Our son James is due to turn five this Saturday, and to help build up some of the excitement for him, this week our bedtime story selections have regularly included Mr. Birthday from the classic Roger (and now his son Adam) Hargreaves Mr. Men and Little Miss series of storybooks.
Jamie loves the Mr. Men books and asks for them to be read to him regularly.
By my very rough estimates, he would be able to understand roughly 20-25% of the words or phrases (or, if you like, "turns of phrase") in the books. Which, apparently, alongside the excellent and very simple illustrations, is more than enough for him to understand the story, get a real feel for the characters, pick up on most of the humour, and genuinely enjoy the plot.
All of the other language in the books doesn't go in one ear and out the other for him. To my way of understanding, it goes in one ear rather quietly and joins a vast array of little delayed echoes that slide about on the periphery of his language awareness and cognitive development.
This is similar for most of the books we read together, but occasionally we do read very simple stories that are more similar to graded readers. The stories generally don't really compare to "real books" in terms of the depth and characterisation, but the good thing is that they allow him to start reading stories very much on his own, with just a little help.
You might be unsurprised to learn, then, that I have a very real concern about EFL and ESL programs relying on graded readers and carefully constructed texts as the be all and end all of the approach to reading.
Sure, Jamie is a native speaker and a young learner.
But this didn't stop me having enormous success with the Mr. Men books when I was teaching kindergarten students in Korea. They loved the stories, even with less than the 20-25% comprehension of individual words and phrases that Jamie appears to exhibit.
That is, they loved them until a Korean co-teacher informed them that the books were too hard for them, and proved her case by attempting to quiz my students about the meanings of individual words in the text. Once the learners became "aware" that the texts were "too hard for their level" they weren't all that keen on reading them anymore. Some parents complained, and that was the end of Mr. Men and Little Miss stories in my kindergarten classes.
Such a pity...
Let me take this a little further, however, and point out that I don't think this sort of issue is limited to younger learners. From primary/elementary right through secondary school levels and even in universities, there appears to be an obsession in ELT with only ever providing students with texts that are very carefully matched to their existing "level". Contrived, awkward-feeling stories appear to be a very acceptable sacrifice for the benefit of having texts that contain 90% or something of the words they (should) already know, and another 10% they will learn in their next so-called level.
I definitely see the point of using graded texts to help learners to read, and to feel confident with the language they are learning.
But used exclusively this way in a reading approach, I think they are both a false advertisement for what genuine reading in the target language is (going to be) like, and can be detrimental for the potential to stock up on some of those "delayed echoes" I mentioned earlier.
As a second language learner myself, taking up Swedish when I went to university, by the end of the second year in the programme I was being asked to read some fairly heavy texts and novels from some of Sweden's best-known literary figures (think Strindberg and Lagerkvist, just to get started!).
I really struggled with these books at first, because I was trying to understand every word in every sentence and stumbling along through chapters with a heavy Swedish-English dictionary in the other hand. It was highly frustrating and, in the end, a war I was destined to lose time and time again.
Eventually I learned to read the texts more for an overall "feel" of them. I focused on what I could understand, made guesses about what I couldn't, and let the rest sort of "soak in" around the edges. I really do think the fact I became fluent in Swedish so quickly and enjoyed access to a very large vocabulary as a second language speaker had a lot to do with this process of focus, guess, and "soak." Beyond reading things like newspapers, it became a very useful strategy for watching movies and television programs, and even for coping during fast-paced conversations with native speakers.
I think it is really important to encourage this sort of broader and less discriminatory intake of a second language, alongside anything more careful and targeted.
Using only things like graded readers and input that has been dissected and reassembled to carefully match what is felt to be learners' current level and vocabulary range, well - it results in some short-term success and feelings of satisfaction. Sure.
But language learning is a distance race - not a sprint, and it rarely (if ever) sticks to one straight, flat, predictable course.
Second language learners need those delayed echoes as much as they need anything else. Especially for their longer-term prospects with the language.
:-)
