ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Panelists: Marc | Peter
Date: May 2003
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Topic: "What role does reading play in the language learning process?"

Peter Viney

This is the title of a book rather than an article, so this is a few gentle scratches on the surface. My answers will be disjointed!

Reading differs hugely in importance according to the mother tongue. I've experienced being in Italy during the World Cup, and happily reading the results and match reviews in Italian newspapers. I don't speak Italian. But because I have studied Latin and French, and because my guessing ability is high, I had few problems. This won't help a Japanese student. On the other hand, most Japanese students have spent years reading and writing before they end up in a situation where speaking and listening are paramount.

“The most important technique of all is guessing from context.”

Reading is the skill that benefits most from personal input - reading for pleasure from graded readers, developing guessing skills, reading short peripheral material, probably learning a few basic Greek / Latin roots (pre-, post-, tele- etc) to improve the ability to guess new words. A classroom course needs to set some tasks that improve skills, but much of the real work can be done outside the classroom. The most important technique of all is guessing from context.

Language teachers often ignore the most basic initial reading skills. I've seen beginner materials criticized as difficult, when the true difficulty is students' literacy, or operational knowledge of the basic pre-reading building blocks - letter formation, phonic values of letters, instinctive awareness of alphabetical order (try using a monolingual dictionary without it), basic spelling rules and so on. These are ignored as it is assumed they have been taught properly by someone else, sometime earlier. Not always true.

One of the leading experts on "whole reading" techniques starts off his book by saying "English has no spelling rules" which betrays his ignorance. English has plenty of spelling rules. The problem is that it has too many. Virtually every spelling combination can be found to fit a rule, albeit an obscure one. Teachers who have made great strides with dyslexics will tell you that whole reading techniques are the root cause of much dyslexia, and that many readers need to learn the rules.

I've got three kids. The oldest was an average reader who could combine whole language techniques and phonic rules; the second was the one who the whole language books were written for - she could absorb complete sentences like a sponge; and the third was severely dyslexic and had to apply rules at every stage. That's how I know that there is no perfect method for teaching initial reading skills. When your students come to you, you need to assess whether they are fluent readers AT AN OPERATIONAL LEVEL and apply remedial techniques if they are not. This is basic.

I've edited many graded readers, written several and published books on developing reading skills. I've designed graded reading series, and most interestingly also written for other schemes. I'm convinced that extra reading reflects back on every other skill, though in an indirect way. I would encourage the use of graded readers, with the choice of reader dictated by individual student interest. A graded reading library is a vital component for most courses.

We spent years working in this area. We started off issuing graded readers in class and checking back on them in some detail. Then we graduated to having graded readers available from an administrative secretary, rather than the teacher. We did minimal checking in class with short feedback sheets (What was it about? Did you enjoy it?). Finally we had totally free access to readers with NO classroom checking. The number of graded readers borrowed multiplied fivefold. We avoided any kind of checking. To our astonishment students began reading more in English than in their own language. This fed back on all areas of their performance in class. More importantly students said they'd even begun to read more in their mother tongue as a result.

Conversely, my latest materials have deliberately lightened the emphasis on reading and writing in favour of speaking and listening, because I feel this is what we can do most efficiently in the limited time available. We have approached reading skills in the classroom as a preamble to student self-access reading and provided the self-access materials. Every course has a set number of hours and we owe it to students to make the best use of our limited time with them.

Panelists: Marc | Peter

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Peter Viney, Freelance ELT Author

Co-author of New American Streamline & Grapevine. Peter's Web site

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