My educative experience as a reader

As a child, I don't remember to have read any English book or story at school, which is a pity because storytelling would have been a good way of engaging children to love reading. In my case, I have always loved reading thanks to my parents' positive attitude towards books. However, I started to read short stories at Secondary School. Specifically, some of the books I remember are "Frankenstein" and  "Scarlet". I must highlight that I had no guidance when reading such books or stories, since I had to read them at home in order to pass an exam; my reading comprehension is the unique point which was tested by my teachers. Therefore, I couldn't find the meaning or sense of reading English stories. Indeed, it was a challenge for me in terms of learning new vocabulary and understanding the plot, but it was not useful at all, educatively talking. 

As an adult, I took up reading English books 4 years ago for pleasure. I thought I couldn't finish a book written in a foreign language, but one day I did! What's more, I learnt a lot of new expressions and cultural facts I had no idea by then. Some of such books are "The Giver" (Lois Lowry) and "Paper Towns" (John Green). 

As an English teacher at an academy, I have the same problem I had as a child: I have not chances of implementing reading as a pleasurable task in class, since every student has his/her "Oxford" or "Cambridge" workbooks. Such books have plenty of readings adapted to their English level or ages, but they are not  motivating enough for pupils, given that these are constantly testing students' reading skills. That's why I would like to incorporate storytelling in my classes, so I love stories for children. Actually, I consider that storytelling let teachers create a special atmosphere that other methodologies cannot. 

Doing research at university (last session), I found an interesting methodology I wouldn't hesitate to put into practice in the future: planning story based-lessons. This consists of planning a whole lesson based on a storybook or reading; for instance, it can be planned a CLIL lesson about the water cycle by using a story about a water drop that travels around the world as a starting point. Such methodology implies go from global contents to specific ones, which means retelling some parts of the story in a variety of ways. Here you may find lots of ideas to plan a story based-lesson: 

https://storyarts.org/lessonplans/index.html 

To sum up, I would absolutely like to implement more reading activities in my English classes in order to motivate children to learn and improve their English skills by reading. Moreover, I consider that emotions and culture are important when learning a new language; without them, we couldn't communicate meaningful ideas. So, storytelling and other reading methodologies should be implemented in class so as to avoid what happened to many children like me: growing up without having found a meaningful reason to read English stories.