Using Harry Potter in the Adult ESL Classroom

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Using Harry Potter in the Adult ESL Classroom


TESOL Matters Vol. 10 No. 1 (February/March 2000)

From the column of the TESOL ESOL in Adult Education Interest Section

by Jesse Nash

By now, most teachers have heard about J. K. Rowling's (1997, 1998, 1999) youthful hero Harry Potter and his popularity with young readers. Intrigued by all the fuss, I stopped at my favorite bookstore on the way to a beginning ESL class I teach at a local children's home. I purchased all three volumes and headed to work. I was a little early, so I sat down in the small dining room that serves as my classroom and began to read the first volume, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997). I soon saw why it was so popular. In a few minutes, I was won over, but when the students began to arrive, I set the book aside.

There are 12 students in the class, and their first language is Spanish. The youngest is 23. The eldest is in his 40s. Most of them are in their early 30s. All but three of them are married with children at home. They work in the laundry, kitchen, and housekeeping departments of the children's home. They had very little formal education in Mexico, but they are enthusiastic about learning English.

When they entered, they came over to me, greeted me, shook my hand, and looked at the Harry Potter book I had been reading. To my surprise, several students immediately recognized the book, and they all had heard of Harry Potter. Their children or the children of family and friends were either reading the books, or the books were being read to the children in school by their teachers. "My daughter," one young mother gushed. "She loves Harry Potter." Then, "Please, maestro, read to us."

At first, I was hesitant, but as I stared into their excited faces, I saw a very real learning opportunity. I opened Harry Potter and began to read. My students, of course, didn't know all of the words they were hearing. When they heard a word they didn't know, I paused to write it down, and then we discussed the word until they knew what it meant. Then I proceeded with the story.

That day, I read for about 30 minutes. Like their children and the children of their families and friends, they were entirely intrigued by the story. Although they didn't know all of the words, and although the names of the characters were strange and hard to pronounce, these students had a look of rapt wonder on their faces. I suspect that Rowling's sense of humor, her pacing of the story, and the way she presents complex human relationships are partly responsible for the interest her stories generated in my students.

Over the next few weeks, I read from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for 10-15 minutes during each class. My students' willingness to listen to a well-crafted story gave us the opportunity to work on their aural comprehension. At the end of each reading, they were assessed orally on what had happened in the story. Then they were given written homework assignments.

It wasn't difficult connecting the novel to skills work. The Harry Potter stories afford the opportunity to practice vocabulary related to the home, family, work, the neighborhood, the community, friendships, food, and, perhaps most important, human emotions. Retelling the story orally and in written form is a good way for students to practice using verbs and tenses.

I now tie the Harry Potter stories directly into my daily lesson plans. For example, the opening chapter presents a scene in which Harry's uncle is leaving his house. The uncle notices a cat on the corner of the street. It appears to the uncle that the cat is reading the street sign. The uncle shakes his head and looks again. Now the cat is reading a map. When the uncle returns at the end of the day, the cat is sitting on a nearby wall. As I expected, my students found this scene funny and intriguing. I tried to use their interest in the scene to work on their word recognition and spelling skills. After the reading, I gave them a picture I had drawn of the scene with all the major characters involved, the street, the map, the wall, the cat, and the road sign. Then I asked the students to label each item in the picture. Ordinarily, they would have viewed such an activity as a chore, but now the activity was tied to a story, in which they were making an emotional investment. They attacked my crude drawing with an eagerness that both surprised me and made me wish I had thought of using Harry Potter earlier. And, of course, working on the drawing was a good way to reinforce what the students had heard, and they repeated those words again orally when we discussed the drawing. To top things off, as homework, I gave the students five questions about the reading to answer with complete sentences.

Their supervisor informed me later that the students had talked about the reading and their homework all that afternoon and the next day. I had always suspected that learning English would be easier if teachers could find a way to make the experience enjoyable. Harry Potter has helped make learning English an enjoyable enterprise for my students. But I was certain something very good was going on when the students began to use the time after the Harry Potter reading to talk about their own fears, worries, and hopes. Teaching them English is going to be much easier, I'm convinced, if they wish to talk about themselves and their most intimate thoughts in English. Thus I heartily recommend the Harry Potter books to any ESL instructor, especially those teaching adults in the workplace.

References

Rowling, J. K. (1997). Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone. New York: Scholastic Press.

Rowling, J. K. (1998). Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets. New York: Scholastic Press.

Rowling, J. K. (1999). Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Scholastic Press.

Jesse W. Nash is a General Education Development (GED) specialist and an instructor in the adult basic education/GED/ESL and the workplace literacy programs at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.


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