so many labor-saving devices, like the washing machine. This is an area where humans apply ingenuity. On the other hand, humans are designed to lap up stories, like milk. It is a way to understand the human experience, and to learn from other people’s mistakes.

What I love about teaching novels is that we (the class and I) enter another reality together and go on a journey. It is never certain how the journey will end. It is an extended journey, because a novel takes up a lot of time and space. We enter another world, and learn a whole cast of characters together. We spend a lot of time with these characters. We notice different things about them every day. We admire them, criticize them, agree/disagree with them, are fearful for some, wary of others. We identify with some characters, we are reminded of people in our lives by others. We have time to really get to know them. We make predictions, we try to pick up clues about what is going to happen next. We are surprised, horrified, and sometimes enchanted. After all, entering alternative realities is the charm of video games and movies too, only you make your own visuals in a novel, so the final interpretation is very individual.

So what are some of the strands of spaghetti? Here is a list of some I have used and found effective:

Start with the student’s own culture and/or experience.

For example, when I taught Moby Dick this year, we started with water stories from their countries and regions. Students worked in regional groups to make posters of these stories and presented them. We then moved to the bible story of Jonah and the Whale, since it is mentioned a number of times in Moby Dick. Many of our students are familiar with bible stories. One student that never says anything in English and almost never speaks in class,was able to tell the class every detail of the Jonah and the Whale story in Spanish. Another student translated for her in English, and that is how she told the whole class the story, unprompted and unexpectedly.

Build up background knowledge before reading (known as schema).

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Every story has a context that students may be unfamiliar with. In the case of Moby Dick, students worked on group presentations on different types of whales, the whaling industry, Nantucket, how to hunt a whale, scrimshaw, the whale ship Essex (the ship that inspired the story), and Herman Melville. This parallels the book Moby Dick, in that Melville spends hundreds of pages providing an encyclopedia of whales and whaling. We did not read these sections of the book in class, since we did this function ourselves, in another way.

Use a variety of texts, in a variety of languages and formats.

Our base text was the original 1851 book, in excerpts. We also used an adapted version (lower reading level), a bilingual Spanish/English version, a graphic novel, and a Spanish Manga. Toward the end of the process we watched an animation movie, and students had access to the movie to re-watch. The bilingual edition of Moby Dick was brought to us by one of our new students, and that also became a class favorite.

Enhance the original text with visuals and vocabulary.

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We used the original text, but I added a short summary to each chapter, some pictures, some vocabulary, and comprehension questions. Strangely enough, the students ended up preferring the original text to the adapted versions and the graphic novel versions. The adapted novel had very few takers. I am able to scoop up the original text from “classics” like Moby Dick from Project Gutenberg. That way I can choose excerpts, and which chapters to use.

Teach annotation, in whatever form necessary.

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I teach this every year, yet students never seem to use it on their own! This year, I had them keep a brief online journal for every chapter we read, and select a favorite quote from each chapter. In past years students shared their favorite quotes with another student as a routine frequently, but we didn’t have time for that this year.

Have a field trip.

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This doesn’t always work out but it is on my best practices list. This year we visited the 19th century sailboat “The Wavertree” at South Street Seaport, where students got to handle the steering wheel and capstan, raise a sail, and see the cargo hold, the sailor’s dorm, and the captain’s quarters.

Have a guest speaker.

For the Jonah and the whale story, our business manager came to our class to tell the Yunus story from the Koran. The biblical Jonah and the Whale story is the same in the Koran, only the name Jonah is Yunus. This also helped us understand that we live in a worldwide community of stories, many of which are shared.

Embed art.

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Students love to draw and be creative. We generally always do a mind mirror with a novel, in which students draw character posters, that drill into the character’s true nature with images of symbols that represent them and quotes from the text. This year I had the privilege of working with an art teacher who initiated and implemented students’ making Moby Dick buttons after we finished the stories.

Embed drama.

You can do reader’s theater with some chapters, or students can do skits in groups. In the Moby Dick case, we pulled dialogue from a few chapters to enact in the center of the room, with volunteer actors and some props. With a short story by Edwige Danticat, we actually built a cardboard boat for the classroom. I have used silent actors – students who don’t mind enacting something, but without talking, while other students do the talking role. For the Banquo’s ghost scene in Macbeth, the students set a table for a feast, and sat at the table while we acted out the scene, goblets in hand. Having the room set up as something different than a classroom immediately sets a different mood.

Do some read alouds.

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Children love to hear stories aloud. Even though our teens are older, I think they still appreciate it, and it can model the sound of English for them. An alternative is the circle read, where the class sits in a circle and passes the speaking piece, reading as much or as little of the chapter as they want. They can pass if they don’t feel like reading, or feel too self conscious to read aloud.

Keep mixing it up!!

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Like I said at the beginning of this reflection, the answer is that NOTHING WORKS. There is no silver bullet. We have to try everything, and eventually some spaghetti sticks to the wall. We have to keep on our toes, be ever-vigilant and responsive, and rethink our approaches frequently as our student population evolves, changes, and responds to the times we live in.

RM Chasek, 2025