We welcome your feedback
Posted by joan | Filed under Feedback
We would like to hear from you. If you have any comments, suggestions or teaching ideas, please post them here.
Special thanks
The financial support of Capilano University for this project is gratefully acknowledged. A special thank you to the learners and teachers who helped choose the articles for these books.
All of the material in these books first appeared in The Westcoast Reader (1982 to 2009). Some of the articles have been updated. Most of the exercises and activities for learners are based on material from The Westcoast Reader Teachers’ Notes (1982 to 2009).
Thank you to Pacific Newspaper Group, publishers of The Vancouver Sun and The Province, Canadian Press, and North Shore News for permission to reuse photos; to Nola Johnston and Guy Parsons for permission to reuse drawings and maps; and to Torstar Syndication for permission to reuse Baby Blues cartoons.
Joan Acosta
Best of the Reader by Joan Acosta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.
This means you are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work. You may not use this work for commercial purposes, or alter, transform or build upon this work.
December 9th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
This is a super resource, and I’m going to post about it on my Shoptalk site, which is about teaching and learning English. I’ll also let my overseas pen pals know about it.
Thanks very much, Joan!
December 10th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Another great project. Over the years, I’ve used many of these articles, always with good response. I’m glad to see them available again.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Kudos To Capilano University for supporting this valuable resource. People will be using and reusing these stories and activities for a very long time.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
As a long-time user of The Westcoast Reader (14 years), I am delighted to see familiar stories — the Mexican Mountie, the Sedin twins, and my all-time favourite the 90 year old track star, Olga– to name just a few. Thank you, Joan, for bringing your usual care and understanding to this new resource.
December 10th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Some of my ESL colleagues and I judge a new text or whatever with “Can I use it Monday morning?” Well, I was looking around for something on Hanukkah for my students for tomorrow and found Holidays and Special Days on this website with a great story, photo, drawing, and exercises on the holiday. I printed the page and exercises. Perfect. Prep done.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Great to see these thematically arranged resources. The WCR has always been a wonderful resource, and this compilation makes it more user-friendly than ever. I appreciate how both culture and linguistic skills are approached, as well as the gentle emphasis on diversity within the stories. The variety of stories serves as a catalyst for discussion, and the accompanying activities offer many suitable extensions.
A welcome addition.
December 16th, 2009 at 8:48 am
This is a fantastic resource! I run a program staffed by English-speaking volunteers who live here in Costa Rica and offer conversational English sessions. I know the volunteers often search for printed materials that can help reinforce what they do during their weekly sessions, but it is always such a challenge to find reading material for adults (or teens) at different levels, which is why I’ve long wished we had a Westcoast Reader here. These books will be very useful. Thank you!
Katherine Stanley
Academic Coordinator
Costa Rica Multilingüe
December 17th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
As a teacher trainer at Vancouver Community College I am always looking for new materials to enhance my courses. This is a super resource for teachers new to the field. Teaching at low levels can be very challenging and these articles and worksheets provide a model for trainee teachers showing how interesting and meaningful lessons might be developed. I have always used the Westcoast Reader in my classes and this provides an excellent addition that can be accessed on-line. It is also a lovely resource for practicing ESL teachers and I am sure students will enjoy reading about real people doing real jobs in Vancouver. For teachers overseas it also provides a nice slice of Vancouver life and provides a welcome respite from endless lessons on the Olympics! It is also beautifully presented. Thank you.
December 18th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Congratulations Joan on keeping The Westcoast Reader alive! This series of books will be widely received by a very hungry teaching public. Let me know what Literacy BC can do to help spread the word, and links, to this terrific resource. We have it posted on our website, http://www.literacybc.ca under Latest News, and will distribute them through our lending library for those who may want hard copies. Keep up the great work.
Diana Twiss
Director of Literacy Development
Literacy BC
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Thank you so much for this resource! The instructors in the Basic Education Dept. at Vancouver Community College are excited to have your work so readily available. I have also received several requests to make some hard copies available for our students, so I am in the process of checking this out with our Duplicating Dept. Your hard work and dedication to adult literacy has been greatly appreciated by all of us over the years, and we are thrilled that you are still so very much in the game!
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:15 am
What a valuable resource! Congratulations to you, Joan, and to Cap. U. for providing easy access to these relevant, plain language, high interest materials in such an attractive, thematic on-line format. I have used your Westcoast Reader articles and Teacher’s Notes with my adult literacy students since 1982 and am delighted to see many of our favorites available for a new generation of literacy learners and providers. Please keep them coming.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
I want to thank you for your wonderful additions to our Community of Literacy Practice website. I first saw the “Best of the Reader” link on the Literacy BC site and planned to add it to our “What’s New” Blog on Friday, and then I discovered you’d added it in our resources. They look wonderful.
Lori L. Walker
Program Manager, Literacy
2010 Legacies Now
January 7th, 2010 at 7:23 pm
This is a great on-line resource Joan. You continue
to provide useful, engaging ESL resources for learners.
As an ESL teacher, I have appreciated the Westcoast
Reader in the classroom–both in Vancouver and
overseas. It’s great you are taking your expertise
to a new level with on-line technology. All the best,
Janet Nicol,
Killarney Secondary School
Vancouver
January 7th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Thank you, Janet. I remember when you took The Westcoast Reader to Mongolia some years ago and shared it with teachers there.
And to everyone else who has posted comments, I appreciate your support for Best of The Reader.
January 14th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
I am teaching a group of ESL beginners at a Learning Centre and decided to tailor these new ebooks to their needs. I printed all the one book level stories and activities from each book (15 total) and made a booklet for each student. I even cut out the photos and made a collage for the cover. These will be our workbooks for a few weeks. I plan to add more pages to each story as we go along. I love the flexibility this resource offers. And my students love the variety of the stories.
January 19th, 2010 at 6:52 am
I FOUND YOU ON WESTCOAST READER. I WAS VERY HAPPY .
I TRY TO LEARN OF YOUR BOOKS.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:32 am
I am very happy to have a student add a comment. Thank you, Nahid. I am working on the other six e-books. Are there any topics you would like to read about?
January 21st, 2010 at 10:52 am
I am studying English in ELSA. My teacher is Karen. We like the e-books. They are interesting and excellent. They are easy for our class to read. We want more information about world news, Canada, more sports and about food.
January 21st, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Congratulations Joan,
I am a long-time colleague at Capilano in the Faculty of Developmental Studies and I was thrilled to see the Best of the Reader come online. I knew from experience that these would be wonderful teaching materials so I immediately began to look for ways and means to copy the booklets through our printshop and to distribute them in class sets to 12 to 15 dept. locations throughout our region. The instructors are all enthusiastic and waiting patiently as I make good on my promise that they would receive class sets. I am fortunate to be a project manager this term, so Joan, being able to distribute your booklets feels as if it will be one of the most memorable and joyful tasks I take on. Thanks for all your years of work at Capilano enriching the teaching and learning lives of so many learners and instructors.
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Dear Joan,
This is amazing work! Thank you for spending time to keep your legacy of work available for future generations of literacy and ESL students.
I am sure that we will be able to use this as a resource for our CAC and Intermediate level ESL classes here at Capilano University.
You are greatly missed!
Maggie Reagh
Department of ESL
Capilano University
April 24th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
What a delight to find online these treasures from over so many years!
Richard Darville
Assistant Professor
School of Linguistics & Language Study
Carleton University
August 16th, 2010 at 9:53 am
I have used all the e-books on this website with my ESL students. I have to say that I am most impressed with Canada’s Aboriginal People. Newcomers to Canada know so little about this subject and seem to quickly acquire misinformation and buy into the stereotypes. “Canada’s Aboriginal population” explains the three main groups so clearly and all the stories are interesting and positive — the Prince family, the woman who started the smoked salmon business, the amazing Susan Point, etc.