ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Curtis | Peter | Marc | Chuck
Date: May 2005

Topic: "How does one set up a reading class, especially in situations where extensive reading is not an option?"

Peter Viney

Phew! Ask an easier one!

I refer back to my original piece on reading as I don't want to simply restate it.

First off, I don't believe that Krashen is right in his Comprehension Hypothesis. Krashen has one genuine insight on acquisition, and he overplays it. Moreover, when he sets out how students will progress from graded readers and TPR through light reading and the "classics" to the ultimate goal of "comparative literature," I believe he is guilty of intellectual arrogance and fails to recognize that his goals are not those of most students. You can't argue from fabulous Hungarian polyglots or the experience of a Mexican waiter who acquired perfect Hebrew by working in a Kosher restaurant to a theory of language teaching / learning / acquisition. Well, I guess you can and do if you have the charisma to carry it off, but it's not possible for us mere mortals.

“Extensive reading is hugely beneficial to students IF you can persuade them to do it. I don't come in with the belief that this is always possible, nor that it's desirable for everyone.”

There is some hoary tale about an 18th century Englishman who taught himself German entirely from a German copy of The Bible without even comparing the texts. Usefully, he knew the English version by heart first (What?). Even so, I doubt that he made many German friends if he wandered the Black Forest shouting 'Thou shalt make no graven image' at the woodcarvers or blundered around yelling 'Thou shalt not commit adultery' in Hamburg docks. There's also Flashman in George MacDonald Fraser's series of historical novels who regularly picks up arcane languages fluently in two weeks. This is a useful semi sci-fi device for novels set in unusual places, allowing him to communicate without Douglas Adams's google-fish (In A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy), but it's neither reality nor the basis for a theory.

If you subscribe to the idea that we all have multiple intelligences, you will not seek a single unified theory of language acquisition. Extensive reading is hugely beneficial to students if you can persuade them to do it. I don't come in with the belief that this is always possible, nor that it's desirable for everyone. I have taught classes of Swiss women who would happily read an entire graded reader every evening, seven days a week, and made astonishing progress as a result. I also recognize that many people are 'non-readers' through choice, and like Curtis I've taught plenty of them. I've taught many students who were struggling to puzzle their way through Roman letters, let alone read for pleasure. Extensive reading would be of no use to them.

In my recent material, I start with reading for pleasure. Snippets of facts. Short jokes. Lists. Cartoons. Word puzzles. This is reading, 'Reading in Snippets' if you like. It needs illustration, too. In the past I've tried bits of subliminal reading in textbook units ­ strips of facts or figures which are not supposed to be exploited in class. You have to get the students feeling that looking at a page in English might be fun before you get them to try and read anything as daunting as a graded reader. One major step is that we encourage them to read these snippets outside the classroom in any order they like (though they do appear in a very roughly graded sequence).

I'd also avoid 'the reading lesson' as such like the plague. It's tiny bits of reading in other lessons that gets interest started. Where I agree with Krashen is that the primary goal of reading is comprehending what's on the page, not performing a comprehension exercise. Can I quote from my earlier article?

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.

Now that won't work without preparing the ground, which more than anything means getting them to trust your advice. Nor will it work with every student. If you get half of them interested, you're winning. Or rather,they're winning.

I agree with Curtis that many tasks destroy the magic of a story. I always used the example of a parent soothing a child to sleep with Snow White, then slamming the book shut and asking 'How many dwarves were there?' or 'What colour was the apple?' Comprehension work is useful, but I don't call that a reading lesson. I call that active language practice based on a text. Eliciting a grammar point, or lexical chunks, or vocabulary from a given text is also useful. But it's not a "reading lesson" either. I actually don't believe in "reading" lessons any more than I believe in "listening lessons" or "speaking lessons." I vary the input, I vary my goals. I don't like dividing the skills, because they all complement one another.

Extensive reading for acquisition is a solitary task. You can build to it. You can encourage it by doing reading skill exercises in class that show them what they can glean from a text without understanding every word. Develop individual reading skills of skimming, scanning, matching headlines to text, finding the facts in unfamiliar texts. Emphasize limited tasks over total comprehension, and you can build the confidence to approach texts on their own.

When I used to do reading development with teachers in the UK, I used authentic extracts from texts in Japanese, Hungarian and Welsh. One was a plan of a Japanese hotel. It had floor numbers in Arab numerals, and amidst the Japanese text you could see the words JAL and Trattoria. The questions were 'Which floor is the restaurant on?' and 'Where is the Japan Airlines desk?' It was amazing how many teachers threw their hands up in despair and said they couldn't find the information from the realia. Another exercise was 'What's the Welsh for television?' They found it surprisingly difficult to guess that it was 'telefision' from a text. The third was find the football result and the scorers from a Hungarian text. The match involved an English team with well-known players. It was all dead easy, but if teachers found themselves unable to guess and deduce when confronted with a sea of unfamiliar text, what hope did they have of persuading students to move from the unknown to the known?

When it comes to graded readers, there are two opposite but equally valid views. One is that they work best when students understand 95% of the text, so they can be taught to read the whole page without stopping over unfamiliar words. They should simply mark them and only come back if they've failed to get the gist of the passage. The other is that students can read "up a level" if they are interested in the subject matter. Both methods can operate in tandem. On grading schemes, I'm always surprised at how careless some of the schemes are over minor structural points. You have to grade for structure, sentence length, number of clauses and so on as well as vocabulary. See also an ancient article by me on Preparing a Reading Scheme.

Panelists: Curtis | Peter | Marc | Chuck

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Peter Viney, Freelance ELT Author

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

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