An important part of learning a new language is reading texts for pleasure—books that are enjoyable, relatable, and engaging. They expose readers to new vocabulary in an authentic way while also building skills that improve speed and fluency in a new language.
Alice Savage knows this and uses her writing to celebrate it. Author of Gemma Media’s Yellow House series, Alice has created stories built on the theme of chain migration that many newcomers to the US can find familiarity in, while also improving their reading and language skills.
Gemma has released the first four books in the series, which follow the family of Yusef— who goes by Joe—and his wife Brita and their children who moved into the yellow house on Summer Street. Joe’s extended family, from war-torn Syria, sequentially come to live in Houston with them, starting with his rough-around-the-edges nephew Rashid. The stories show how the family and neighbors build relationships through romances, accidents, education, and even extreme weather. Books 3 and 4 were just released, and the fifth book in the series—Rashid’s Road Trip—will be released early next year.
Alice has worked with immigrants in the Houston area teaching English as a second language for over 30 years. About a decade ago, she began writing fiction, including several plays, to add that missing element of pleasure reading for students. Students needed the type of reading, she said, that doesn’t require them to continuously stop and look up words, but rather just let them let go of some of the pressure of learning to read and relate.
Her stories draw on her own experiences of what she’s learned working with adults in the classroom as well as having previously been married to a man from the Middle East. She builds themes of family and community. She creates characters who are working to do their best in every situation and who react with resilience, compassion, and grit—just like the students she’s met in her courses.
It’s important to Alice that her books positively and authentically represent chain migration and families helping families. She sets her characters as middle to upper class because it’s been her experiences, but also because it’s important to realize that not everyone who comes to the US is in dire need, she said.
While the books are short—held to 10,000 words—there is a lot of planning that goes into every word. For example, Alice structures the Yellow House stories using a template that new English speakers can emulate when they tell their own stories. She reiterates language using tons of dialogue, and each book is carefully restricted to 800 word families. This means if she uses the word “pretty” in one place and “beautiful” in another, she will go through the book to make changes to ensure she has only used one of the two words. This repetition of vocabulary is important and built on the idea that you need to be exposed to a word 20 times before you acquire it.
She also has created reader’s theater scripts from her books using dialogue from the stories. These free resources can be found on Gemma’s website and are designed to both reinforce new words as well as teach new language learners what to stress as they speak. Students have to think about the character they are portraying and how that person would say something, building pronunciation and prosody. Instructors can then use this exercise to open discussion, asking what character students think they’re most like or whether they can share their own stories of helping families who are new to the country.
Alice sees this as the “real stuff” learners will use in the world and why she sees so much benefit in creating the reader’s theater supplements. She said the scripts are not meant to be memorized. They should be held in hand as a way to drill and practice multiple times so that when they are ready to perform a scene, they do so fluently, building confidence speaking.
As the series evolves, so does the vocabulary. While the core word families carry through each book, Alice relies on plot lines to introduce vocabulary about weather, health care, or factories, for example.
Every aspect of the Yellow House series was thoughtfully crafted to be relatable, to allow readers to learn without pressure, and, hopefully, to find some enjoyment at the same time.
- You can purchase the Yellow House stories from New Readers Press. The series includes:
- The Yellow House on Summer Street
- Mona
- Eli’s Coming
- Warehouse 54
- Rashid’s Road Trip — Coming early 2026
Alice Savage has written course material for English as a second language classrooms for over 20 years. Most recently, outside of fiction, she worked with New Readers Press on our new series To Your Health!, which will be released in September.