Hi Gina,
I am also new to this site. My name is John and I am an ESL instructor for
Tulsa Community College. My first advice on using reading and literature in
your classroom is to identify what your terminal goals and objectives are.
For our program, we want to prepare students to be able to not only pass
their English College Placement Test but to be able to excel on their future
college level course work. 

Here is an outline of what I did last semester for one of my Academic
reading classes.

First, secondary news articles that included charts, diagrams, and tables.
Some of these were included in our textbook, but I got others from National
Geographic and other news sources. The primary purpose of each article and
exercise was to show how the charts graphs and tables were used to support
the written text. 

Second, I introduced the class to diaries, journals and other personal
writings. My purpose with this was to build upon the previous section, show
the students how a personal account from a witness or an expert can be very
powerful, and offer an unusual or insightful look at a topic. 

Third, I introduced the class to a variety of poetry. My topics were love
and war. The reason for this is that poems about these subjects tend to have
a strong and obvious emotional content. This was my primary purpose, to show
the class how writing, without facts, personal accounts or statistics can be
used to solicit an emotional response.

Fourth, I brought in several argumentative articles that were for and
against current national or international policies. I used these to show how
personal accounts and emotion are used to appeal to the reader to influence
their opinion. I challenged them to check the facts and claims made in their
articles. Many completed the assignment finding either that the facts didn't
exist, or that they were taken out of context. From here we analyzed the
quality of a source in research.

Finally, I used a series of academic articles and excerpts from textbooks to
show them how all of these factors can come together. Illustrating how the
use of charts, graphs and tables can be used to support expert or first
person accounts of the topic. We discussed how the articles were organized
and how some of the articles generated an emotional response through their
facts and testimony instead of inflated or false statements. In the end the
class was able to read and analyze a variety of different styles of written
materials and they were also able to acquire skills that they would need in
the future. 

One suggestion is to locate a concordencer, there are a few free ones on
line or you can pay for one if you wish. This program allows you to sort
through all of the words in each article that can be used to generate a
vocabulary list and identify any difficult or unusual words that you may
need to explain.

One other point to consider is if the article or literary work uses
colloquial English. For example, if the article uses professional English or
the literary work  may use words and phrases that are either not used today,
or they are used in a different manner. 

I hope this helps. 

John Warrior
Tulsa Community College
Tulsa, Oklahoma
John.r.warrior at cox.net