La Photo dans le Placard-an original mystery story in 12 chapters

I wrote this 12-chapter story-La Photo dans le Placard- for my students when I couldn’t find anything that fitted my requirements. I wanted a pacey narrative, short chapters and comprehensible input via pared-down language. So I had to write it myself.

This story will provide you and your students with a full 12-week reading programme or alternatively a concentrated 2-3 week reading project. It took about 35 hours of work and will provide you with a whole term of reading. It has also been proofread and tested on my own students with excellent results.

The story is about a young woman, Sophie, who feels that she doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of her family. One day, when discovering an old photo in a cupboard at her parents’ home, she decides to discover the identity of the mystery man in the photograph and why his existence has been kept a secret.

I have put a good number of cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter to drive the reader to want to know what happens next. Grammar structures are there, obviously, but the writing is not driven by the need to demonstrate and practise rules of grammar (as is usually the case in textbooks). I have used pared-down language to keep the reader moving independently with minimal use of a dictionary. ( For more information about pared-down language please refer to aimlanguagelearning.com)

I have also written an additional resource, How to create a reading programme, which will give you ideas about how to develop work on reading resources in general.