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Encouraging
Extensive Reading
by Scott Shelton
- 2
How
to go about it
In my experience, it can be quite difficult to convince adult
learners, in an EFL or ESL environment, with an already tight
work and school schedule, to make the time to read if they
do not already have the habit. Christine Nuttall (1996) rightly
points out that teachers have to create the right conditions
for reading to become a valued part of every student's life.
They first have to ensure that attractive books are available
and second, use every trick available they know to persuade
students to 'get hooked on books'. If a school has a class
library, and teachers purposely take their students into it
and actively promote reading, the chances of people beginning
to read are greatly improved. Nuttall offers an attractive
acronym to aid teachers and administrators in putting together
a collection of books to be made available:
SAVE. S for short. A for appealing. V for varied. And E for
easy.
Four essentially important points to keep in mind if we want
our readers to be successful and want to continue reading,
which is the primary goal of any extensive reading program.
In
line with a learner centered approach, a 'needs and interest'
questionnaire could be circulated among the students of the
school on a periodic basis in order to ensure that there are
materials on offer to cover a wide range of interests and
needs.
In
order to keep up interest and encourage people to take reading
seriously, time can be set up either in class or outside class
time (as part of an extra-curricular 'conversation' class)
to allow students to discuss what they are reading and promote
interest in others to continue on. In my class survey mentioned
earlier, by far the most popular method of choosing a book
to read was by recommendation from a friend.
The
teacher plays an important role model too. By bringing in
books to share with the class and being seen with books he
or she is seen as an active member of the classroom reading
community and helps to promote reading as an expected norm.
I always take my new classes into our school library and ensure
that they know what is available and how to access the materials
there. In a recent effort to promote learner autonomy, I have
been stressing reading as an important tool, at the fingertips
of every student, to be used as a complement to regular classroom
attendance.
As
well as student libraries, there is the immense resource of
the Internet. In one of my advanced classes we have been focusing
on reading and part of what we have been working with was
the urban myth or legend. Daniel Linder (2001) points out,
in an article on the subject, many good reasons for using
them with learners. Among them are; short and neat plots,
elements of humor and irony, being an active part of both
the culture of English speaking countries as well as EFL countries,
and they exist in almost any subject area. I was able to leave
my class with several web sites dealing with urban legends
at the end of the class in which we had listened to, read,
and re-told a few examples of them. They all quickly copied
them down. This is a good example of available out-of-class
reading sources for most students world-wide.
What
to read
As mentioned above, Urban legends are one possible genre and
the Internet is one possible place to look for reading material.
But if we are to take into account of what has been said on
the subject of learners reading extensively, whatever they
choose to read must be largely understandable to them to be
able to afford any of the benefits that this sort of pleasurable
reading can incur.
In
their article on extensive reading, Bamford and Day (1997)
make several interesting points to consider. As a result of
the Communicative Language Teaching movement, authentic reading
material for real communication has largely replaced the step
by step, focus on form approach to reading that was commonplace
in traditional language teaching and it was suggested that
students should read authentic texts by and for native speakers.
Honeyfield
(1977) demonstrated that artificial, simplified texts lacking
features of authentic texts were less-than-useful preparation
for students learning to read in the real world. This may
well be true for developing reading skills in the classroom
and analyzing functions of discourse, though have less to
do with extensive reading purposes. Although extensive reading
can be regarded as a communicative meaning-oriented approach
in contrast to form oriented or translation approaches, it
is pointed out, however, that it is the very communicative
insistence on authentic text that makes extensive reading
all but impossible for less than very advanced students. Perhaps
the distinction between intensive and extensive reading and
the purpose for which we are reading needs to be considered
before we throw the balance too far in one direction when
deciding on criteria for choosing a text. That would bring
us to the question of just what makes "authentic"
reading material authentic. Janet Swaffer offers an explanation:
"For
purposes of the foreign language classroom, an authentic text…
is one whose primary intent is to communicate meaning, In
other words, such a text can be one which is written for native
speakers of a language to be read by other native speakers…or
it may be a text intended for a language learner group. The
relevant consideration here is not for whom it is written
but that there has been an authentic communicative objective
in mind." (1985:17)
Bramford
and Day (1997) go on to suggest that artificiality in texts
that have been simplified occurs when the writer is more concerned
with using particular words, or telling an entire story in
the present perfect and less concerned with communication.
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