Page 25 - ELG1804 Apr Issue 456

IATEFL special . SPECIAL FEATURE
Do you want to actually teach

Telling your young learners to read?

fairy Graded readers from the innovative new ELT publisher

tales based on the latest research into early reading

Designed for children whose first language is not English

Terry Phillips explores some of the common myths surrounding graded
readers for language learners

have been in language teaching for over part of a programme to improve reading fact that course-book texts often don’t have Engaging!
forty years, working as a freelance ELT skills. any communicative value at all. They exist
author for the last thirty. I have written I began my search confidently. However, only as a vehicle for a particular grammatical
I support materials for graded readers but I rapidly identified several underlying myths structure or, more rarely, a vocabulary set.
never actually written any readers myself. that seemed to militate against the sourcing Readers are perhaps ‘purer’ and therefore get a
I never thought there was a need for any of good graded readers for young EFL classification all their own.
more. learners for a class programme. As I see it, all reading texts should be
In 2017 I joined Innova Press. Almost graded in a way which will assist the reader to
the first request from a potential client was make subconscious patterns of structure, and Motivating!
to source graded readers for young EFL Myth 3: You only need to control for to present, then reinforce, new vocabulary.
learners. They were to be used in class as vocabulary level to make a reading text
comprehensible Fun!

Graded ESL/EFL readers from UK Myth 5:Reading for pleasure just
Myth 1: Readers for native speaker publishers are certainly strictly, almost involves providing interesting texts
children are fine for non-native children pathologically, controlled for vocabulary. Colourful!
But English is a syntactic language,
so unless there is equally strict control This is fine as far as it goes, but what makes
The vast majority of readers in the global of syntactic patterns, the chances of a text intrinsically interesting? We can try to
market – principally from US publishers – comprehension are reduced, even of known ensure that topics are interesting but we all
were originally for native-speaker children, words in a particular sentence. We can ‘read on’ to the next page of a text because
but according to vocabulary expert Paul certainly grade syntactic structures and we want to know the answer to a question
Nation, ‘A seven-year-old native speaker … must do so in graded readers. or to find out what happens next.
knows at least 5,000 words.’ There is no intrinsic pleasure in simply Pop-out characters
Our target population was seven years turning the pages of a reader. The pleasure
old, but our children knew almost no comes from making predictions about for story retelling
English words. Myth 4: Graded readers should what comes next and then having them
only be part of an extensive reading confirmed or confounded. So graded readers
programme need ‘hooks’ at the end of every page to
get the reader – especially, perhaps, the
Our client wanted to use the graded readers young learner – to turn over and check • Free audio
Myth 2: Readers can guess unknown in class once a week – an excellent idea. But predictions.
words from context graded readers are not, apparently, designed So what was the result of my research • For classwork or for one-to-one
for this but for ‘extensive reading’. But is there for our potential client? I found that all the
a qualitative difference between reading a myths above were alive and well and made •
This myth has powered sloppy vocabulary short text in a course book and reading a short the graded readers I was potentially able 76% of the 200 most common English words in Grades 1 to 4
control for some time, but research story in a reader? to source completely unsuitable for the use
suggests that learners need to know Reading is extracting the communicative required by the client. • Detailed teacher / parent notes
around 98 per cent of the words in a text value from a text. That’s true when you read And so, reader, I wrote them myself.
in order to guess the remainder (Schmitt a course text and find information to enter
et al, 2011). into a table (intensive reading, supposedly). Terry Phillips
For an L2 child, the number of known And it’s true when you have to read the story is business Visit innovapress.com to see a flipbook reader
words in a reader written for native in order to understand who did what and why development director
speakers will be more like 2 per cent. (extensive reading, so they say). The same for Innova Press and to browse our range of titles
basic processes of decoding are involved. Limited … amongst
Perhaps the elephant in the room is the other things.
24 April 2018 editorial@elgazette.com Innovating Language Education
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