Adapting A Text
One thing that comes to my mind is probably making a small adaptation to the reading on the emails. Instead of having only two emails with all the information, I would create about 3 to 4 to shorten the pieces of information between them. For example, Simon's first email could be only about asking his friend if he's at Eidenburg and hoping that things are good. Fran could easily reply that she's been busy and that she's learning a lot about other languages and cultures. Then Simon can answer back asking about his host family, and have Fran tell him all about them. I would keep this format until I get the full story. I know that if I break the emailing into multiple pieces of information I am stretching the activity to a certain point that it might be tedious for some people, but I have to take into consideration that I might have some students that are not familiar with emailing and who probably never had or used a computer before. If this is to be the case, I would totally follow the above adaptation.
The exploitability level of the text is adequate for my learners. Here, I can have my students brainstorm ideas and begin to anticipate the content of the reading. Discussions of unknown vocabulary will take place as we work our way into reading the text once, twice and possibly three times. Each time will give us a different level of understanding and comprehension.
As soon as I feel or think that my students have learned the objectives of this lesson, I would have them create additional emails from Simon and Fran with entirely new information, but following the same format as it was initially presented. This extra activity can take us to explore other areas in the English language like sentence structure, grammar, speaking and listening.
Here are some sources that are useful when it comes to knowing if your reading material is suitable for your learners.
https://app.readable.io/text/
http://blog.tesol.org/reading-texts-for-adult-ells/
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