Becoming a Reading Teacher: Connecting Research and Practice 2022032259, 2022032260, 9781032405261, 9780367473020, 9781003041382

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CONTENTS
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Series Editor’s Preface
Introduction
Becoming a reading teacher
Why should a teacher of reading engage with research?
Ten questions about reading
What this book is not
What this book is
1. From research to implications
A: Framing Reading as Linguistic Process
Introduction
Question 1: What are we doing when we read?
Question 2: What are the different reasons and ways people read?
Question 3: What knowledge do we bring to our reading?
Question 4: What is the relationship between L1 and L2 reading?
B: Framing Reading as Personal Experience
Introduction
Question 5: Why and how do people read for pleasure?
Question 6: Can reading change the way we think and feel?
C: Framing Reading as Collective Experience
Introduction
Question 7: How far and in what ways is reading a collective act?
Reading groups and EFL learners
Teachers’ reading groups
D: Framing Reading as Pedagogy
Introduction
Question 8: What pedagogies are used in the teaching of reading?
Question 9: How should teachers of reading teach language?
Question 10: What does it mean to be an effective teacher of reading?
Our beliefs and principles
2. From implications to application
A: Teaching Reading as Linguistic Process
Introduction
Question 1: What are we doing when we read?
Activity 1.1. All in one: the shape of words
Activity 1.2. Word chain race
Activity 1.3. Learner generated word chain race
Activity 1.4. Run-on sentences: seeing and hearing sentence boundaries
Activity 1.5. Text shopping: what’s next in the text?
Activity 1.6. Reading aloud and holistic reading
Activity 1.7. Storytelling: stories without barriers
Question 2: What are the different reasons and ways people read?
Activity 2.1. Reading the landscape: noticing and acting in the linguistic landscape
Activity 2.2. Bits and pieces: choosing your favourite bits in a longer text
Activity 2.3. Wikipedia race: searching for something specific
Activity 2.4. Information slant: separating facts and opinions
Activity 2.5. Why I read: personal reading behaviours
Question 3: What knowledge do we bring to our reading?
Activity 3.1. Rhyme race: reading and sounds
Activity 3.2. Word bags: knowing about words
Activity 3.3. Language detectives: reading and language
patterns
Activity 3.4. Text guessing: reading and text types
Activity 3.5. Reading between the lines: reading for nuance
Activity 3.6. Border crossing: reading culturally
Question 4: What is the relationship between L1 and L2 reading?
Activity 4.1. Book covers crossing borders
Activity 4.2. Text memory game
Activity 4.3. First language story sharing
Activity 4.4. Talking to the author: asking questions about a text
Activity 4.5. Comprehending across languages
B: Teaching Reading as Personal Experience
Introduction
Question 5: Why and how do people read for pleasure?
Activity 5.1. Feeling stories
Activity 5.2. The dream book competition: understanding reading preferences
Activity 5.3. Reading spurs and blocks: what would make you read more?
Activity 5.4. Profiles of lifelong readers
Question 6: Can reading change the way we think and feel?
Activity 6.1. Nobel prize champions: books which changed the way we think
Activity 6.2. Re-reading over time: returning to childhood stories
Activity 6.3. Reading in layers
Activity 6.4. Personal reading histories
C: Teaching Reading as Collective Experience
Introduction
Question 7: How far and in what ways is reading a collective act?
Activity 7.1. Performing reading
Activity 7.2. Dream circles: building reading circles
Activity 7.3. Choosing together
Activity 7.4. Reading Shaping the Child
D: Teaching and Training Reading Pedagogy
Introduction
Question 8: What pedagogies are used in the teaching of reading?
Activity 8.1. Communicating with texts
Activity 8.2. Text Activities: Interacting with Texts
Activity 8.3. Task-based reading and the real world
Activity 8.4. Activity detective: mining for principles
Question 9: How should teachers of reading teach language?
Activity 9.1. Genre bending: unravelling text types
Activity 9.2. Language doctor: unravelling a text
Question 10: What does it mean to be an effective teacher of reading?
Activity 10.1. Finding a star teacher 1: criteria for stardom
Activity 10.2. Finding a star teacher 2: asking questions
Activity 10.3. Star teacher of reading competition
Activity 10.4. Walking into the shoes of star teachers
3. From application to implementation: teaching reading in time and place
Introduction
A: Becoming a Reading Teacher: Connecting with Others
B: Becoming a Reading Teacher: Know Yourself as a Reader
C: Building Reading Resources
D: Building a Reading Assessment Strategy
E: Reading for Many Kinds of Learners
If you teach young children
If you teach adults
If your learners all share the same first language
If your learners have multiple different first languages
F: Reading for Different Kinds of Classes
If you teach large classes
If you teach small classes or one to one
If you are teaching reading for special purposes
If you are teaching English language reading in an English language context
If you are teaching English language reading in a second/foreign language context
G: Reading Outside the Classroom
H: Creating a Reading Culture
I: Conclusion
4. From implementation to research
Introduction: researching as a teacher
A: Researching Reading as Linguistic Process
B: Researching Reading as Personal Experience
C: Researching Reading as Collective Experience
D: Researching Reading Pedagogy
Final reflections: The virtuous circle
References
Index

Citation preview

BECOMING A READING TEACHER

This book encourages readers to think about reading not only as an encounter with written language, but as a lifelong habit of engagement with ideas. We look at reading in four different ways: as linguistic process, personal experience, collective experience and as classroom practice. We think about how reading influences a life, how it changes over time, how we might return at different stages of life to the same reading, how we might respond differently to ideas read in an L1 and L2. There are 44 teaching activities, all founded on research that explores the nature, value and impact of reading as an authentic activity rather than for language or study purposes alone. We consider what this means for schools and classrooms, and for different kinds of learners. The final part of the book provides practical stepping stones for the teacher to become a researcher of their own classes and learners. The four parts of the book offer a virtuous join between reading, teaching and researching. It will be useful for any teacher or reader who wishes to refresh their view of how reading fits in to the development of language and the development of a reading life. Jane Spiro is Professor of Education and TESOL at Oxford Brookes University, National Teaching Fellow and Research Lead for Applied Linguistics. Her book Changing Methodologies in TESOL (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) forms the core of the MA in TESOL in the School of Education. She has run programmes for teachers of language and literature worldwide, including Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Kenya and India. Her doctorate was on the role of creativity in language education (Bath University 2008). She is a published poet and novelist: her resources for the teaching of language through creative writing include Storybuilding (2007)

and Creative Poetry Writing (2004), with Oxford University Press. She was co-editor of the journal Reading in a Foreign Language in its first incarnation in the UK. Her most recent publication is Crossing Borders in University Learning and Teaching (Routledge, 2022). Amos Paran is Professor of TESOL at the IoE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. His background is in teaching EFL in secondary schools in Israel, and he has worked and taught internationally, including visiting appointments in Chile, Germany and Hungary. He has also written EFL coursebooks including supplementary skills books for reading comprehension, and his doctoral work looked at processing words and reading times in L1 and L2. His current areas of interest are using literature in EFL, reading in EFL and distance education, and he has published extensively in these areas, including co-editing Testing the Untestable in Language Education (with Lies Sercu, Multilingual Matters, 2010) and co-authoring the Teachers’ Handbook Literature (with Pauline Robinson, OUP, 2016). He is a tutor on the free MOOC, Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task-Based Approach. He is the book review editor of the ELT Journal and co-convenor of the AILA Research Network, Literature in Language Learning and Teaching (LiLLT ).

Research and Resources in Language Teaching Series Editors: Anne Burns, University of New South Wales, Australia and Jill Hadfield, Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand

Research and Resources in Language Teaching is a groundbreaking series that aims to integrate the latest research in language teaching and learning with innovative classroom practice. Books in the series offer accessible accounts of current research on a particular topic, linked to a wide range of practical and immediately usable classroom activities. Communicating Identities Gary Barkhuizen and Pat Strauss Extensive Reading The Role of Motivation Sue Leather and Jez Uden Digital Literacies 2nd edition Mark Pegrum, Nicky Hockly and Gavin Dudeney Sustaining Action Research A Practical Guide for Institutional Engagement Anne Burns, Emily Edwards and Neville John Ellis Initial Language Teacher Education Gabriel Diaz Maggioli Critical Thinking Gregory Hadley and Andrew Boon Becoming a Reading Teacher Connecting Research and Practice Jane Spiro and Amos Paran For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Research-and-Resources-in-Language-Teaching/book-series/PEARRLT

BECOMING A READING TEACHER Connecting Research and Practice

Jane Spiro and Amos Paran

Cover image: ©fcscafeine at Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Jane Spiro and Amos Paran The right of Jane Spiro and Amos Paran to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Spiro, Jane, author. | Paran, Amos, author. Title: Becoming a reading teacher : connecting research and practice / Jane Spiro, Amos Paran. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Research and resources in language teaching | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022032259 (print) | LCCN 2022032260 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032405261 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367473020 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003041382 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Reading teachers--Training of. | Reading. Classification: LCC LB2844.1.R4 S75 2023 (print) | LCC LB2844.1.R4 (ebook) | DDC 428.4071--dc23/eng/20220707 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032259 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032260 ISBN: 9781032405261 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367473020 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003041382 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003041382 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Dedicated to my students over four decades who have shared their reading lives and enthusiasms and who have been my best teachers. Jane In my pre-service education and in my early years of teaching I was incredibly fortunate to be mentored and guided by a number of teachers and teacher educators without whom I would not have become the teacher that I am: Dvora Ben-Meir, Tami Ronen, the late Sheila Been and Jane Vaknin. I would like to dedicate this book to them, with infinite gratitude. Amos

CONTENTS

List of tables List of abbreviations Series editor’s preface

xiv xv xvi

Introduction1 Becoming a reading teacher  1 Why should a teacher of reading engage with research?  2 Ten questions about reading  3 What this book is not  4 What this book is  5 1 From research to implications A:  Framing reading as linguistic process 7 Introduction 7 Question 1: What are we doing when we read?  7 Question 2: What are the different reasons and ways people read?  11 Question 3: What knowledge do we bring to our reading? 14 Question 4: What is the relationship between L1 and L2 reading? 16

6

x  Contents

B:  Framing reading as personal experience 20 Introduction 20 Question 5: Why and how do people read for pleasure?  20 Question 6: Can reading change the way we think and feel?  25 C:  Framing reading as collective experience 28 Introduction 28 Question 7: How far and in what ways is reading a collective act?  28 Reading groups and EFL learners  30 Teachers’ reading groups  31 D:  Framing reading as pedagogy 33 Introduction 33 Question 8: What pedagogies are used in the teaching of reading?  33 Question 9: How should teachers of reading teach language?  37 Question 10: What does it mean to be an effective teacher of reading?  43 Our beliefs and principles  44 2 From implications to application A:  Teaching reading as linguistic process 47 Introduction 47 Question 1: What are we doing when we read?  47 Activity 1.1 All in one: the shape of words  47 Activity 1.2 Word chain race  50 Activity 1.3 Learner generated word chain race  52 Activity 1.4 Run-on sentences: seeing and hearing sentence boundaries  54 Activity 1.5 Text shopping: what’s next in the text?  56 Activity 1.6 Reading aloud and holistic reading  58 Activity 1.7 Storytelling: stories without barriers  60 Question 2: What are the different reasons and ways people read?  62 Activity 2.1 Reading the landscape: noticing and acting in the linguistic landscape  63 Activity 2.2 Bits and pieces: choosing your favourite bits in a longer text  64

46

Contents xi

Activity 2.3 Wikipedia race: searching for something specific  66 Activity 2.4 Information slant: separating facts and opinions  69 Activity 2.5 Why I read: personal reading behaviours  71 Question 3: What knowledge do we bring to our reading?  74 Activity 3.1 Rhyme race: reading and sounds  74 Activity 3.2 Word bags: knowing about words  76 Activity 3.3 Language detectives: reading and language patterns  78 Activity 3.4 Text guessing: reading and text types  80 Activity 3.5 Reading between the lines: reading for nuance  82 Activity 3.6 Border crossing: reading culturally  84 Question 4: What is the relationship between L1 and L2 reading? 86 Activity 4.1 Book covers crossing borders  86 Activity 4.2 Text memory game  88 Activity 4.3 First language story sharing  90 Activity 4.4 Talking to the author: asking questions about a text  92 Activity 4.5 Comprehending across languages  94 B:  Teaching reading as personal experience 96 Introduction 96 Question 5: Why and how do people read for pleasure?  96 Activity 5.1 Feeling stories  96 Activity 5.2 The dream book competition: understanding reading preferences  98 Activity 5.3 Reading spurs and blocks: what would make you read more?  100 Activity 5.4 Profiles of lifelong readers  103 Question 6: Can reading change the way we think and feel?  105 Activity 6.1 Nobel prize champions: books which changed the way we think  105 Activity 6.2 Re-reading over time: returning to childhood stories  108 Activity 6.3 Reading in layers  111 Activity 6.4 Personal reading histories  113

xii  Contents

C:  Teaching reading as collective experience 116 Introduction 116 Question 7: How far and in what ways is reading a collective act?  116 Activity 7.1 Performing reading  116 Activity 7.2 Dream circles: building reading circles  118 Activity 7.3 Choosing together  121 Activity 7.4 Reading shaping the child  123 D:  Teaching and training reading pedagogy 127 Introduction 127 Question 8: What pedagogies are used in the teaching of reading?  127 Activity 8.1 Communicating with texts  127 Activity 8.2 Text activities: interacting with texts  130 Activity 8.3 Task-based reading and the real world  131 Activity 8.4 Activity detective: mining for principles  134 Question 9: How should teachers of reading teach language?  137 Activity 9.1 Genre bending: unravelling text types  137 Activity 9.2 Language doctor: unravelling a text  141 Question 10: What does it mean to be an effective teacher of reading?  144 Activity 10.1 Finding a star teacher 1: criteria for stardom  144 Activity 10.2 Finding a star teacher 2: asking questions  146 Activity 10.3 Star teacher of reading competition  148 Activity 10.4 Walking into the shoes of star teachers  150 3 From application to implementation: teaching reading in time and place Introduction 154 A:  Becoming a reading teacher: connecting with others 154 B:  Becoming a reading teacher: know yourself as a reader 156 C:  Building reading resources 157 D:  Building a reading assessment strategy 161 E:  Reading for many kinds of learners 163 If you teach young children  163 If you teach adults  165 If your learners all share the same first language  166 If your learners have multiple different first languages  166

153

Contents xiii

F:  Reading for different kinds of classes 167 If you teach large classes  167 If you teach small classes or one to one  168 If you are teaching reading for special purposes  169 If you are teaching English language reading in an English language context  169 If you are teaching English language reading in a second/ foreign language context  170 G:  Reading outside the classroom 170 H:  Creating a reading culture 171 I: Conclusion 176 4 From implementation to research

177

Introduction: researching as a teacher 178 A:  Researching reading as linguistic process 180 B:  Researching reading as personal experience  186 C:  Researching reading as collective experience  188 D:  Researching reading pedagogy  191 Final reflections: The virtuous circle 194 References197 Index206

TABLES

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Building reading connections Building teaching resources Simplifying a text The construct of reading ability (based on Alderson 2000:127) Reading test frameworks Activities for reading with young learners Reading in large classes list of DON’TS Activities for reading outside the classroom Creating a reading culture Broad and narrow research questions Methods for gathering information about reading Mapping reading enjoyment Discussion roles and patterns in a reading circle (based on Shelton-Strong (2012)) Coding your questions about reading (Day and Park 2005)

155 159 160 162 163 165 168 171 176 178 179 187 190 192

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CEFR Common European Framework of Reference for Languages D Decoding EFL English as a Foreign Language ELTA English Language Teaching ESL English as a second language (usually applied to speakers of other languages living in an English-language setting) IATEFL International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language L1 First language L2 Second language (any language acquired outside the home language) RC Reading comprehension STEM Science, Technology and Maths TALO Text as linguistic object TAVI Text as vehicle for information TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

About the series Research and Resources in Language Teaching is a ground-breaking series whose aim is to integrate the latest research in language teaching and learning with innovative classroom practice. The books are written by a partnership of writers, who combine research and materials writing skills and experience. Books in the series offer accessible accounts of current research on a particular topic, linked to a wide range of practical and immediately useable classroom activities. Using the series, language educators will be able both to connect research findings directly to their everyday practice through imaginative and practical communicative tasks and to realise the research potential of such tasks in the classroom. We believe the series represents a new departure in language education publishing, bringing together the twin perspectives of research and materials writing, illustrating how research and practice can be combined to provide practical and useable activities for classroom teachers and at the same time encouraging researchers to draw on a body of activities that can guide further research.

About the books All the books in the series follow the same organisational principle: Part I: From Research to Implications Part I contains an account of current research on the topic in question and outlines its implications for classroom practice.

Series editor’s preface xvii

Part II: From Implications to Application Part II focuses on transforming research outcomes into classroom practice by means of practical, immediately useable activities. Short introductions signpost the path from research into practice Part III: From Application to Implementation Part III contains methodological suggestions for how the activities in Part II could be used in the classroom, for example, different ways in which they could be integrated into the syllabus or applied to different teaching contexts. Part IV: From Implementation to Research Part IV returns to research with suggestions for professional development projects and action research, often directly based on the materials in the book. Each book as a whole thus completes the cycle: research into practice and practice back into research.

About this book This book encourages readers to think about reading not only as an encounter with written language, but as a lifelong habit of engagement with ideas. The authors look at reading in four different ways: as linguistic process, as personal experience, as collective experience, and as an integral part of the teacher’s daily planning and pedagogy. Whilst the book does discuss reading in the classroom, it also takes a few steps beyond the classroom. The authors consider how reading influences a life, how it changes over time, how we might return at different stages of life to the same reading, how we might respond differently to ideas read in an L1 and L2. There are 44 teaching activities, all founded on research that explores the nature, value and impact of reading as an authentic activity rather than for language or study purposes alone. The book then suggests what this means for school reading policy, for schools and classrooms, for homework and assessment, and for the way you choose classroom texts. The final part of the book provides practical stepping stones for the teacher to become a researcher of their own classes and learners, trying out for themselves ten research questions described in earlier sections. The four parts of the book offer a virtuous join between teaching, reading, reflecting and researching. For all readers we hope the book refreshes their view of how reading fits in to the development of language and the development of a reading life. We hope that you will find this book and the series exciting and above all valuable to your practice and research in language education! Anne Burns and Jill Hadfield (Series Editors)

INTRODUCTION

Becoming a reading teacher We have called this book Becoming a reading teacher, with the double meaning in this title fully intentional. On the one hand we can interpret ‘the reading teacher’ as the teacher who builds reading into the lesson. This may well be you, opening this book today. As a teacher of reading, you make multiple decisions, such as how far your reading activities are about language development; which specific reading sub-skills you teach; and how or how far your focus should be on the content and meaning of the texts. For some teachers of reading, the question is how to lead from responding to text, to ‘talking’ back as an active participant, with text as a starting point for learners to express their own creativity. But there is another way of interpreting ‘reading teacher’. This is the teacher who not only provides the opportunity for learners to be readers, but who is a reader themselves. This interpretation of ‘reading teacher’ describes the teacher who reads as a lifelong habit, not for study, or language learning, but for personal enjoyment and growth, and who communicates this enthusiasm to learners. In this second meaning, we discuss not so much how a teacher might plan a reading lesson, but how they might build a whole reading culture that goes beyond the classroom. This book takes both approaches. We look at the teaching of reading from many angles, including those suggested above: reading as language development, as skills development, as engagement with meaning. But we also look at the ‘reading teacher’ in terms of building reading enthusiasms, encouraging personal engagement and leading reading out of the classroom and into a lifelong habit. DOI: 10.4324/9781003041382-1

2  Introduction

Why should a teacher of reading engage with research? There may be good reasons why a teacher of reading might not be interested in research. A teaching life is already more than busy; there are materials to prepare, students to think and care about, marking to do, forward planning to consider. In a busy teaching day there are few moments of rest, and if we do manage to sit down at the end of the day, it is a time to unwind, and not to become challenged by something new. More troubling, you may feel that research is created by other people who have very different priorities to you, who have the space, funds and leisure to conduct projects which have little bearing on your own working life. If these thoughts echo some of yours, there are good reasons why a new look at research might change your mind. First of all, research allows us to turn our difficulties, surprises and challenges into questions, and to seek answers to them. For example, research unpacks why some learners are faster than others; why some reading strategies work better than others; why enjoyable reading is not an indulgence or distraction from ‘real’ teaching. Research, in fact, can help us respond to teaching challenges, find new strategies where we have felt blocked and argue our case when we need to justify our choices and teaching decisions. Secondly, research allows us as teachers to see our role in the bigger picture. The individual teacher is not alone in testing out the value of a new idea, a new set of materials or a new teaching fashion. There are likely to be others too asking the same questions and coming to their own solutions, and we all benefit from seeing ourselves as part of a collective rather than as a lone voice, solving problems on our own and inventing wheels that someone else has trialled and refined over years. Research joins us up with others and gives our questions and experiences a wider, and shared, perspective. Thirdly, research informs and drives change – in policy, thinking, methodology, assessment and materials development. Teachers need to be part of the change, and part of the research that drives it. If teachers opt out of research, they also opt out of ensuring that research is workable and effective and makes a positive difference to them and their learners. To build this bridge between teachers and researchers, this book is structured around ten questions, starting with what learners do when they read and moving towards what teachers can do to research their own practice as readers and teachers of readers. We take a holistic view of reading, recognising that we read for many reasons: to gather information, to enter imaginary worlds, and that these reasons lead beyond the classroom, to the way we think and even act in the world. Some terminology is used throughout the book. L2 is used to indicate any language that is not the learner’s home language, whether this is a foreign language, a second language used for work or study, an additional

Introduction 3

language or a third language. Although there are contextual differences between each of these kinds of second language, this book suggests questions, activities and research studies which are relevant to all of them. Part III suggests ways these activities can be differentiated for different kinds of learners and classrooms.

Ten questions about reading Recent writing on reading and on reading in a foreign language acknowledges the huge complexity of the reading process. Indeed, Grabe (2009) makes a case for not talking about the reading process, but rather conceptualising it as a group of processes. While research into reading has expanded our understanding of its complexity and range, teachers may still be mainly influenced in their practice by the ways in which they learnt and practiced reading: for example, by isolating reading from other skills and practicing it through reading comprehension, or by reading extensively for pleasure without conscious skills-building. The findings of researchers may appear to have little connection with what is taught and learnt in classrooms. We address this gap between researcher and practitioner knowledge by asking ten questions that have puzzled and interested teachers in the workshops, reading programmes and projects we the co-authors have run over more than 80 combined teaching-researching years. These questions cluster into four broad themes: reading as language development, reading as personal experience, reading as collective experience and reading pedagogy.

Framing reading as linguistic process Questions 1–4 grapple with the question of how far reading should be seen as a vehicle for language teaching, how the first language helps and differs from second language reading and the kind of knowledge learners need to understand and appreciate a text. 1. What are we doing when we read? 2. What are the different reasons and ways people read? 3. What knowledge do we bring to our reading? 4. What is the relationship between L1 and L2 reading?

Framing reading as personal experience Questions 5 and 6 acknowledge that reading is not only an activity for language learning, but can change the way we think and feel. Can, or should, the language teacher create these conditions for reading in their classes?

4  Introduction

What should your role be as a language teacher, in fostering this personal experience of reading? 5. Why and how do people read for pleasure? 6. Can reading change the way we think and feel?

Framing reading as collective experience Question 7 deals with the assumption that reading is an isolated, even lonely, process. We ask how far reading is part of shared communication and fosters connections with others locally, culturally and imaginatively. 7. How far and in what ways is reading a collective act?

Framing reading as pedagogy Questions 8, 9 and 10 are concerned with the development of teachers, asking what it is they need to know, do and be in order to be effective teachers of reading. 8. What pedagogies are used in the teaching of reading? 9. How should teachers of reading teach language? 10. What does it mean to be an effective teacher of reading?

What this book is not This book does not claim to be a comprehensive reading syllabus. However, it is a tool for change, to be adapted by each reader for their own context and purposes. The ideas in this book can nourish the development of reading curriculum, provide evidence and examples for changing and guiding new policy, and support the teacher who wants their reading classes to be innovative and transformative. Also, this book does not claim to be a comprehensive research manual that leaves no research stone unturned. We have navigated the huge literature on reading through the lens of our ten questions and selected research studies and concepts which we think will be most meaningful, practical and helpful for teachers. It is designed for both teachers new to research as a way of questioning their practice, and teachers familiar with research and its potential to inform and change. What it does is to help both kinds of teacher ask and answer precise questions, equipped with research tools and ideas that can be applied to their own purposes and concerns.

Introduction 5

What this book is The core purpose of the volume is to show how research can offer a means to re-evaluate and re-energise reading in the ELT classroom. Most distinctively, it aims to encourage readers to think about reading not only as an encounter with written language, but as a lifelong habit of engagement with ideas. There is a great deal available in the ELT world that concerns the teaching of reading for individual lessons: for example, pre, post and while-reading activities, jigsaw reading, reading games and comprehension tasks. Whilst we do discuss this, this book takes the teaching of reading a few steps further and beyond the classroom. We think about how reading influences a life, how it changes over time, how we might return at different stages of life to the same reading, how we might respond differently to ideas read in an L1 and L2, or stories read in free flow without stopping for comprehension or language practice. The activities are all founded on research that explores the nature, value and impact of reading as an authentic activity rather than for language or study purposes alone. What this means for school reading policy, for schools and classrooms, for homework and assessment and for text choices is explored in Part III. For the teacher, the book offers new ideas and possibilities for teaching, and for transforming their teaching into sources of research knowledge. For all readers we hope the book refreshes their view of how reading fits into the development of language and the development of a reading life.

Part One FROM RESEARCH TO IMPLICATIONS

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041382-2

From research to implications 7

A: FRAMING READING AS LINGUISTIC PROCESS Introduction At one level, reading is about interpreting signs and shapes on the page. As we do so, the act of turning these shapes into meanings entails not only what we see on the page but also our experiences in the world, our assumptions about its categories and connections, and our expectations about what texts can do. We draw on our knowledge of the world and the culture which surrounds us, and we compare the text we are reading to all the other texts we have encountered which look the same or which we read in the same context. We do so rapidly, sometimes without consciously appreciating these many processes. How does research help us understand all the processes which lead from seeing shapes on the page to recognising them as connected and meaningful text? How does ‘knowing how to read’ connect with ‘knowing a language’?

Question 1: What are we doing when we read? Throughout most of our waking hours, we do something which is related (if not identical) to what you are doing now: reading. In the past 24 hours, you have probably read a number of short messages on your phone (probably on WhatsApp), seen and read a short announcement about a train being delayed or the destination of the next train, read the news in a paper or online, read and evaluated your learners’ written work, read an email from a friend, read a tweet by someone you follow and maybe spent some time immersing yourself in a novel. Reading is something that many of us do throughout the day, for longer or for shorter periods, and there were probably very few hours in which you were not reading for at least part of the time. With the prevalence of mobile phone communication and of social media, the average person is reading and writing far more than in any previous era, though they do this in forms that are very different from the ways in which these activities were conducted up until the last couple of decades. The prevalence of reading in our daily lives masks an important point: namely, that it is not a ‘natural’ thing to do. We are not hard-wired to read, whereas we are hardwired to speak: all human beings, with a few exceptions, learn to speak merely by being exposed to speech. Reading, on the other hand, has to be taught (Wolf and Barzilai 2009), and we know that even with prolonged teaching there are people who do not succeed in doing this, for a variety of reasons. As Cain, Compton and Parrila (2017:1) write, ‘printed words are one of the most remarkable inventions of humankind, and learning to read them is one of the most remarkable achievements of human individuals’. Writing and reading entered human life probably around 5,500 years ago; interestingly writing was invented in a number of different centres around

8  From research to implications

the world – probably four to six different centres – though the alphabet was invented only once, around 1850 BCE, and all alphabetic writing systems are descended from this single original alphabet. Another issue that sometimes obscures the discussion is that the word ‘reading’ has taken on a host of meanings; we talk about ‘reading someone’s mind’, or ‘reading someone’s expression’; we even talk of ‘reading the world’ – all of these are instances of the word ‘reading’ meaning something wider than the act of reading script. These extensions of the word ‘reading’, though important and meaningful, can sometimes cloud the core meaning of the word, which is that, at its very base, reading consists of decoding symbols and matching combinations of these symbols to representations in our mental lexicon. So when you came across the word ‘lexicon’ in the previous sentence, you performed a number of cognitive operations which told you the meaning of this string of letters. If you had come across the word ‫לקסיקון‬, you would probably have been stumped, because you probably don’t recognise these letters, though you do know the word which they spell (lexicon). On the other hand, when you read the sentence ‘Two bulked DNA samples are generated from a segregating population from a single cross’, you were probably able to recognise each word and decode it properly, but probably did not understand what this sentence actually means (and neither do we!) – because although you recognise words such as ‘bulked’, ‘segregating’ and ‘cross’, you most probably don’t know what they mean in this context – so your mental lexicon does not have representations of these words that would make sense in this context. At a very basic level, then, you need to know two things in order to be able to read: you need to know the language in which the text is written and you need to know the system which represents this language in print in order to be able to decode the signs on the page (or on the screen, or in another system of representing words, such as Braille). This observation gives rise to what is known as ‘The Simple View of Reading’ (Hoover and Gough 1990), which posits that success in reading depends on the interaction of decoding ability and language comprehension, and which sees these two as the basic elements of reading (see Stuart, Stainthorp and Snowling 2008 for a highly accessible explanation). This is not to say that there aren’t other factors that come into play (and we will discuss these factors later in this section), but rather that these two elements are crucial for reading. At its barest, the Simple View of Reading suggests that Reading Comprehension (RC) is the product of two components: Decoding (D) and Language Comprehension (L; this is often referred to as Listening Comprehension, because it is measured through listening and oral tasks; we use the term proposed by Stuart, Stainthorp and Snowling 2008). The usual formulation then is RC = D × L

From research to implications 9

The interaction between these two components changes over time. When children begin to learn to read, the differences between their reading comprehension results will be mainly dependent on their decoding ability. Slowly slowly, as they acquire the alphabetic principle and develop their decoding ability, the accuracy and speed of decoding rise, until, with older readers, it reaches a ceiling and stops providing us with any new information about reading ability – because the differences between readers on this measure become very small (Farnia and Geva 2013). There are a number of myths concerning reading, including reading in a foreign language. One persistent myth is that reading is ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game’, in which readers don’t process every word in a text, or even every letter in a word, but rely on context to decode the words (Goodman 1967). But if that were true, this beautifully presented harpsichord chiaroscuro bungalow would pose a problem for you as a reader, wouldn’t it? And it probably didn’t: you were able to identify and read the words ‘beautifully presented’ in spite of the fact that there was no previous semantic context here for you to rely on, and you probably also processed ‘harpsichord’, ‘chiaroscuro’ and ‘bungalow’ with no problems. Yes, you possibly paused on them a bit longer than you would pause on other words, without consciously noticing it, partly because they are long words which are quite rare in the language, and your higher level processes probably also made you wonder what these words were doing there – they are, after all, totally unexpected, and the mechanisms you employ for monitoring your comprehension alerted you to that – but you probably went on reading them, trying to see whether they fitted in. In fact, it is fairly obvious that you needed to decode them and access their meaning in order to realise that they did not fit into the sentence in any kind of way. The important point is that decoding is independent of context, and although it can be facilitated by context – in an effect we call priming – we don’t rely on this facilitative effect to decode words. As Geva and Ramírez (2015:17) say, ‘to become good comprehenders, novice EL2 learners need to develop their basic word-level reading skills, regardless of the age when they begin to learn EL2’. (See also Paran 1996 for an overview of this field; see Nassaji 2014 for a recent summary of research in this area.) There are myriad reasons for the persistence of the idea that ‘reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game’. One of them is that it is true that many times readers do not actually process every word or even every sentence. We often use various techniques such as skimming and scanning to quickly read through text, find areas of the text that interest us in particular, focus on specific points, make decisions about continuing to read and so on. But we are likely to do this more when we are reading about something that we know about, in a language that we know well, and when we are proficient readers. Rodgers (2009), who researched young adult L2 learners of English preparing for the IELTS test, showed they found skimming difficult and challenging.

10  From research to implications

L2 reading researchers have been aware for more than 30 years of the importance of the skills of word recognition and decoding, sometimes known as ‘bottom-up’ processes; Eskey (1988) coined the phrase ‘holding in the bottom’ in reference to this. However, Newton (2016:433) notes that although we are now very clearly aware of the importance of automatic word recognition in L2 reading, researchers such as Akamatsu (2008) and Gorsuch and Taguchi (2008) have not come up with a ‘viable pedagogical proposal’ to develop automaticity. In Part II, Section A, we present a number of activities that teachers can use for the development of automaticity (see also Paran 1996 for some ideas). An important point to make is that the Simple View of Reading does not claim that reading is simple. It is very clearly a highly complex cognitive skill, one which takes a long time to develop and to achieve mastery of. It is also clear that language comprehension and decoding ability are not the only elements that play a part in achieving comprehension. For example, we have known for many years that in order to learn to read, learners have to exhibit phonological awareness, i.e. awareness of sounds and of the distinctions between sounds. Simple examples of phonological awareness are the ability to recognise rhymes, the ability to recognise individual sounds and the ability to manipulate sounds, syllables and words – for example, to follow instructions for deleting word-initial consonants (‘say the word “stop” without the “s” sound’). Without such awareness, it is extremely difficult to internalise the alphabetic principle. It also turns out that when we process the written form of a word – its orthographic form – we also automatically activate the phonological representation of that word – that is, the way its sound is stored in our brain. Another important element in reading is working memory, which allows us to process and store information for a few seconds as we read and build a model of the text we are reading. Walter (2004) has shown the way in which L2 working memory impacts on reading comprehension, and Shin, Dronjic and Park (2019) have shown the interaction between working memory and background knowledge (see the discussion of Question 3). These various findings have led Farnia and Geva (2013) to argue for what they call an ‘augmented’ Simple View of Reading, in which factors such as phonological awareness and working memory also contribute to differences in reading comprehension. But all told, we now have incontrovertible evidence that the two main factors predicting reading comprehension ability are language knowledge and decoding ability. In the discussion in the previous paragraph, we made an important point, namely, that as we read we construct a representation of the text in our mind: the various ideas and propositions in the text, helped by the various inferences that we make during the reading, form the basis for this representation, which is known as the text model of reading comprehension. As we encounter additional information and ideas in the text, these ideas either contribute to

From research to implications 11

the emergence of previous ideas as important (main ideas) or are discarded if they are not seen to contribute to the emergence of the model. As this text model develops, the reader also begins to form a model of the text that is connected more strongly and more extensively to their previous knowledge and to the purposes of reading; this is called the situation model of reading comprehension. This is ultimately what the reader stores in their long-term memory as the representation of the text (Grabe 2009; Jiang, Grabe and Carrell 2020). As we shall see in our discussion of the next question, the purpose of our reading is a crucial element in the way we read and in what we take out of the text.

Question 2: What are the different reasons and ways people read? In our discussion of Question 1, we suggested that there are many kinds of reading we might do in a typical day. Some reading is instantaneous and involuntary, such as reading street names, bus numbers and road signs. Our eyes interpret these rapidly and transform them into information and then into actions: we catch the bus or do not, turn left or right as a result. With more extended reading, we might also move through text rapidly in search of the information that interests us: for example, searching an encyclopaedia entry to gather dates or scanning a list to find a name that interests us. Sets of instructions such as a recipe or a manual for assembling a flat-pack cupboard will lead us through from meaning to action in a more structured, careful and intensive way, as each step will include the information we need. However, like the other examples here, our purpose for reading is to gather information, and in many cases, this reading has an outcome, whether in action or in our minds. We know that reading for information is one major reason for reading and is often the main focus of a reading curriculum. Another reason we read, however, is not about learning, knowing or acting, but rather about the pleasure of engagement with the parallel world that texts open up for the reader. Knowing and understanding may happen as a result, but the driving force that may lead us to read a detective novel, a short story or the biography of a historical figure, for example, is not the same as the drive that makes us read information texts for action or for specific knowledge. Reading for pleasure is less easy to explain and define than reading for information, because the choices and associations are different for every reader. One reader may enjoy detective stories because of their problem-solving intricacies; another may enjoy reading about chess moves to improve their own chess practice; another may enjoy reading children’s stories as a reminder of childhood. Reading for pleasure ensures that reading is not a duty, or a task driven from the outside by teachers or parents, but an act that may continue throughout a lifetime. For this reason, a major role that a teacher of reading

12  From research to implications

might wish to consider is that the classroom becomes a place where learners move from reading for study, to reading for themselves as an act of choice. We discuss reading for pleasure in greater depth in Part I, Section B. In its discussion of reading comprehension, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (henceforth CEFR; Council of Europe, 2018) presents five categories for reading: reading correspondence, reading for orientation, reading for information and argument, reading instructions and reading as a leisure activity (p. 54). This categorisation is interesting because it seems to be a pragmatic categorisation (rather than a theory-driven one) in that it is (as the document itself acknowledges) ‘a mixture between reading purpose and reading particular genres with specific functions’ (p. 60). Also, note that reading instructions is given its own place in the list, rather than being categorised under ‘reading for information’, probably because it is an extremely common type of reading. The category of reading for information and argument, on the other hand, combines two separate abilities, partly because of the importance of the ability ‘to recognise when a text provides factual information and when it seeks to convince readers of something’ (B1 descriptor, p. 63). Finally, the CEFR makes the point that reading as a leisure activity pertains to both fictional and non-fictional texts. (See also our discussion of Question 5 in Part I, Section B.) Sheldrick Ross (1999) suggests that much research looks at reading as either reading for pleasure or reading for information, with the latter being conceptualised as an intentional type of reading where the reader might articulate a problem or a need and consciously embark on reading in order to solve it. However, she suggests that reading for pleasure might also be a source of important information. The Reading Agency (2015:6) uses ‘reading for pleasure’ and ‘recreational reading’ interchangeably and defines it as ‘non-goal oriented transactions with texts as a way to spend time and for entertainment’. It then defines ‘reading for empowerment’ as ‘transactions with texts as a means of self-cultivation and self-development beyond literacy’ (p. 7). This suggests a major division between goal-oriented and non-goal-oriented reading. Our purpose for reading influences the way we read and the way we make our way through a text. Pugh (1978) lists five reading styles and connects each of them to different purposes: •

Scanning refers to situations in which the reader looks for a specific word or set of words (e.g. a phrase) or a set of characters (e.g. a date) in the text they are reading. Readers use this style in order to locate an area which they might wish to read in greater detail, and it is most likely that very little, if any, of the rest of the text is processed in any detail. This is very much a strategy which is deployed to solve a specific problem – namely, locating an area in the text that contains the information the reader is looking for.

From research to implications 13

•

•

•

•

Search reading is also used by readers in order to locate information about a specific topic but is different from scanning because it involves looking for a larger number of words or symbols – the reader will need to be sensitive to the appearance in the text of a large number of words or names. For example, if a reader is looking through a book on reading to see where the text deals with literature, they will need to be alert to the appearances of words such as literature, literary, novel, poem, poetry, play, etc., in addition to the names of poets, novelists and playwrights. Skimming is a reading style in which the reader follows the author’s structure in order to form a general overview of the gist of the text. It involves reading and processing longer stretches of text than when scanning or search reading. Receptive reading is an important reading style which involves reading at a steady pace with the purpose of understanding what the writer was trying to convey. It is an author-directed activity in that the reader reads the whole text, rather than parts of it (which is what happens in the other author-directed activity, skimming). This is very similar to what Carver (1977–78) calls ‘rauding’, during which the reader reads at a steady pace of ca. 250–300 words per minute. Responsive reading involves reading longer texts but then using them to develop the reader’s own thoughts.

The two last styles, receptive and responsive reading, offer a remarkable parallel to the distinction between the text model of reading comprehension and the situation model of reading comprehension, which we presented briefly above. Although not identical, the concept of ‘receptive reading’ is highly aligned with the creation of a text model; the concept of ‘responsive reading’ is highly aligned with what we described above as the situation model. Although all reading results in a situation model, in receptive reading the reader attempts to ensure that their comprehension is as near to what is present in the text as possible. In responsive reading, on the other hand, the reader might go well beyond the original text and almost to the point of re-creating it for their own personal purposes. In academic reading, we often use a combination of two or more styles. For example, when writing this section of the text I (Amos) did some search reading in order to locate the chapter in which Pugh (1978) discusses reading styles. I then scanned through the chapter, looking for the section on styles, and then did some receptive reading to remind myself of what each style represents, and summarised the different styles. I then engaged in some responsive reading, for example, thinking of using this example. I then went back to read again about text models and situation models and thought of bringing them into what I was writing as well.

14  From research to implications

An understanding of reading as being purpose driven (as well as connected to previous knowledge) brings us to the realisation that readings of the same text are likely to result in different understandings and different models of the text. Two people reading the same text might reach different understandings of this text; someone reading the same text at different times might also take away different impressions or knowledge from it, depending on their purpose at each reading. Reading purpose has important implications for the language classroom. Paran (2003) makes the point that in ‘real life’ reading, readers determine the purpose of their own reading. They also determine the level and the extent to which they want to comprehend a text. This is very different from what happens in the language classroom and as we shall see in Part I, Section D, creating a purpose for reading (thus approximating it to ‘real’ life) is an important part of creating reading lessons.

Question 3: What knowledge do we bring to our reading? In our discussion of Question 1, we presented the Simple View of Reading, in which two elements are paramount: the ability to decode, which relies on knowledge of the writing system of the language and of the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes in this language; and the ability to comprehend oral language, which presupposes knowledge of the language, both lexical knowledge (i.e. knowledge of vocabulary) and grammatical knowledge, as well as inferencing abilities. We made the point that these two types of ability do not account for the whole of the variability of reading comprehension and that the contribution of decoding to reading comprehension reduces with time. In this section, we elaborate on the types of knowledge that readers bring to texts. One element of language knowledge that is acknowledged as critical in all models of reading is knowledge of vocabulary, which emerges in all studies, both in L1 and in L2, as a major element. Laufer (1989) was the first study which looked at the connection between lexical coverage in L2 and reading comprehension; she found that readers needed to know 95% of the tokens in a text (i.e. the total number of running words) in order to comprehend it. More recently, researchers have suggested that the percentage needed is 98% (Hu and Nation 2000; Schmitt, Jiang and Grabe 2011). An important finding by Schmitt, Jiang and Grabe (2011) is that there was no ‘threshold’ at which comprehension improved markedly. The relationship is linear: the higher the percentage of words known, the higher the score on the reading comprehension test. In a recent paper in this series of experiments, Laufer (2020) suggests that much hinges on our definition of reading comprehension and on what we view as an acceptable score on a reading comprehension test. She suggests that 95% coverage ‘could be enough for minimal comprehension reflected in

From research to implications 15

a score of 55%–60% on a reading test, while 98% is necessary for adequate comprehension reflected in a score of 70% and above’ (pp. 1076–77). Laufer (2020) also suggests that when coverage is 95%–98%, learners can infer a high percentage of the meanings of the unknown words. However, when coverage is only 90%, readers can only infer the meanings of half of the words. In addition to the number of words that the learner knows, the associations that they are able to form between words are also important, and Verhoeven (2011:672) suggests that compared to L1 readers, L2 learners have ‘fewer associative links between the words in their vocabularies’. The second element that readers bring to reading is knowledge of the grammar of the language they are reading. Clearly, it is impossible to comprehend sentences or text without understanding the information that is grammatically encoded in them. This includes information encoded morphologically (for example, word endings for plurals or past tense, prefixes or suffixes indicating word class) and syntactically (through word order). Bernhardt (2005) suggests that about 30% of the variance in reading comprehension scores is attributable to language knowledge. The third important element that we bring to our reading is the background knowledge needed for comprehending the text. This can be specific background knowledge from our profession, or general background knowledge rooted in our life experiences and our culture. A simple and illuminating study showing this is Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984), in which the researchers asked two groups of readers (one from the US and one from India) to read two letters about weddings – one from each country. Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984) found differences between their participants on a number of levels. At the basic processing level, their participants read the passage from their own culture faster than they read the other passage. They also remembered a larger number of idea units from the text from their own culture and elaborated more on that text. Finally, in their recall, the participants distorted more details in their recall of the text from a different culture. Importantly, both groups of participants that Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984) engaged in their study were proficient readers of English. Pritchard (1990) conducted a similar study in which 11th-grade proficient readers from the US and from Palau read two texts – one from their own culture and one from the other culture. Both texts were read in the participants’ first language. Pritchard found that readers produced more elaborations and fewer distortions when retelling the texts from their own culture. Malik (1990), also working with proficient EFL learners, reported similar findings. Overall, studies looking at the contribution of background knowledge to reading comprehension all show an effect of background knowledge on measures of comprehension. However, it is important to note that not all learners are able to take advantage of background knowledge even when it is provided to them. Shin, Dronjic

16  From research to implications

and Park (2019) asked their learners to read four texts on obscure topics; a day before the reading comprehension test, the learners read texts in their L1 (Korean) about two of the topics. Shin et al. (2019) showed that readers with low working memory were less able to take advantage of background knowledge that had been provided to them. Shin et al. (2019) therefore talk about the process as the one in which ‘the rich get richer’ and where success breeds success. Their findings support a model of developing reading in which teachers not only need to provide learners with the background knowledge needed for comprehension but also help the learners to activate this knowledge. One of the ways in which it is possible to build background knowledge is through narrow reading, in which in a sequence of lessons, learners read texts on the same topic – for example, reading running stories over a few days in newspapers (Schmitt and Carter 2000). This allows for repetition of lexis, reducing the vocabulary load in new readings and building up the lexical quality (Hwang and Nation 1989), but, importantly, this also helps in building up background knowledge, helping processing of the later texts in the sequence.

Question 4: What is the relationship between L1 and L2 reading? The most basic (and obvious) difference between reading in L1 and L2 is that when a reader begins to read in their L1, they invariably know a great deal of the language itself. As O’Grady (2005:113) puts it, ‘even a three-year-old has a firm grip on the sentence-building tools of his (sic) language’, and by the age of 6, children have mastered a vocabulary of about 14,000 words. When learning to read, the task that children face is learning the way in which the sounds of the language are mapped out in writing. In some alphabetic languages, such as Spanish or Bahasa Melayu, this is extremely straightforward, and there is a one-to-one correspondence between the phonemes of the language (the units of sounds in the language) and its graphemes (the written signs the language uses); such languages exhibit what is known as a shallow orthography. Other languages have a deep orthography, and the correspondences are more complex; some languages, such as Mandarin, provide only rudimentary clues to pronunciation in the writing, which is logographic – that is, each character represents a word or a morpheme; other languages provide only partial information – in Hebrew, for example, only about 20% of the vowels appear as letters in print, and many words in print do not indicate the vowels at all. If you find it difficult to picture this, try to read this sentence: ‘Its dfntly pssbl to rd sntncs wth almst no vwls’. Different languages are positioned at different places on this continuum, but ultimately what the child learning to read needs to do is to map the knowledge of the writing system on to their existing knowledge of the language.

From research to implications 17

An L2 learner, however, faces a different challenge – they need to learn the language and its written form at the same time. This can create difficulties at different levels, both when the L2 learner is already literate in their L1, and when they are learning to read in their L2 only, either as a child (in countries where the language of instruction in schools is not the language of the home) or as an adult (in the case of refugees who need to become literate in their L2 but who may not be literate in their L1). If the learner can already read in their L1, issues may arise because of differences in the writing systems of the two languages. Languages use a large variety of writing systems – alphabets (e.g., English, Arabic or Russian); syllabaries, in which each written sign represents a syllable (as Japanese partly does); or logographic characters (like Chinese and Japanese do). Languages may be written from left to right (like English) or from right to left (like Hebrew and Arabic). These differences have implications for the areas of the brain being activated (Wolf and Barzilai 2009). All of these present cognitive challenges for the learner. Even if the learner is learning a language written in the same alphabet as that of their L1, it is highly likely that some of the letters and letter combinations will be pronounced differently, for example.

Are reading skills and strategies transferable from L1 to L2? An important question is whether learners are able to transfer the skills that they might have in L1 to their L2 reading. Swan and Walter (2017) suggest that most readers are able to transfer the higher level skills of predicting, skimming, inferring or recognising text structure from their L1 to their L2, and therefore L2 reading lessons do not need to deal with these areas. They suggest that ‘most foreign-language learners have already developed a reasonable command of the various skills and strategies under discussion, by virtue of being competent communicators in their mother tongue’ (2017:230). They claim that reading lessons need to deal with specific issues – often linguistic issues such as unknown vocabulary or complex syntax – and suggest that the best teaching deals with specific language-related issues in the text readers are trying to comprehend. In contrast, Newton (2017) suggests that for many learners reading skills do not easily transfer from the first into the second language, and he lists a number of groups of learners who may not have developed the strategies that Swan and Walter (2017) assume for most learners. These groups include young learners; learners with low literacy skills in their L1; learners who come from educational systems where such strategies are not taught or practised; and learners of English for Academic Purposes. More importantly, Newton suggests that even where learners are able to use a wide variety of skills and strategies in their L1 they may not always be able to access these abilities in their L2. Another assumption that can be challenged is that the transfer of skills and strategies will be from L1 to L2, whereas in fact the transfer can be in the

18  From research to implications

opposite direction as well. This was shown in a study by Levine and Reves (1985), who compared the L1 reading comprehension results of two groups of learners. After the initial L1 reading test, one group took a course on reading skills and strategies in L2. When the two groups were tested at a later point in the year, the group who had taken the reading strategies and skills had improved significantly more than the control group.

Affective factors and self-concept as a reader An interesting study which focuses on the ways in which learners can (or cannot) access their reading strategies in an L2 is Statman (1987), who highlighted the affective element that may influence L2 reading. In a simple and ingenious study, Statman (1987) asked participants to read a text in Hebrew (their L1) and to answer one simple question: summarise the topic of the first paragraph of the text. The text was a complex philosophical paper, but the topic of the first paragraph was summarised quite clearly in the first sentence of the second paragraph, and the participants had no problems in identifying it there, and answering the question. Six weeks later the same students were asked to read a similar text in English, where again the topic of the first paragraph was summarised clearly in the first sentence of the second paragraph. A sizable group – about a third of the participants – were able to do this in Hebrew, but not in English. In interviews with this group the students expressed the fear and the confusion that they felt; whereas in Hebrew they were able to deal with their lack of understanding and to continue reading in the hope of understanding more, in English they were worried about misunderstanding and missing details; many of them were unable to even finish reading the first paragraph and abandoned the reading in the middle.

L1, L2 or both? Translanguaging in reading Another important issue that connects L1, L2 and reading is that we may sometimes read a text in one language but discuss it in another. We may, for example, read a newspaper article in one language and summarise it for a friend or partner who does not know that language. Linguists and language teachers are increasingly aware of the multilingual and translingual practices that many of us engage in. This is acknowledged in the new version of the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2018), which includes specific descriptors for mediation, which, as the CEFR explains, often occurs between languages – e.g. reading a text in Language A and relaying its content to an interlocutor in Language B, either in writing or in speech. Vallejo Rubinstein (2020) provides a vignette in which a child in an after-school literacy club explains the contents of a story she is reading in a mixture of Catalan and Spanish with English and Punjabi words and terms. Vallejo Rubinstein suggests that the child ‘builds meaning

From research to implications 19

within, between and beyond named languages’ (2020:240). Although traditionally EFL classrooms eschewed the use of L1, current pedagogy is moving to a position where the focus is on meaning making and any resource that the learner can bring to the table is acceptable. At all levels of language learning, teachers need to be aware of the help that using the learners’ other languages may provide for developing their reading. The next section asks questions about reading for pleasure, and the emotional effect or ‘affect’ of reading, two topics which we have touched on in the sections above.

20  From research to implications

B:  FRAMING READING AS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE Introduction Questions 5 and 6 are concerned with the affective and transformative characteristics of reading and the journey towards reading as a lifelong habit. We talk about the importance of deriving pleasure from reading, and the different ways in which scholars have talked about the pleasure that reading generates in the reader. We pick up on the human engagement with reading which we looked at in our discussion of Question 2 in Part I, Section A, and focus on theories of reading engagement (e.g., Guthrie and Wigfield 2000).

Question 5: Why and how do people read for pleasure? The Reading Agency (2015:12), in a review of scholarship on reading for pleasure, makes the important point that pleasure is an important outcome of reading in itself, and Sheldrick Ross’s (1999:796) formulation of ‘committed engagement with books, undertaken for their own sake and not for an extrinsic goal’ is appealing and will resonate with many readers of this book. We suggested in the introduction to this book that reading for pleasure is the key to becoming a lifelong reader and takes the experience of reading beyond the classroom. Researchers have asked several questions in relation to reading for pleasure, and one of these is how far a teacher can actually inspire learners to become readers for pleasure. In some ways, classrooms in which reading is an explicit part of acquiring information may not necessarily be the same environment that encourages fluency and pleasure in the written word. The main division of purposes for reading is the division between reading for information and reading for pleasure. However, this division may, in fact, be more blurred than we think (Moje et al. 2008; see also Council of Europe 2018), and reading for information can generate pleasure in the reader. This is borne out by Alexander and Jarman (2018), who initiated a project designed to encourage pupils’ engagement with books about science, and looked at the ways in which reading non-fiction can generate pleasure: they found the children who took part in the project responded to the books they were reading not only intellectually but also emotionally. The project started as a challenge that the children signed up to – so, not as a choice of reading for pleasure – but the effect was to strengthen their enjoyment of reading. Our understanding of reading for pleasure is dependent on the ways in which we research it, and Moje et al. (2008) point out some of the issues concerned with researching this area. In a large scale study that looked at the outof-school reading of adolescents in a large city in the US, Moje et al. (2008) realised that when asked about reading for pleasure, most of their respondents interpreted the question as referring to reading novels, short stories, picture

From research to implications 21

books and plays. Thus, although their respondents might have found pleasure in reading informational texts about their hobbies – something which came through, for example, in their descriptions of reading about gaming – for them the concept of ‘reading for pleasure’ was connected to reading fiction. The difficulty of understanding this area is exemplified by the response from one of their respondents who said, ‘I don’t like reading just for fun unless it’s something I like’ (Moje et al. 2008:122). This meshes with Hollis’s (2021) suggestion that the differences between fiction and non-fiction can also sometimes be blurred. Putting these concerns aside, Wilhelm (2016) identifies pleasure as a major component of reading and suggests that researchers have neglected pleasure as an element of reading and have focused too much on ‘the power of reading’ (2016:31), the instrumental value and outcomes of reading that are so necessary for functioning in the modern world. This focus neglects the importance of pleasure as ‘pre-requisite and necessary for harnessing all this power’ (2016:31). Wilhelm then rightly points out that pleasure is an important element in motivating readers. His study, in which he interviewed 29 self-professed avid readers of different types of books, led him to identify five different categories of pleasure that reading can generate. The first category is what he calls ‘immersive play pleasure’, i.e. ‘the pleasure you get from living through a story and getting totally lost in a book’ (p. 34). This is an important element of reading for pleasure, which different scholars have attempted to capture in different conceptualisations. It is clearly similar to the idea of ‘flow’ described by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), where readers become so immersed in their experience that hours can pass fully absorbed. Csiksenthmihalyi saw ‘flow’ as the essential ingredient in enjoyment, engagement and even happiness. Researchers such as Judge (2011) and Kirchhoff (2013) have discussed a similar idea in their research into L2 reading. Another way of conceptualising this same experience is the metaphor of ‘transportation’ which is used by scholars such as Green and others (e.g., Green and Brock 2000; Mazzocco et al. 2010; Isberner et al. 2019) to characterise immersion in narratives. This type of pleasure is also akin to the type of ‘aesthetic reading’ that Rosenblatt (e.g. 1982) identifies, in which what is important for the reader is the lived experience of the reading. Even as readers immerse themselves in their reading and experience transportation, they may still be capable of noting ways in which a story develops and still be aware of the processes they undergo as readers, giving rise to what Wilhelm calls ‘intellectual pleasure’. This is different from a third type, which he calls ‘the pleasure of work’, which refers to ways in which readers used texts ‘as a tool to accomplish something’ and for practical purposes. This is not an instrumental, functional or academic type of purpose but rather refers to using the text for accomplishing the reader’s own personal goals. Examples of such goals might be the awareness of the contribution of reading to the

22  From research to implications

reader’s ability to engage with others, understand others and obtain perspectives that they would normally not have access to. This ‘pleasure of work’ is also connected to what Wilhelm calls ‘the pleasure of inner work’ (p. 36, our emphasis), ways in which readers take their reading and consciously use it ‘to help them become the kind of people they wanted to become’ (p. 36). Finally, ‘social pleasure’ is defined as the ways in which readers connect to each other and form reading communities (see our discussion of reading as a communal experience and as a social phenomenon in Part I, Section C) as well as ways in which readers use their reading to define themselves and shape their identity. (Note the way in which this is connected to ‘the pleasure of inner work’.) Clearly, an important takeaway from Wilhelm’s (2016) work is that he identifies elements of pleasure in so many different types of reading; another important point is the way in which different types of pleasure are connected to each other. The connections between reading for pleasure and academic success are complex. Clark and de Zoysa (2011), in a large-scale study of 4503 pupils in the UK, looked at the connections between reading enjoyment, reading attitudes and reading behaviour and their impact on reading attainment. They found a network of relationships, in which reading enjoyment and reading attitudes had a strong correlation with reading behaviour, which then had a strong relationship with reading attainment. However, reading enjoyment on its own also had a strong effect on reading attainment. Clark and de Zoysa (2011) do however make the important point that their study was cross sectional (i.e. they compared different findings collected at the same point in time) rather than longitudinal (i.e. looking at data collected at different time points). That means that they could not claim that one element or variable caused another. Instead, they speak of a ‘cycle of positive influence’ (p. 5), in which the different elements influence each other, which is similar to Nuttall’s (1982) description of the virtuous circle of reading. Similarly, Jerrim and Moss (2019) used the database of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to explore whether the type of reading that 15-year-olds do correlated with their academic success. They found evidence that teenagers who read fiction frequently also achieved higher scores on reading tests, though they too warn that this correlation cannot imply causality and suggest that longitudinal research is needed to explore these relationships. Readers and learners are influenced by many different models around them. Gagen-Spriggs (2020), for example, researched reading for pleasure in a school context and found that it was in fact the passionately engaged librarian who made a difference, helping children to select books that would appeal to them. She highlights the importance of pupils being able to consult an adult who is knowledgeable about books and who can offer them a range of choices that are appropriate for them. Making the right reading choice emerges in many research studies as an important part of enjoyment, for example Merga (2017).

From research to implications 23

But what exactly is the source of appeal for one book rather than another? Duncan and Paran (2018) found that some of the teachers in their study believed that this appeal might come from identification with the characters, and focused on finding novels with teenage protagonists and narrators for their classes. But Merga (2017) suggests too that children become attached to stories in a series, and characters for whom they build loyalty and connection over time, such as Harry Potter. In this study, children reported other factors which made them read more. This included reading that mapped over their current skills set, and time given for reading, which normalised reading as part of the school day. An important element in reading for pleasure is that it is volitional: it entails the agency of the reader, as Kucirkova, Littleton and Cremin (2017) point out. In the classroom, this volition then focuses on the choice of what to read. As Paran (2003) points out, outside the classroom readers choose what they read themselves, and it is important to embed choice as far as possible in our teaching as well. Guthrie and Wigfield (2000) highlight the importance of enabling students to make real choices in their classrooms, and suggest that ‘as students perceive that teachers respect them enough to provide genuine choices, students increase their effort and commitment to learning’ (p. 412). Garces-Bacsal et al. (2018), in a study of Singaporean teachers, also highlight student choice as an important strategy for encouraging pupils to read. Merga (2017) points out that one of the barriers that some children face when looking for books that will interest them is the lack of strategies for their reading choice behaviour. The volitional aspect of reading for pleasure is clear in Sheldrick Ross’s finding that the readers in her study (which focused on ‘heavy readers’, defined as people who read a book a week or more) ‘made time and built opportunities for reading into their daily routines’ (1999:787). The way in which Sheldrick Ross’s interviewees elaborated on the ways they made reading choices highlights the complex set of information, recommendations, needs and wishes that come into play. Choice is an important element for L2 readers where there are Extensive Reading programmes, but it can become an important element in other reading classes as well (see Leather and Uden 2021 for the role of motivation in Extensive Reading, for example). Duncan (2012) describes a process in which she and the students discussed how to choose a book to read and agreed that they would bring novels to the next class and make a choice then. Both the teacher and the students brought a selection of books to class and the students spent time looking at them and discussing them, and then voted on what they would read and study for the next few weeks/months. The choice thus became a literacy event in itself. Duncan and Paran (2017, 2018) found that choice was an important element in the L2 literature classrooms they studied: many of the teachers they interviewed would bring a selection of works into the classroom and discuss this selection and the criteria for choice with their learners. It is

24  From research to implications

also possible to introduce choice when teaching shorter texts: Kung (2019), for example, asked her learners to choose short texts from specific publications to read. In all these cases, the learners were guided by the teachers in their choice making. This presents issues for teaching reading in the EFL classroom, where readers very rarely choose what they read. When the teacher chooses the text themselves for their class this may be mitigated if the teacher chooses appropriate, topical texts, chosen for their ability to interest and engage the majority of the class. In the current teaching climate, however, where many teachers use textbooks, the texts are likely to be far removed from the realities of the learners. An important point in the discussion about reading engagement and reading for pleasure is the way in which younger readers learn to enjoy reading and the way in which their reading attitudes develop. Merga (2017) includes a discussion of teaching strategies to help younger readers choose their reading. She suggests that this may be ‘an orphaned responsibility’ (p. 217), which neither parents nor teachers claim as their own. This meshes with our point (see Question 1 in Part I, Section A) that reading is not hard-wired: it is a learned skill and a learned behaviour, and it turns out that the different sub-elements of this skill and behaviour also need to be taught and practised. Overall, there is evidence from research that there is a virtuous circle whereby teachers who had encouragement to read when they themselves were learners and who had had good experiences with reading and with literature in school are more likely to instil the love of reading and the love of literature in their learners. Nathanson, Pruslow and Levitt (2008), for example, report that teachers who had enjoyed their experiences with literature as learners were more enthusiastic about reading than teachers who had not. This raises the question of the effects on teaching of a decrease in teachers’ reading enjoyment and engagement with reading. Skaar, Elvebakk and Nilssen (2018) found differences between the reading practices of in-service teachers and pre-service teachers. Calafato and Paran (2019) found that among their respondents there was a decline in the enjoyment of reading in both L1 and L2 amongst teachers of EFL in Russia. They question whether teachers who do not enjoy reading can become role models of the engaged reader for their learners. In a study with a different focus, Garces-Bacsal et al. (2018) report that many teachers do not view it as their job to motivate learners to read, particularly if these teachers specialise in teaching STEM (Science, Technology, and Maths) subjects. However, they also found that these teachers nevertheless were able to support their learners’ reading strategies. Like Wilhelm (2016) and Alexander and Jarman (2018), Garces-Bacsal et al. (2018) see the possibility of encouraging readers and of nurturing lifelong readers through reading non-fiction texts in the disciplines being taught. The conclusion from all of these studies is that all teachers are responsible for encouraging literacy and literacies in

From research to implications 25

their learners and that it might be part of teacher training to highlight this to future teachers. In Part I, Section A, we suggested that one of the tasks of the teacher is to take reading beyond the classroom so that it becomes a lifelong habit. One of the triggers is that readers come to read for pleasure, but in addition to this, regard reading as a continuing form of communication, as readily accessible and meaningful as listening and speaking.

Question 6: Can reading change the way we think and feel? In Part I, Section A, we made the point that reading is a relative newcomer to the language skills of human beings, and that the human brain is not ‘hardwired’ for reading. The development of reading is an example of the great adaptability of the human brain, what is known as its plasticity, and the way in which it is able to adapt and change neural pathways in the service of this new skill. We know that in order to learn to read, the learner needs to have achieved a certain level of phonemic awareness – for example, the ability to recognise rhymes, the ability to manipulate phonemes and syllables (e.g., to drop the first sound of a word or change the order of syllables in a word). However, as Bigelow and Vinogradov (2011) show, the relationship between literacy and these sound manipulations is reciprocal: literacy changes the way in which adults perceive oral language. Literate adults are more aware of sound patterns in words and are able to manipulate phonemes and syllables more easily than their non-literate counterparts. Importantly, these differences are found in alphabetic scripts, but not in logographic scripts (see Tarone 2010; Bigelow and Vinogradov 2011). Bigelow and Vinogradov (2011:127) go on to point out that ‘formal schooling and alphabetic literacy acquisition is not only a process for cultural transmission but also a mechanism that changes the physical makeup of the human brain and the way the brain processes oral language’. Even a small amount of literacy resulted in differences in brain processing. Tarone, Bigelow and Hansen (2009:18) suggest that ‘the acquisition of literacy in an alphabetic language significantly changes human beings’ oral processing of language, enabling them to focus on and manipulate language in terms of its metalinguistic form rather than solely in terms of its semantics’. Ravid and Tolchinsky (2002) point out that learning an orthography involves constructing internal models of various aspects of language; because different scripts highlight different linguistic units, children who are learning to read form different perceptions of these linguistic units in oral language as well (for example, focusing on consonants vs. focusing on syllables). The important point here is that there is evidence that literacy influences our perception of spoken language too.

26  From research to implications

The connections between reading and cognitive development are the focus of Cunningham and Stanovich (1998), who suggest that the amount of reading a child does contributes to the development of their vocabulary, independent of other factors. They thus stress the importance of ensuring that children have an early start in reading and that reading is encouraged; in their words, ‘Those who read a lot will enhance their verbal intelligence; that is, reading will make them smarter’ (p. 7). Wolf and Barzilai (2009) consider not only the amount of reading, but the type of reading that children do. They focus on what they call ‘deep reading’, by which they mean ‘the array of sophisticated processes that propel comprehension and that include inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection and insight’ (2009:32). They argue that the type of distracted reading that many children (and, we might add, adults!) do may hamper the development of the complex, interconnected cognitive processes that are needed for what they call ‘deep reading’. One argument that is sometimes put forward when discussing distracted reading is the alleged ability of modern-day readers to multitask in a variety of ways – for example, checking social media, watching a video or listening to music while reading. However, multitasking has been repeatedly found to result in lower performance. In a study of college students in the US, Mokhtari, Dellelo and Reichard (2015) found that students’ grades were negatively correlated to the amount of multitasking that they reported, though their participants did not seem to note the effect that their multitasking was having on their results. Kirschner and de Bruyckere (2017) point out that the very term ‘multitasking’ is misleading, because the actual phenomenon is one of switching rapidly between tasks, rather than being engaged in more than one task simultaneously. They go on to present evidence from the literature that such cognitive behaviour results in diminished performance. More recently, Clinton-Lisell (2021) conducted a meta-analysis of studies which looked at the effect of multitasking on reading comprehension. She reports that overall, most studies find that multitasking has a negative effect on comprehension when readers have a specific time limit for reading, and that it has a negative effect on the time that reading takes when there are no limits; in other words, multitasking reduces the efficiency of reading. It is interesting to note the way in which multitasking stands in stark opposition to the notions of ‘flow’ and ‘transportation’ that we discussed above. Clinton-Lisell (2021) points out that since students do not seem to understand the effect of multitasking on their work, as Mokhtari, Dellelo and Reichard (2015) found, this is particularly worrying. Kirschner and de Bruyckere (2017) highlight the implications of these findings to teaching, suggesting that teachers need to be aware of the deleterious effects of multitasking and that ‘learning how to achieve focus could be included in the curriculum’ (p. 140).

From research to implications 27

Finally, reading can influence our thinking and feeling through the subject matter and its treatment of the subject matter. Sheldrick Ross (1999) asked her interviewees to nominate a book that made a difference to their lives in one way or another, and although many of her interviewees resisted this question and its implications, in fact many interviewees did talk about books that proved to be transformative in their lives. They spoke about books that reinforced or confirmed beliefs, books that were ‘a model for living’ (p. 792). They also spoke of books that provided important information about political issues that mattered to them. Other researchers have found complex interactions between previously held attitudes and personality; Mazzocco et al. (2010), for example, found that narratives dealing with various topics had an effect only on some readers, and that the degree to which a reader rated themselves as highly transportable or deeply engaged had an effect on whether they were persuaded by the story they read. This section has looked at reading as an individual experience, connected with personal reading enjoyment and intellectual engagement. The next section turns to reading as a collective experience that can lead to connection with others, and to deeper ways of interacting with, learning with and developing with others.

28  From research to implications

C:  FRAMING READING AS COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE Introduction We tend to think of reading as an individual act, as our focus in Part I, Sections A and B, suggests. We think of ‘curling up with a good book’, or immersing ourselves in a story, images that conjure up a solitary reader engrossed in a book. And most research that defines itself as being about reading (rather than being about literacy, for example) has been done on individual reading, sometimes on reading aloud by beginning readers, though mostly on silent reading by readers with more experience. However, reading is also a collective and cultural process, learning with and through others, and this is what we turn to now.

Question 7: How far and in what ways is reading a collective act? Although reading is, indeed, an interaction between the reader and the text, and is very fundamentally so, it also has a strongly social side. What we read is often transformed into the topic of a conversation, for example, and is shared with others; we tell others what we have read and recount information that we have gleaned from our reading; we tell others about the enjoyment we have derived from reading, and agree or disagree on the merits of the text we are talking about. In fact, Long (1993 in Duncan 2012) claims that the culturally dominant idea of the lone reader is a misleading myth which obscures both the social infrastructure and the socially framed nature of reading. Merga (2017: 211) suggests that ‘influential social agents, such as parents and educators, can potentially play a shaping role in increasing children’s engagement, reflecting a view that children’s attitudes toward reading are, to some extent, shaped by their interactions with key social agents’. She also sees reading clubs and reading circles as having an important role to play in helping learners transition from reading books that are easy for them, to reading books that are interesting and appropriate to their interests but which are also challenging for them and which will pull them up. In the same vein, Sheldrick Ross (1999) highlights that ‘reading occurs within a network of social relations’, social relations that exist in myriad ways – not only book clubs but recommendations from friends, books bought by and for friends and family, reading about books and choosing books based on reviews written by others. Another angle is that suggested by The Reading Agency (2015), who point out that reading has social outcomes which they divide into relatedness and empathy, as well as what they call ‘external outcomes’, which include knowledge of other cultures. The connection between reading and community is also apparent in the ways in which reading prepares the reader to be part

From research to implications 29

of a community. However, the community that readers relate to does not always have to be a known, shared, reciprocal, community. One of Sheldrick Ross’s (1999) interviewees spoke of reading books by parents who were going through situations similar to hers, parents whose children were ill or had congenital conditions that were challenging. She spoke of the way in which it was important to her to know that there were others in the world who were experiencing similar feelings to hers. The collective aspect of reading is strongly present in many recent research findings. This happens from a very early age: in a case study of a 4-year-old child Wagner (2019) shows how reading is connected to its social context already at the very beginning stages of reading and at the very beginning of the formation of a classroom reading community. At a later stage of reading development, Moje et al. (2008) found in a study of Latinx adolescents in a large town in the US Midwest that the reading their respondents engaged in was strongly ‘situated in social networks’ (p. 132). Their respondents interacted with their peers about their reading, discussed recommendations for reading with their peers and sometimes took or gave their peers actual books. Some of their interviewees (mainly girls) reported that they were part of informal reading groups, and some were members of actual book clubs; in one case a respondent reported about being a member of a book club which read books together prior to watching the filmed version. Other interviewees described the way in which their parents were involved in reading and encouraged them to read, often as part of maintaining their heritage language. Indeed, Moje et al. (2008:108) suggest that some students ‘read because they are part of social groups’ (emphasis ours). Wilhelm’s (2016) research into reading, which resulted in highlighting five types of pleasure (which we discussed in Part I, Section B), identified social pleasure as one of these five types. He defines two sub-types within social pleasure, namely ‘the pleasure of using reading to connect to others, and the pleasure of using reading to name and identify yourself ’ (p. 35). Like Moje et al.’s (2008) participants, Wilhelm’s interviewees described their friends as recommending books and pushing them to read these books, and talked about their wish to read books so that they could discuss them with their peers. They also talked about ways in which they defined themselves as readers: ‘I like to think of myself as a Harry Potter reader. As someone who has imagination and is a good friend’ (Wilhelm 2016:35). As these studies show, there is wide ranging evidence that readers enjoy discussing their reading with others and telling others about what they have read. In a project designed to encourage pupils to read books about science, Alexander and Jarman (2018) report that most of the students they interviewed (n=27) indicated that they discussed what they had read with others – family or friends. A memorable quote comes from a 12-year-old boy, who explained his liking for science books ‘because they’re facts and I enjoy reading facts

30  From research to implications

because then I can know about them so I can tell people and then they find it interesting’ (p. 82). This quote highlights the interconnectedness of many of the phenomena that are part and parcel of reading, reading behaviours and talking about reading. Kucirkova, Littleton and Cremin (2017) likewise suggest that reading for pleasure is a social act, in the sense that readers enjoy discussing their reading and look forward to doing this: they claim that the possibility of having such discussions enhances the reading pleasure children feel. It is important to note that there are many cases where reading is conceived a-priori as a group activity, and Duncan (2012) highlights an important distinction between two ways in which reading is a collective act. One is what she calls ‘a communal act’. By this term she refers to uni-directional reading, such as the reading aloud that happens when partners read to each other, an author conducts a public reading of their work (as, for example, Dickens used to do), or a professional reader reads to workers, as in the case of Cuban cigar factories (Duncan 2012). This ‘communal act’ is contrasted with ‘true’ reading circles, where the interaction is between a larger number of people discussing their reading and taking their understandings forward in a collective act. Duncan (2012) tracks the history of reading circles, providing instances from medieval communities in Anglo-Saxon England, through Tudor England, the 17th century, and family reading circles in 19th-century US. She shows how reading circles were an important part of mutual improvement societies, one of the most famous of which is the Kalamazoo Ladies’ Library Association, founded in 1852 and still in existence (https://ladieslibrarykzoo.org).

Reading groups and EFL learners In the EFL classroom reading circles are very strongly connected with extensive reading. Auerbach and Paxton (1997) describe an undergraduate ESL course in which they engaged their learners in reflecting on their reading, working with the learners on their own understanding of their reading strategies and preferences. Auerbach and Paxton decided to add a reading circle element midway in the programme, as students were struggling and discouraged, and witnessed how these reading circles caused a transformation and a turning point for the learners. Auerbach and Paxton (1997) suggest that a number of elements contributed to the success of their reading circles, including the fact that the reading material was fiction, which enabled the learners to respond in a freer and more personal way, relating their reading to their own lives as well as enabling them to use the strategies they had previously learned and make cross-cultural connections. Importantly, some of the students ‘who had been reluctant readers became passionately involved’ (Auerbach and Paxton 1997:252).

From research to implications 31

One pedagogical adaptation of reading circles to the EFL classroom is that teachers often assign the learners specific roles in the discussion, with each student receiving a slightly different task in relation to the text being read. Shelton-Strong (2012), drawing on Furr (2004), lists seven such roles: discussion leader, summariser, word master, passage person (chooses key passages from the text), connector (connects the text to the outside world), cultural collector (comments on cultural differences between the text and the learners’ own cultures) and artistic adventurer (creates an artistic artefact based on the text). In an EAP context, Xu (2021) includes a slightly different list of five roles: Discussion leader, Mind mapper, Summarizer, Connector and Word master. Roles can thus be adjusted to the specific context of the learners. Interestingly, Xu (2021) also found that the role of Connector (finding connections between the article being read and the outside world) was particularly associated with the development of critical thinking. Students enjoyed their work together and saw the value of collaborating in their reading and analysis of the papers. (See also Hadley and Boon 2022 on critical thinking.)

Teachers’ reading groups Teachers, too, can engage in reading circles. The two major purposes are firstly, for language development (Lima 2017) and secondly, for professional development through reading research (e.g., Fenton-Smith and Stillwell 2011; Lee and Abbott 2021). Lima (2017) is noteworthy for examining an a-synchronous online reading group (ORG) which existed for seven years, in which the participants discussed a variety of literary texts. The online format enabled widespread participation, with the membership of the ORG reaching more than 1400 members from over 75 countries, most of whom (89.7%) classified themselves as non-Native Speakers. Lima analysed a limited set of data (14 discussion threads) and found that most comments were posted by a smaller core of 26 participants. Importantly, Lima’s (2017) analysis of the posts in the online reading group revealed dialogic patterns of interaction similar to that used in face-to-face reading circles. Fenton-Smith and Stillwell (2011) and Lee and Abbott (2021) document the existence of long-term reading groups for professional development. Fenton-Smith and Stillwell (2011) describe a group of teachers meeting for one hour every two weeks over a four-year period to discuss research. In their paper they describe the different types of material for discussion which they used with the teachers in their study – e.g. opinion piece, book reviews and DVD. They found that the most popular format was reading a paper and then discussing it with the author present, though this is clearly not an option for most papers. The other popular format was reading an opinion piece, which in this case was a Point Counter Point section from the ELT Journal, in which two contrasting opinions are presented (an example of this is the exchange

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between Swan and Walter 2017 and Newton 2017 that we discussed in Part I, Section A). Fenton-Smith and Stillwell (2011) also found that participants in the reading group preferred to choose their own materials to read, rather than follow suggestions from the researchers. Lee and Abbott (2021), too, discuss findings from long-term reading circles in which different groups of ELT teachers in a large town in Canada met monthly to discuss professional readings. Lee and Abbott’s (2021) main interest is in documenting the different ways in which members of the groups co-constructed knowledge together, introducing and developing topics and building on each other’s contributions. The researchers’ five-year study of professional development reading groups is evidence of the potential of such groups to last over a very lengthy period of time.

From research to implications 33

D: FRAMING READING AS PEDAGOGY Introduction Questions 8, 9 and 10 are concerned with reading as a classroom activity. In our discussion of these questions we make the various components of reading in the EFL classroom explicit. We look at common pedagogies for reading used in the EFL classroom, looking at the links between reading and the other language skills, and end with an overview of research into reading materials and reading classrooms and the attempts to understand what successful teachers of reading in EFL do.

Question 8: What pedagogies are used in the teaching of reading? The presence of reading in the language classroom normally happens in the form of what is known as ‘intensive reading’, in which teachers and learners pay detailed attention to a short text which is discussed from a number of angles, both linguistic and non-linguistic. Intensive reading lessons most commonly follow an approach which Johns and Davies (1983) call TALO – Text as Linguistic Object: the text is used for the linguistic information and the language practice it can provide. It is used for teaching vocabulary, exemplifying language structures, and sometimes exemplifying discourse structure and cohesion. Although teachers may direct learners to the content of the text being read and discuss it with them, this is most often done in the form of comprehension questions. In these questions the teacher (or the textbook) hones in on specific locations in the text and the learners are asked questions aimed at assessing the degree to which they comprehended the text they have read. In the most extreme form, such lessons consist of the teacher talking and explaining the text to the learners (see, for example, Memon and Badger 2007; Kung 2019). In terms of overall lesson structure, the most common format for reading lessons is a three-phase methodology consisting of a pre-reading stage, while-reading stage and a post-reading stage (Williams 1984; Mera Rivas 1999; Macalister 2011a; Macalister 2011b). This is also the structure that is most familiar to teachers and learners (Macalister 2011a, Macalister 2011b). It is rooted in an understanding that readers need to be provided with sufficient knowledge (of different types) to understand the text (as we discussed in Question 3 in Part I, Section A), giving rise to pre-reading activities most commonly focusing on vocabulary, or on background knowledge. This lesson format is also rooted in an understanding that readers need to have a purpose for reading (as we discussed in Question 2 in Part I, Section B), giving rise to activities that generate interest in the topic, or which provide a purpose for

34  From research to implications

reading. In the while-reading part the learners are then asked to read the text for the main purpose identified in the pre-reading activities or arising from them. In the post-reading part the learners go back to the text, look for additional information and (normally) answer comprehension questions about it. In some cases there is an additional phase, which we would call ‘Extension’, in which the learners take their engagement with the text further, discuss the issues raised in the text and relate it to their own lives and experience. This structure has been popular since the late 1970s: E. Williams (1984) provides a very detailed discussion of this, with a number of fully worked examples (though he includes comprehension questions in the while-reading phase), and this is the format that is also suggested by Nuttall (1982) and is used in many global coursebooks. However, it is important to remember that in some contexts this three-phase structure may still be regarded as an innovation (Memon and Badger 2007; Kung 2019). In and of itself, this three-part framework often seems to work well and provides a structure that is familiar both to learners and to teachers. Practically speaking, reading lessons are often dominated by the post-reading activities, in which learners answer a variety of questions about the content of the passage, questions constructed to ‘ensure’ that they ‘comprehend’ the text that they have read. In effect, this turns the reading lesson into a reading test conducted collectively. In many cases, the focus is ostensibly on the meaning of the text, but the lessons actually focus on the meanings of those specific parts of the text that are targeted by the comprehension questions. Comprehension is implicitly defined as the ability to understand those parts of the text the coursebook writer has chosen to focus on. These parts of the text are then perceived by teachers (and learners) as more important than others and worthy of detailed treatment. This is very different to a focus on those parts of the text that the learners identify as being most important to them, or those parts that they identify as posing most problems for them in the pursuit of their purpose for reading. Day and Park (2005) present a taxonomy for comprehension questions which includes six types: literal questions, reorganisation questions (requiring answers based on different parts of the text), inference, prediction, evaluation and personal response. In many classrooms, however, teachers start with the first three types, and the last three, which lead to divergent responses and which require a personal engagement with and interpretation of the text, are often neglected. This neglect happens either because teachers do not perceive the value of such questions, because these questions are not likely to appear on tests, or simply because they are always last in the list of questions or topics in the textbooks and there might not be time to deal with them. It could also be that the textbooks that teachers use do not provide them with an appropriate range of questions to choose from: Freeman (2014), using a taxonomy of comprehension questions that she developed, found that in the textbooks she analysed most texts were accompanied by a narrow range of

From research to implications 35

questions, rather than a variety of questions of different types. It is striking that the reliance on comprehension questions is still so common in so many classrooms in the world, considering that already more than 40 years ago Nation (1979:85) talked of ‘the curse of the comprehension question’, though some of the alternatives that he proposed would probably be classified as ‘comprehension questions’ using Day and Park’s (2005) taxonomy. What is notable is that the actual reading of the text often lasts only a few minutes and is the shortest part of the lesson; the while-reading phase mainly consists of going over the text a number of times in order to answer different comprehension-type questions. In some ways, this is the type of ‘distracted reading’ that Wolf and Barzilai (2009) talk about, and we need to ask ourselves what is the hidden message that we are conveying to our learners by presenting them with such short texts which we then do not really use in ways that mirror what we do with texts outside the classroom (see also Dupuy, Tse and Cook 1996). In a different approach, Kung (2019:98) describes an innovation in which the learners chose the passages to be read, but in the lessons themselves ‘the instructor would go through the passage word by word before asking every student to come up with the main idea of each passage at the end, followed by a group discussion marking the end of each meeting’. We might consider whether in many ways this counteracts the effects of the innovation. All this is in strong contrast to the principles formulated by R. Williams (1986:42), whose view is that ‘the primary activity of a reading lesson should be reading – not listening to the teacher, not reading comprehension questions, not writing answers to the comprehension questions, not discussing the content of the text’. One of the main problems with the focus on comprehension questions is that posing such questions in the classroom in the way we highlighted above is a way of testing comprehension: it does not equate to teaching reading. It is important to realise this, because the idea that ‘successful reading’ equates ‘success in reading comprehension’ is engrained in many of us. Using comprehension questions during a reading lesson focuses on what the learners can do at a specific point in time, and does not focus on showing them how to do what they are still unable to do. Since the texts used in most intensive reading classes are often difficult texts which the learners would not be able to tackle on their own, testing them on the content of the passages does not show them how they should tackle similar texts in the future. There are, however, various alternatives to this focus on comprehension questions and on the linguistic properties of the text, all of which have meaning as their core focus. Johns and Davies (1983) present an alternative  to TALO, which they call Text as Vehicle for Information, or TAVI. Here the focus is on the meanings encoded in the text, and engagement with language arises from engagement with meaning through activities such as information transfer (e.g., creating a graphic representation of the text in the form of a

36  From research to implications

table or a diagram), using the information in the text for a task, or finding texts that extend the information in the text. Another alternative is jigsaw reading, first introduced into EFL by Geddes and Sturtridge (1981), in which different groups of learners read different texts about the same topic and are then regrouped so that the new groups include learners representing each text. The new groups work towards completing a task that relies on knowledge from all the texts. Clearly, this requires a great deal of language work, but this language work is not controlled by the teacher, or determined by the questions in a textbook, and there is no pretence that a ‘full’ comprehension of the text is needed or indeed achievable. Importantly, the joint comprehension that the learners construct through carrying out the task is achieved through extensive discussions in the original groups and in the task-oriented groups, and the focus is on meaning. Paran (2003) suggests a different approach focusing on meaning, proposing that the first question all teachers should ask their learners is how they reacted to the text. This can focus on affective factors – for example, was the text boring or interesting – or on cognitive factors – for example, was there anything surprising in the information in the text. The language learning focus then arises through and during the discussion of the text and its meanings for the learners. Finally, Macalister (2011a) presents two sets of principles for teaching reading: the MINUS principles (meaning focus, interest, new learning, understanding, stress-free tasks) and the LIST acronym for four types of goal – language, ideas, skills and text. Such approaches also acknowledge that ‘comprehension’ is an elusive concept, that it may be different for different learners and that different learners might face different issues when constructing their understanding of the text. One element of reading lessons that has begun receiving attention recently is reading aloud. Though this is a contentious practice, Gibson (2008) found that all but one of the 27 teachers she surveyed used reading aloud in the classroom. Gibson suggests that reading aloud was brought into disrepute because of the way it was used in some L2 classrooms, where the ‘reading aloud’ activity consisted of learners reading aloud from the textbook with no preparation. Reading aloud was also thought to be an inauthentic practice. However, recent research (Duncan 2018; Duncan and Freeman 2020; Duncan 2021) shows that reading aloud is prevalent in society in many ways, and is in fact part of the communal reading that we discussed in Part I, Section C. We also know that a teacher reading aloud in L1 to their class can bring about progress in comprehension: Westbrook et al. (2019) conducted a study in which they read aloud, at a fast pace, two whole novels to their pupils over 12 weeks. All pupils benefitted from the activity, but poorer readers benefitted more, and made statistically greater progress in their reading than better readers. Duncan and Paran (2017, 2018), looking at data from their lesson observations, teacher interviews and teacher questionnaire, also found that most reading aloud in the classroom is done by the learners, often with no preparation. Paran and

From research to implications 37

Robinson (2016) stress that reading aloud needs to be prepared for, and present guidelines for preparing read-alouds that teachers can follow and also present to their learners for their own preparation. Another aspect of this question is what happens in the L2 classroom when reading longer pieces, such as novels or plays. In such cases, different pedagogical issues arise, often connected with the fact that one text is read over a long period of time – weeks or months. Duncan and Paran (2018) interviewed 37 foreign language teachers in three schools in three different European countries and noted the wide spectrum of practices, which included individual reading as an event which takes place in the classroom itself, so reading time becomes part of the school day; reading as taking place at home, with the classroom the place of response, activity and development; reading in school but outside the classroom; reading aloud by the teacher; reading aloud by the learners. Most teachers found a balance between these different approaches and varied their approach according to circumstances. Paran (2007) discusses the options that are available to teachers reading such longer works with their classes. In our discussion of enjoyment and reading for pleasure (question 4) we suggested that reading enjoyment and reading attitudes correlate with reading behaviour, which then in its turn correlates with reading attainment. An important question for the pedagogy of teaching reading is whether working on texts in the classroom is able to impact the learners’ enjoyment and attitudes, and therefore their reading behaviour. We would suggest that it is probably possible to construct lessons in which the text, short though it may be, can nevertheless be a source of enjoyment and of interest to the learners, thus impacting on their reading attitudes and possibly future reading behaviour. If classroom texts are consistently shown to be of interest and of value to the learners, their attitudes to reading are likely to be impacted by this.

Question 9: How should teachers of reading teach language? Implicit in much of what we have been saying in our discussion of the previous eight questions has been a call for re-balancing the use of texts in the language classroom towards a focus on meaning and away from a focus on language as an object. We suggest this because we believe that a focus on meaning first is more likely to involve learners in the text, stimulate their interest and help them realise the role that reading – be it of shorter texts or longer texts – can play in their lives. We also believe that reading for meaning creates the conditions for lifelong engagement with both texts and with the language of texts. However, we acknowledge that most ELT teachers need to use texts as a focus for language development and developing language skills. This is what we turn to now, moving from smaller units of language to larger units and

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whole texts: that is, from a focus on vocabulary to grammar, discourse and more global considerations of genre.

Vocabulary There is a strong reciprocal relationship between vocabulary and reading, and vocabulary knowledge is a major element in making a text accessible to the reader and in enabling comprehensions ( Jeon and Yamashita 2014). Throughout the different sections in Part I, we have referred to research that highlights the importance of knowing 98% of the words in a text in order to understand it (Schmitt, Jiang and Grabe 2011; Laufer 2020). This is, of course, a figure that relates to reading autonomously rather than in a classroom situation, where there is support from the teacher. We also need to remember that in ‘real life’ a reader might skip words that they do not understand; they may look for definitions of words they do not understand, in a print, electronic or online dictionary; they may skip sentences or even skip whole paragraphs and they may still reach an understanding of the text that is adequate for their purposes. However, this figure of 98% highlights the crucial importance of pre-teaching vocabulary before learners encounter any text for the first time, in order to ensure that this encounter is enjoyable and that the experience leads to comprehension rather than frustration. In pedagogical terms, this equates to providing support before the learner confronts a difficulty. Pre-teaching vocabulary also meshes well with one of the other purposes of pre-reading activities, providing background knowledge, as in many cases the vocabulary that is needed for understanding the text is topic-specific vocabulary.

Narrow reading In addition to pre-teaching vocabulary, another way of reducing the vocabulary load in reading text is through narrow reading, an approach to choosing texts in which learners read multiple texts on the same topic over a series of lessons. In such cases the vocabulary load is likely to lessen progressively as additional texts are read, processed and discussed, and the learners also build up background knowledge about the topic. A good illustration of this is the comparison that Schmitt and Carter (2000) did between a series of eight newspaper articles dealing with Princess Diana’s death published in the same newspaper on eight consecutive days, and a series of unrelated articles published in the same newspaper on the same days. Schmitt and Carter (2000) demonstrate that the group of articles on the same topic contain, as a whole, fewer content words that learners need to deal with, and that there is a higher repetition of words in the series as a whole. The vocabulary load is therefore lower, making the texts easier to deal with, and the repetition suggests that more words will be learned with these texts. Since the words are repeated in different contexts,

From research to implications 39

this also contributes to the depth of vocabulary knowledge. Kang (2015) also demonstrated the way in which words are repeated in narrow reading, and also showed that learners are able to use the words they meet in narrow reading productively. Using narrow reading is likely to contribute to growth in vocabulary breadth and depth. Note, however, that the definition of narrow reading that we have presented above refers to shorter texts on identical or highly similar topics. Other definitions of narrow reading, such as ‘reading several books written by the same author, on the same topic, or from the same genre’ (Hansen and Collins 2015:137) do not seem to guarantee repetition of vocabulary to the degree that choosing short texts on the same topics does.

Using reading to teach grammar Grammar teaching and learning is still a highly contested area (LarsenFreeman 2015) and this is not the place to enter a discussion about whether grammar should be taught to L2 learners at all, or what types of pedagogy are appropriate for teaching. (See also Boers 2021 for an excellent overview of this field.) In terms of reading and of the texts we use for teaching reading, most EFL teachers are familiar with texts that are used to teach grammar through a type of input flooding (that is, texts that include a very high number of instances of the grammatical feature to be taught), followed by either an inductive approach in which learners examine the text and formulate grammar rules, or a deductive approach in which learners are taught a grammar rule and then examine the text as a demonstration of this rule in practice. This is a common phenomenon, and here we would like to highlight a number of problems with it, approaching this area from the point of view of reading research and reading teachers. Boers (2021) highlights issues with focusing on content and the degree to which a focus on content can bring about language learning. He makes the point that it is more difficult to learn grammar from content-focused activities than it is to learn vocabulary, partly because ‘the contribution to meaning by grammar features is often overshadowed in natural discourse by the contribution made by vocabulary’ (2021:195). He nevertheless points out that most popular textbooks use texts for both purposes: a focus on content often followed by revisiting the text a number of times and focusing on a language issue exemplified in it. We would suggest that one issue that may arise with this approach is that the implicit message conveyed in such cases may be that texts are not for reading but for learning grammar. This hidden message that is conveyed to learners over many years of learning a language may be hard to overcome (unless there is, at the same time, a supportive, well-designed Extensive Reading programme that might counteract this hidden message). On the other hand, we need to acknowledge that this is a common way of

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using texts, and need to consider the other implications that such TALO approaches to text have. One point here is that we believe that it is unlikely that a text chosen for content, and which demonstrates features of authentic discourse, will contain enough examples of the specific grammatical structure that we are trying to teach. In our experience, it is in fact very difficult to construct such texts. Below is a text that was circulated some time ago on an email discussion list, and which illustrates these issues: Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in a Scottish village called Alloway. His father, who was a farmer, had built the family home. Initially, Robert had followed in his father’s footsteps, but had found he disliked agricultural work. His main interests since childhood had been books and poetry. Fortunately, he had written a collection of poems that had sold well. He became famous and was able to forgot about agriculture. Burns died aged just 37, in 1796, but he left behind a huge number of poems. He had had 12 children (the youngest son was born on the day of Burns’ funeral), so there are many of his descendants living today. This text was very clearly written to teach the Past Perfect: the text is 113 words long and includes 7 cases of the Past Perfect. However, there are a number of places where this use is on the boundary of grammatical acceptability (for example, ‘had built the family home’) and some where this is outright wrong (‘Initially, Robert had followed in his father’s footsteps’). In other places it is grammatically correct, but discoursally one has to ask why the information is presented there, with only one answer emerging: because it provides an opportunity to demonstrate the Past Perfect. This means that the text is useful only for focusing on the morphosyntactics/form of the Past Perfect; it is not suitable for examining its semantics, and definitely not for examining the Pragmatics/Use element (Larsen-Freeman and DeCarrico 2020). In contrast, we would like to talk about a text taken from Hall and Shepheard (1991), a book with the alluring title of The Anti-Grammar Grammar Book, and which has been suggested for use to teach the Present Perfect. It is 246 words long, with 9 occurrences of the Present Perfect. As can be seen from the beginning of the text, the target form is used more naturally and in contrast with other tenses and aspects: The rains which have just brought hope to the starving in Africa have also triggered a new menace – the biggest plague of locusts in three decades. Experts who have been with the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Mali for years were amazed by the size of one swarm measuring 75 by 16 miles. Such a swarm could contain 150 billion insects, between

From research to implications 41

them eating 300,000 tons of fresh vegetables every day. And there are other swarms. Giant swarms have also been reported in Cape Verde and Burkina Faso. In Botswana, according to the FAO, locusts have covered between one and two million acres. Hall and Shepheard (1991:101) As is apparent from this excerpt, the text enables the teacher and the learners to look not only at the form of the Present Perfect, but also at the way in which this form is used as a resource for creating meaning and the way its use differs from the use of other verb forms within the same text. Such longer texts, with a more natural choice of verbal forms, enable the learner to experience and encounter different uses of grammatical forms, helping them understand the way in which grammatical form is a choice, and how this choice operates in a whole discourse. The text thus brings out very strongly Larsen-Freeman’s point (2015:274) that ‘grammar is a lexicogrammatical resource for making meaning. In other words, it is not autonomous from the meaning-making capacity of language more generally, but rather integral to how we make meaning in interaction with others’. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to this issue, and the discussion is likely to continue for a long time. From our vantage point as researchers and teachers of reading, we would suggest that it might be better to acknowledge the implicit message that we mentioned above, and ensure that textbooks have at least some texts that are not focused on for language purposes, but are only used for their content. This might mean focussing on authentic texts written for meaning and message rather than for language learning.

Discourse elements There are other areas of language, on the other hand, for which a focus through texts is ideal. Cohesion (the grammatical ways in which writers signal a relationship between concepts and between propositions) and coherence (the meaning relationships between ideas and propositions) are language elements that are best demonstrated in longer textual extracts. It may be possible to teach some vocabulary elements in isolation, but the best way of teaching discourse markers such as ‘however’ or ‘therefore’ or teaching pronoun reference is to examine them as parts of whole texts. When teaching these elements we need to understand what builds the whole text, what builds the whole message, content or story and what are the linguistic clues for this. The other reason for this is that the isolated teaching of connectives and discourse markers often results in overuse of connectives in students’ own writing (Crewe 1990; Chen and Tsang 2022), a phenomenon which is often attributed to teaching connectives and discourse markers as lists, or in gapped texts for practice which contain an inauthentically high number of connectives.

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Interestingly, there is some evidence that knowledge of connectives may not play an important role in L2 reading comprehension. Crosson and Lesaux (2013) found that knowledge of connectives had a lesser effect on reading comprehension of English language learners than on the reading comprehension of English-only students. They suggest that it is possible that there is a threshold effect here, and that only learners who are at a higher level of proficiency are able to benefit from knowledge of connectives. Wellie et al. (2017) also found that language background had no effect on the ability to use connectives for reading comprehension, but did find that students with higher metalinguistic knowledge were able to use knowledge of connectives better than other students. They therefore highlight the importance of discussing connectives and their contribution to local and global coherence with students.

Genres The last area we will look at is the way in which text genre interacts with reading comprehension by EFL learners. Duke and Roberts (2010) divide definitions of genre into two types – one which focuses on the formal features of the text, and the other which focuses on the social and rhetorical aspects of the text. Flowerdew’s (2013:138) definition combines the two: ‘different communicative events which are associated with particular settings and which have recognised structures and communicative functions’. Paré and Smart (1994 in Duke and Roberts 2010:75) provide a definition which is particularly useful here: a distinctive profile of regularities across four dimensions: a set of texts, the composing processes involved in creating these texts, the reading practices used to interpret them, and the social roles performed by writers and readers. Genres thus interact with reading purpose and reader expectations, and also mesh in the way in which reading leads to writing: we read different genres in the language classroom both to sensitise our learners to the hidden messages of different genres, but also to show our learners what the choices are for them when they come to write in these genres. It is quite obvious that we do not read a short story in the same way in which we read an article about climate change, even if they are the same length, simply because our purposes are likely to be different. This is backed up by research as well, and Duke and Roberts (2010) survey research that shows that readers perform differently according to the genre which they are reading. In particular, they suggest that performance in reading comprehension tests based on narratives is different to performance in reading comprehension tests based on information texts (Duke and Roberts 2010). Duke and Roberts (2010) suggest that teachers need to go beyond merely teaching students the differences between the genres,

From research to implications 43

but that teachers should combine authentic reasons and contexts for reading that highlight the social purpose of different genres, with instruction on strategies appropriate for specific genres. We will look at the implications of these findings from L1 reading instruction for L2 teaching in the following sections.

Question 10: What does it mean to be an effective teacher of reading? This is, most probably, the most important question that we could pose, and is, in a way, what the whole of this book is about. But answering it is not easy. Richards (1989), in the first evidence-based study trying to define an effective teacher of reading, commented that there were very few descriptions of successful reading teachers in existence at the time. Unfortunately, this is still the case. As we have demonstrated throughout the previous sections in Part I, the reading process is highly complex; reading in a foreign language adds to this complexity and the classroom adds even more. But there is another issue with our question, namely, the definition of ‘effectiveness’. It is probably appropriate to say at this stage that decisions of what is ‘effective’ are always based on theoretical principles of pedagogy, often anchored in our personal beliefs about teaching and learning, rather than on empirical evidence that one approach is superior to the other. This is mainly because it is so difficult to isolate the different variables and really understand what it is that is causing any specific improvement in the results. An interesting paper in this regard is Kung (2019), who implemented a teaching approach that involved two innovative elements. One was that learners read authentic texts that had not been simplified; the second was that for each lesson, learners would choose the text that they would study in class and the class would focus on the text that had been chosen by the majority of the students. However, because there were two innovative elements here, it is impossible to decide what it was that made a difference. Johnson (2019) lists six criteria for identifying ‘exemplary’ teachers for her study, but she includes a mixture of specific factual criteria (length of teaching experience; qualifications and awards), knowledge of the student population and appreciation of their teaching by colleagues and students (though we are not told how these views were collected). The important point we need to take from this is how difficult it is to identify ‘exemplary’ or ‘effective’ teaching and teachers, and how making these decisions will always rely on an array of criteria. In his study, Richards (1989) observed a teacher considered to be an effective reading teacher on a regular basis, and presents the conclusions he reached from analysing the video recording of one lesson in detail and discussing it with the teacher. Apart from general principles of good teaching (e.g. the lessons have a clear structure; instructional objectives are used to guide and organise lessons; instruction is learner-focused; a variety of activities are used; students receive

44  From research to implications

feedback on their performance), a number of important principles related to reading also emerged from Richards’ observations. These include: the use of class time for learning; a focus on teaching and not testing; the teacher has a theory and understanding of reading; and instructional activities relate to real-world purposes. In a later study, Paran (2002) analysed two EAP reading lessons in which two different teachers used the same unit from the textbook used in their institution. He shows how one teacher had a learner-centred, process-oriented focus, whereas the other teacher had a teacher-centred, product-focused approach to the same material. In the teacher-­centred lesson, the teacher spent large amounts of time talking to the learners about the text. There was some amount of pair work, but most of the communication was between the teacher and the students. In contrast, the process-oriented lesson included two lengthy episodes in which the learners discussed what they had read; in the first episode groups worked together to reach a joint understanding of the text; each group then sent one person to another group to present their views of the text, in effect creating new groups which worked together to refine and nuance their understanding of different points in the text. In this process-oriented reading lesson, 48% of instruction time was devoted to a discussion of the text in groups. In contrast, in the product-­oriented lesson, only 19% of the time was devoted to discussion, which was done in pairs. This means that in both lessons reading was linked to speaking about the text and discussing it, providing opportunities for practising vocabulary and structures present in the text through listening and speaking. The importance of discussion in helping readers hone and nuance their view of the text appears in other studies as well. Johnson (2019) found that organising pair work and organising group work were amongst the scaffolding strategies used most by the teachers she observed. Discussion is also explicitly highlighted by Silver and Png (2016), who conducted a longitudinal study in which they mentored a group of teachers over three years on ways in which they could lead discussions about the texts they were reading with their classrooms. Interestingly, the project consisted of reading research on reading and discussing it with the researcher mentors, followed by the teachers planning lessons together collaboratively to incorporate the new teaching and reading strategies that were introduced in the project. The discussions the teachers had with the mentors about their reading meant that they were practising the type of discussion that they would later be trying to implement in their own lessons, in a type of loop input (Woodward 1988).

Our beliefs and principles As we have said above, and as the four sections in Part I have demonstrated, reading is a highly complex activity; there are myriad ways of exploring it and researching it; our understandings of reading and of teaching reading are

From research to implications 45

influenced by theory, research and, not least, our own personal experiences of reading in L1, learning to read in our L2, and our actual engagement in reading L2, but most importantly by our personal beliefs about reading. We therefore end Part I of the book with a list of some of our personal beliefs about reading and about teaching reading: •

• • • • • •

Reading for language development is important and an effective way of developing language, but is not a replacement for the reading experience itself. The reading experience should be at the centre of all our reading lessons. Language development is an important part of reading lessons but is not a replacement for the reading experience itself. Language classrooms should allow time for reading that mirrors the way we read outside the classroom. Reading takes place for a purpose, and that purpose can include interest, enjoyment and curiosity about the subject, amongst many. Learners need to experience opportunities for making reading choices for themselves. A reading classroom will offer opportunities to read longer texts and a variety of genres, including literary genres such as stories and novels and non-fiction such as biographies, history, popular science texts and many others.

Part Two FROM IMPLICATIONS TO APPLICATION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041382-3

From implications to application 47

A:  TEACHING READING AS LINGUISTIC PROCESS Introduction We know from our discussion in Part I, Section A, that we can think about reading at several levels, from the decoding level through to the ability to interpret the marks on the page or on the screen and translate these into meanings, and to the involvement of background knowledge, the ability to deploy different reading styles and the capacity to relate the written word to the known world, both imaginative, cognitive and physical. What does that really mean for teachers, readers and learner readers? This section translates the questions, concerns and findings of research into practical activities. Many of the activities can be tried out with the text you are using in class, from the coursebook or class reader, so no additional resources are needed beyond your everyday materials. Other activities suggest the building of a resource bank from what is freely and authentically available in your setting, such as brochures, forms, leaflets or advertisements. A few activities can be used in the school library if you have one. However, no assumptions are made about what is available, and each activity can be adapted to what is practical in your setting.

Question 1: What are we doing when we read? These activities look at the different aspects of what we do when we read, starting with the decoding aspect of reading as a bottom-up process (Activities 1.1–1.3), and going on to look at the way in which other, top-down processes are involved (Activities 1.4–1.7).

ACTIVITY 1.1 ALL IN ONE: THE SHAPE OF WORDS Aims • • •

To develop word recognition To develop the link between seeing words with the eye and interpreting them as meaning To notice progress and change in rapid reading

Level You the teacher Advanced learners and trainee teachers of reading

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Time Phase 1: 30 seconds Phase 2: 5 minutes

Materials and preparation •

• •

Choose a text you are working with currently with your learners. Choose five sentences at random and type them out without any spaces between the words. Copy, project, display on the whiteboard or send online so each learner can see the sentences Have a way of timing in seconds: e.g. a digital watch or phone with seconds timing

Procedure 1. Ask your learners to look at the first sentence. Below is an example for you as reader to practice for yourself. • • •

Read the line below and time how long it takes for you to make sense of it. Notice the process by which you start to make sense of the line. What did your eye see first? How did you ‘read’ it first of all? How did you find words and meanings in the line? Hereisalinewithoutanybreaksatallhoweasydoyoufindittoread

2. Now you have grasped the key idea about the line: that it is a string of words that make complete sense, but there are no breaks between words and no punctuation. In spite of that, it is possible to recognise the words and make sense of the sentence: the brain is able to chunk the string of letters into words in a process that requires an interaction between the skill of decoding on the one hand and assigning meaning to the letter string on the other. Try the string of words below and again time how long it takes for you to make sense of it. Doesitgeteasiertoreadonceyoureyegetsusedtonogapsbetweenwords? •

Having tried out the strategy of looking/thinking/finding the gaps, did it take you less time to read the string of words above?

From implications to application 49

•

Did you find it easier to interpret the second line and if so, why? What do you think is happening to the relationship between eye and brain?

Variations You could ask learners to be teachers, and choose five sentences from texts they have read to write out without spaces. Collect these as a ‘resource bank’ of sentence chains, shuffle them and hand out a new set of sentences to each learner. You could also turn this activity into a reading race, by splitting the class into two teams. The winner is the team that separates out the string of words into sentence parts the quickest.

Comments Although these exercises seem ‘childish’ and suitable for low level learners, in fact automatising word recognition is important at every stage of language learning, and all learners, including advanced learners, would benefit from including some of these exercises in a teaching plan. What is interesting, too, is this activity can take the form of a ‘race’ with yourself: does it get easier to decode the second sentence? Are you quicker?

Research connections Decoding is an extremely important element in the development of reading, and one of the important aspects of developing reading in the classroom is encouraging the development of automatic processing of words by the learners. There are two ways in which this can be done. One is through a large amount of extensive reading, and we tackle this issue in Part I, Section B, and Part II, Section B. The second is through targeted exercises, which have been shown to effectively influence word recognition in the studies by Akamatsu (2008) and by Gorsuch and Taguchi (2008). It is important to acknowledge that these targeted exercises are often not particularly interesting, and do not sit comfortably within a communicative approach to language teaching and its focus on meaning. The way in which you can use them in the classroom is to turn them into games and competitions. Possibly the most important principle to remember here is to ensure that you do not spend too much time on this: remember that the study by Akamatsu (2008), for example, showed positive results after only seven weeks, with short training sessions of 90 seconds once a week.

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ACTIVITY 1.2 WORD CHAIN RACE Aims • •

To develop word recognition and automaticity of specific vocabulary To practice eye recognition of the shape of words and the boundaries between them

Level All levels

Time 90 seconds

Materials and preparation • •

You will need a whiteboard or way of displaying word chains clearly to the whole class (e.g. a projector) You will need a stopwatch or way of counting up to 90 seconds.

Choose a number of texts that the class has read recently. Choose about 25 words from these texts that you think are important for your learners to recognise automatically. With these words, create word chains of about five to six words each (ca. 30–35 characters). A word chain is a string of words without gaps, like this: ofchainlearnerlevelwordscharacters Provide your learners with a handout with the word chains.

Procedure 1. Explain that each learner has 90 seconds to divide the word chains into separate words. If the learners have a handout, all they need to do is to mark the boundaries between the words. 2. Time them using a stopwatch or countdown. 3. At the end of the 90 seconds ask the class to put their pens down.

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4. Mark the word chains on the board with slashes in the correct places. Each learner can use this to ‘correct’ their own work (or exchange with another learner). 5. Ask each learner to record the number of chains they have been able to complete correctly within the time allocated. 6. Repeat the activity over a few days, using the same words in different combinations. Again, time the activity and ask each learner to keep a record of how many word chains they complete in the time allocated. 7. Once most of the students in your class succeed in completing all word chains within the 90 seconds allotted to this exercise, it’s probably time to move to another group of words! 8. Ask your learners about any improvement in speed that they notice over time.

Variations If you cannot provide handouts for your learners, you may wish to type up the word chains in a Word document or a Powerpoint and project them onto a screen. Learners will then need to identify the words and write them down. This will slow the activity but still requires them to segment the word chain quickly.

Comments Seeing the boundaries between words is useful for co-ordinating what the eye sees and what the brain interprets. Fluency includes the capacity to take in the shape of the word without spelling out each sound, and rapidly translating this into meaning.

Research connections In Part I, Section A, we mentioned Geva and Ramírez’s (2015) survey of the research and quoted their point that ‘to become good comprehenders, novice EL2 learners need to develop their basic word-level reading skills’ (Geva and Ramírez 2015:17). Activities 1.1 and 1.2 focus on word-level reading as the eye learns to discern the boundaries between words and make sense of them as separate units.

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ACTIVITY 1.3 LEARNER GENERATED WORD CHAIN RACE Aims •

To develop word recognition and automaticity of specific vocabulary

Level All levels

Time 90 seconds

Materials and preparation • • •

Each learner will need access to at least one reading text you have read in class, for example in a coursebook, class reader or extensive reader You will need a stop watch or way of counting up to 90 seconds. You will need a pack of blank cards (See activities 1.1. and 1.2 for examples of word chains).

Procedure 1. After a reading lesson ask your learners to write – on a card or post-it – five words they like, or five words they have started to use for the first time. 2. Each learner should prepare four or five cards; these can be identical or different. 3. Ask them now to write out their five words as word chains on the card, and hand the card to you. 4. Mix up the cards and hand each learner five different word chain cards. Explain that each learner has 90 seconds to divide the word chains into separate words and write them down as a list. 5. Time them using a stopwatch or countdown. 6. At the end of the 90 seconds ask the class to put their pens down.

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7. Ask each learner to record the number of chains they have been able to complete correctly within the time allocated. 8. Repeat the activity over a few days, using the same words in different combinations. Again, time the activity and ask each learner to keep a record of how many word chains they complete in the time. 9. Once most of the students in your class succeed in completing all word chains within the 90 seconds allotted to this exercise, it’s probably time to move to another group of words! 10. Ask your learners about any improvement in speed that they notice over time.

Variations One variation is to ask the learners to divide the word chain into words without writing them out as a list.

Comments In this activity, learners are choosing the words themselves and writing them out. As they do this, they are not only processing the words as they read, but translating the shapes and spellings for themselves in the act of writing. Giving learners the chance to be the ‘teacher’ is also empowering and consolidates their reading and writing skills.

Research connections Like Activities 1.1 and 1.2, this activity is based on the view that ‘to become good comprehenders, novice EL2 learners need to develop their basic word-level reading skills’ (Geva and Ramírez 2015:17). It introduces a strong game-like element into this activity, as well as involving the learners to a greater extent by asking them to take part in constructing the activity.

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ACTIVITY 1.4 RUN-ON SENTENCES: SEEING AND HEARING SENTENCE BOUNDARIES Aims • • •

To develop the capacity to recognise the divisions between sentences To develop comprehension monitoring To compare reading silently and reading aloud

Level Intermediate to advanced learners

Time 90 seconds

Materials and preparation • •

Choose four texts that the class has read recently, from the coursebook, class reader or authentic texts such as newspaper articles or labels. Prepare a handout with four or five sentences from the start of each text, typed up without sentence endings (full stops) or capital letters, such as this: There are a number of myths concerning reading including reading in a foreign language; one persistent myth is that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game this is the claim that readers don’t process every word in a text or even every letter in a word this myth claims that readers rely on context to decode the words.

Procedure 1. Explain you are going to do the same exercise twice, first reading aloud, and second reading silently, to see which they like better. 2. Ask each learner to work with a partner and allocate Partner A and Partner B. Give each Partner A a copy of the handout. 3. Ask Partner A to read the different sentence strings on the handout aloud, one by one. Partner B must call out STOP as they hear a sentence ending. Partner A should note down how many times their partner calls STOP with each sentence string.

From implications to application 55

4. At the end ask how many times STOP was called for each sentence string. If you have four sentences per string (as in the example above), a ‘correct’ number would be x 4 per string. 5. Now each learner is going to read the same text silently. Give each partner the handout and ask them silently to read the sentence strings, marking the sentence boundaries with a slash (/). 6. Time the class for 90 seconds. At the end, ask them how many of the four texts they have successfully divided into sentences. Was there any difference between the first and second versions?

Variations Compare the speed of recognising boundaries when sentences are read aloud, as opposed to read silently. You might also discuss whether it helped to experience the texts twice; whether it was easier the second time; whether, and how reading aloud helped them. Students can also become the teachers, by choosing a paragraph for themselves in a text they are reading, and writing it out without sentence endings on a card. Collect the cards, and redistribute them so every student has a different paragraph to ‘correct’.

Comments Fluency includes the capacity to see the boundaries of sentences and recognise when meaning has been grammatically completed. Punctuation helps the reader recognise that the end of the sentence has been reached, but readers also recognise this from their processing of the syntax. This activity brings the syntactic parsing that readers do while reading to a level of conscious awareness.

Research connections This activity forces readers to attend to the process by which they construct the meanings of sentences, and attend to sentence boundaries, where readers spend a bit more time integrating what they have understood into their model of the text. It develops comprehension monitoring (Block 1992) as the learners have to recognise that there has been a shift in focus and in grammatical structure. The advantage of this activity is that it develops comprehension monitoring through reading unchanged texts (compared to developing it through changing the text and introducing contradictory information, for example).

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ACTIVITY 1.5 TEXT SHOPPING: WHAT’S NEXT IN THE TEXT? Aims • •

To develop prediction skills as a part of the reading process. To develop prediction as a way of selecting texts

Level All levels, beginners to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

• •

•

Choose 4 or 5 readings which you are thinking about using in class. These might be texts coming later in their coursebook, class readers or learner literature you plan to read with your class. Choose the first two sentences from each reading. Prepare a handout with these sentences, or project them for the whole class to see together. If neither of these are possible, write the first two sentences of each text on the whiteboard in preparation for the class. Keep for your use during the lesson the full texts – books, articles or other resources which will enable you to answer questions about the full text.

Procedure 1. Divide the class into groups of three. 2. Explain to your learners that these are the opening lines of four texts that you are thinking of buying for the class library. However, you can only choose one of these texts and you would like them to help. Each group of three is a student advisory board offering advice about book purchases. 3. In pairs ask them to think about each of the four texts using the questions below: • • •

What kind of text do I think this is (e.g. story, newspaper article, instructions, blog)? Does it inspire me to read further? What do I think comes next in the text?

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Ask them to draw up five questions they want to ask about the text before making a final choice. 1. After 10 minutes, ask the class to share their questions about each text. Confirm what genre each text belongs to, and offer answers to the questions from the full texts you have available. 2. With these pieces of information, now invite the class to vote for the text they would like to buy as a class text. (Consider actually using this text as a reading in future classes). If you have presented shorter texts (e.g. newspaper articles, blogs) consider using them for more detailed reading in the next lesson.

Variations The learners could become the teachers in future versions of this activity. They could be invited to bring in a reading they have enjoyed, in any form, and share the first two sentences with others in groups of four or five. Then they become the ‘informants’ answering questions about what comes next in the text. A further extension of this activity is to ask learners to write down what they think the following sentence will be for each sentence opening. Then reveal on the whiteboard, or read out, the actual following sentence in each text. Compare and discuss the differences and what they now have learnt about the text. Has it changed their mind about the text at all? Would they now choose another text?

Comments The texts and opening sentences you choose should be appropriate for the level of your class, and should not present any comprehension issues for your learners. For beginner and pre-intermediate level, the discussion could also be in the first language if this is a shared class language. The important thing is that the reading itself is in the target language, and the prediction of sentences to follow. We know from research that giving learners permission to think and discuss in their first language in the classroom can enhance confidence and success in the second language. The skills your learners are practising are firstly, that of asking questions about a text, and secondly, prediction about text on the basis of minimal information.

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Research connections Prediction is one of the many skills which comprise ‘deep reading’, looking beyond the text to hidden, projected and possible meanings. Wolf and Barzilai (2009) define ‘deep reading’ as ‘the array of sophisticated processes that propel comprehension and that included inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection and insight’ (2009:32). Activities 1.5–1.7 develop these ‘sophisticated processes’, and prediction is one of these. Prediction can work at sentence level, or at the level of whole meaning and message. In some cases (though not all) we can predict some elements of the content of a whole book from the title, blurb on the back or picture on the front cover; or we can respond just to a single opening sentence by predicting what will come in the next sentence, or next paragraph. Reading can create a kind of flow when the text seems to answer our questions as they arise. Somewhere in these predictions, we are also asking does it inspire me to read further? These questions explain the rapid decisions we might make about what we read.

ACTIVITY 1.6 READING ALOUD AND HOLISTIC READING Aims • • •

Strengthen the connection between phonological representations and written representations of words Increase learners’ reading speed Help learners achieve general comprehension without necessarily understanding every word

Level All levels

Time 1–5 minutes, depending on the length of the text

From implications to application 59

Materials and preparation •

The only material needed here is the text that you are using with your class. Make sure that you are able to read the text quickly and are able to pronounce the words of the text clearly and correctly

Procedure 1. Once you have worked with your learners on the pre-reading activities for the text that you are using, explain to your learners that they are going to listen to you reading the text, while following the text in writing on the page. 2. Read the text aloud to your learners. Do not rush the reading, but keep a steady pace at the faster end of the continuum. You should be able to read around 180-190 words a minute. Do not stop to explain words or to ask your learners questions. Read the text from the beginning to the end without stopping. 3. Once you have read the text aloud, move with your learners to the post-reading activities that you have prepared (or that the coursebook that you are using includes). 4. At the end of the lesson ask your learners: a. Did you like hearing the text being read aloud? b. Does it make the activities easier, more difficult or no difference?

Variations Once your learners have experienced the text being read aloud, invite them to prepare a paragraph that they would like to read aloud themselves. They should practice reading this text aloud, articulating the sounds and ensuring that the boundaries between sentences are clear. They should focus on the meaning of the text and bring it out in their reading, as well as think about the mood and the tone of the text and bring these out as well. Divide the class into groups of 3. Give each group time for the learners to read their paragraphs to one another. Then ask the groups to discuss the following questions: • •

Did you like hearing the text read aloud by your partner? Did you understand the text when your partner read it aloud? Was it easier to understand than on the page?

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Comments The focus on strategies in teaching reading in EFL has meant that we often ask our learners to glean at least some information from the text before they read it in detail. However, we should also be giving our learners practice in reading quickly from beginning to end. This is particularly easy to do when we are dealing with shorter texts – e.g. texts that are about 200–400 words long. Such texts should take no more than two or three minutes to read, if readers read at a pace of 150–180 words per minute. (See the next activity for an extended version of this activity.)

Research connections Two studies which we discussed in Part I provide the rationale for this activity. The first one is Statman (1987), which we discussed in Part I, Section B, where she showed how learners who are faced with texts that are challenging often give up on reading and become disengaged from the text. To combat this disengagement, we believe that listening to a more experienced and more capable reader read a text fluently enables the learners to leap over the points at which they might get stuck when reading independently on their own. The second rationale for this activity comes from Gorsuch and Taguchi (2008), who showed that repeated readings of the same texts, combining timed reading, untimed reading and reading while listening to the text being read aloud, contributed to improvements in reading fluency as well as improvements in reading comprehension. This activity is geared towards achieving similar aims, but making the repeated readings collaborative.

ACTIVITY 1.7 STORYTELLING: STORIES WITHOUT BARRIERS Aims • •

Encouraging comprehension of overall story/message without being held up by unknown language. Reading without anxiety: reading in whole stretches

Level All levels

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Time 10–15 minutes over a number of sessions – preferably as many sessions as possible.

Materials and preparation •

• •

A selection of short stories of different lengths. The stories should be at a level that challenges your learners, rather than at a level at which they can read comfortably on their own. You could use a set of graded readers at a level higher than that which your learners would be comfortable reading on their own. Prepare enough copies so each student has a copy of the story that they can follow while you are reading. Prepare for the session by reading the story aloud to yourself. Practice taking the parts of characters, and bringing out moments of drama or surprise. These are very valuable storytelling and reading aloud skills for teachers.

Procedure 1. Introduce the short story briefly or provide some background information to the story before you begin reading but make sure that you do not let this take over from the reading. 2. Read the story, uninterruptedly, from beginning to end. If the story is long and you need to divide it into two sections (or more), try to make sure that they are of equal length. 3. After the reading invite your learners to work in groups of three in response to these questions: a. Did you like the story? What did you like about it? Was there anything that you did not like about it? What did you find difficult? b. If you were talking about this story to a friend, how would you summarise it to them? c. Which do you prefer, reading stories on the page or hearing them being read aloud? Can you say why?

Variations Another interesting development could be the re-reading of the same story over time, separated by a week or so, to see if it is understood or enjoyed better the second time.

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Comments a. In the original study on which this activity is based (Westbrook et al. 2019), teachers were asked to spend the whole the lesson reading to their class. You will probably not be able to do this, but try to devote some time to fast-paced reading aloud every lesson. b. Do not stop and explain words, even if you are sure that your learners don’t know them, and do not stop to check comprehension. The aim is to help learners realise how much they can understand even if they don’t understand each word, and to help them get over the worry that each obstacle might generate. c. The focus should be on enjoying the short story or the book itself. This pleasure is created by uninterrupted reading, rather than focusing on comprehension of specific words or details.

Research connections Reading aloud without stopping for explanations or discussion focuses on experiencing the text itself. This way of exposing learners to texts means that the experience becomes a pleasurable one, and contributes to a virtuous circle in which their reading improves. This was shown in a study by Westbrook et al., which we discussed in Part I. Westbrook et al. (2019) constructed an intervention programme in which English teachers (of English as L1) read two challenging novels to the class over a period of 12 weeks, at a faster pace than usual. Westbrook et al. found that the students improved their comprehension, and the poorer students improved more than the average ones.

Question 2: What are the different reasons and ways people read? In Part I we presented a number of ways and reasons people read. Here we present activities broadly in line with two of the reading styles and purposes described in the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2018). We look at reading for orientation, which includes the search skills of skimming and scanning (Activities 2.1 and 2.2), and we look at reading for argument and information (Activities 2.3 and 2.4). The final activity in this group provides a way for learners to reflect on the different purposes they read, the different ways they read and how they take the information gleaned from reading forward.

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ACTIVITY 2.1 READING THE LANDSCAPE: NOTICING AND ACTING IN THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE Aim • •

To encourage noticing of languages in the landscape To notice the way we act and react in response to reading in the landscape

Level Beginners to advanced

Time Homework task

Materials and preparation •

If learners have ways of taking pictures, such as phones or mobile phones, this will be helpful as part of the activity.

Procedure 1. Ask your learners to notice language in their surroundings – you could phrase this generally, or suggest to them specific places where they could focus their attention – for example, on their way back from their class to home. 2. Ask them to take a photograph of any examples or sample of language they find interesting, amusing or surprising. These might be posters, signs, labels, advertisements, labels, names or numbers on the bus and so on. If they cannot take photographs, ask them to make written notes, copying the language they see. 3. Ask them to bring these images or written notes to class. Display the images around the walls and use these as a reading and learning resource for discussion and reference, to make the walls reflect the kind of language in the world outside the classroom. 4. Invite discussion of the signs: What do they mean? (In the L1 and the L2) What did we do when we read/saw these signs?

64  From implications to application

Did we consciously read those signs or did we ‘just know’ what they meant? How? Are there images, shapes or colours which also help us understand the signs? If the signs are in two or more languages, what is the relationship between the languages? Which comes first? If two languages (or more) are routinely used in the signs in your context, are all signs in all languages? Are there any signs that are only in one language? If yes, what are the possible reasons for that? What does the choice of language for a sign say about the community using these signs?

Comments The samples of language you will use for this activity will differ, depending on whether you are in a monolingual setting, whether you are in a setting that brings together several languages and whether English is present, partially present or absent in the environment.

Research connection We saw in Part I, Section A that reading includes the decoding of symbols, and we might do this automatically when we meet these symbols in the outside world, and act on them – for example, to catch the bus or not, to turn right or not, to go into a shop or not. In our natural linguistic landscape, we are in fact processing language without even realising this. Sayer (2010) describes building the linguistic landscape into teaching, and the positive effect it has on the literacy of learners.

ACTIVITY 2.2 BITS AND PIECES: CHOOSING YOUR FAVOURITE BITS IN A LONGER TEXT Aim • •

To practice making choices about what to read by skimming a longer text. To practice making rapid decisions about what is or is not interesting in a text.

From implications to application 65

Level Intermediate to advanced

Time 45 minutes (a whole lesson)

Materials and preparation •

•

Build a resource bank of magazines, newspapers and journals in the L2 that you think are at a roughly tuned level for your learners. These do not have to be an exact match with your learners’ language level, nor do you need to carefully hone your choice to their interests, as the learners will make this decision for you. You could also ask each learner to bring in one L2 magazine, journal or newspaper of their own choice, if this is practical, to add to your collection.

Procedure 1. If you have a large class, divide them into groups of three and give each group one journal, newspaper or magazine. 2. In a smaller class, and if you have enough in your resource bank to do so, give each learner one magazine. 3. Tell your learners they are the journal editor and they have been asked to select just one article/section of the magazine to be read aloud on the radio. The section needs to be interesting, well written, topical, appealing to people of their age group. They have just 10 minutes before the radio show goes live so they need to skim the magazine rapidly and make their choice. 4. Time this part of the activity for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes ask the learners to form groups of four or five and explain their choice to the others. Each group needs to vote on the most convincing choice. 5. In plenary you can now share answers to the question: how did you make your choice?

Variations The same activity could also be applied to choosing books in a bookshop, or selecting books to include in the library. A homework task could include

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going to the library and choosing a book, explaining the strategies by which this choice was made.

Comments You could tease out strategies that helped the learners choose the ‘best bits’ in a longer magazine. These strategies could include using headlines, using pictures, seeing how densely the paragraphs were written – if they included quotations, for example; reading opening and closing sentences. A list of these on the walls might be useful as a continuing reference, so learners might expand their own repertoire of strategies.

Research connections The CEFR (Council of Europe 2018:53) describes this process of reading rapidly for key information as ‘reading a text “diagonally”’.

ACTIVITY 2.3 WIKIPEDIA RACE: SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING SPECIFIC Aim • •

To develop awareness of how we read when we are searching for specific information. To develop strategies for extracting information quickly from a text.

Level Lower intermediate to advanced

Time Each run of the game will last 40 minutes. One suggestion is to run the game twice so learners can see if they improve their timing between the first and second race. A double race would last 80 minutes.

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Materials and preparation •

•

•

Each group of five in the class should have access to the internet and specifically Wikipedia, via mobile devices, laptop or classroom PC. Make a decision before the class of how many acceptable devices per group is practical: for example, one device such as a classroom computer per group or three personal devices per group. Each group should have the same number of resources. Choose a theme or topic which you have been recently studying, which would be interesting or useful to return to: e.g. people in the world; famous poets; our city. Alternatively, the theme could be general knowledge.

Procedure 1. Divide the class into teams of five. Give each student – or ask students to choose – one of these roles: quizmaster (to write down the questions); secretary (to write down the answers); researchers (to check for information). 2. Ask each team to plan together five quiz questions. These could be themed quiz questions about a topic covered in class; or a theme reflecting interests of your students. Whatever the case, the quiz questions need to be general knowledge (rather than personal); and they should be questions the members of the team can find answers to through using Wikipedia or the internet. 3. Give the groups 15 minutes to formulate their questions, using their search devices. 4. Each team should write down their questions on one sheet of paper, and the answers they have found on a separate piece of paper kept safely by the secretary. Sample questions in the theme My country could be: • • • • • • •

When was the prime minister/president of your country born? When was your town/city founded? What is the height of the tallest building in your town? When was the first train/tram/bus in your town? Who is the biggest employer in your country? How many people left your country to live abroad last year? How many people came to live in your country last year?

5. Each team should exchange their questions with another team.

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6. Give the class 15 minutes to research the quiz questions online using any search engine they like in order to answer the questions. The team members can use laptops or mobile devices. 7. After 15 minutes stop the race. Ask the secretary in each group to join the team that has researched their questions. 8. The team then gives their answers, checked by the secretary and a score arrived at, with one point for each correct answer. 9. The winning team is the one with the most correct answers in the given time. 10. When the game is over, ask the students how they researched their topics, and draw on the board a list of their strategies. These could include points such as: • • • •

I looked for key words. I looked for all the dates in brackets in the text. I looked for all the names/words with capital letters I skimmed the list of titles on Google and chose the ones with the key word in.

11. Now ask the class to notice: • • • •

How many of the strategies listed on the board did you use? Are there any of the strategies listed on the board which you didn’t try? Are there any strategies you would like to try next time? Are there any you use often?

Variations If the technology available does not enable learners to connect to the internet, the quiz questions could be answered using the school library, or answerable using resources around the walls of the classroom. The Wikipedia race could be re-run on another day, or within the same class, to see if the teams can now improve their scores, using the strategies discussed. To make the activity time shorter, the number of questions each team prepares for the quiz could be reduced to 1, 2 or 3.

Comment This activity could also be used to separate out facts from opinions in each source, and notice how the same information is treated differently. There could also be an evaluation of which sources seem to be more reliable

From implications to application 69

than others – or seem to foreground known facts and evidence rather than opinion.

Research connections This activity illustrates the CEFR (Council of Europe 2018) description of ‘reading for orientation’, or searching for something specific – usually a piece of information (=‘scanning’). This is connected to two of Pugh’s (1978) reading styles – scanning and search reading.

ACTIVITY 2.4 INFORMATION SLANT: SEPARATING FACTS AND OPINIONS Aim • • •

To interrogate critically the way texts with similar information can be slanted in different ways. To interrogate texts to extract information as opposed to opinion To notice the language used to build up opinion

Level For adult learners; Intermediate to advanced

Time 45 minutes (a whole lesson)

Materials and preparation • • •

Choose three newspapers which you think are interesting, roughly accessible for your learners, and cover the events of the day. Browse through the papers and find one story which is covered in each of the newspapers. Make copies of the three versions of the news story, so that you can give each learner one of the three.

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Procedure 1. Ask learners to work in groups of three. Give each member of the group one of the three versions, so all three newspapers are represented in each group. 2. Ask the group to note down as many points of information as they can. 3. Set the three versions of the news story side by side and note down as many ways as possible in which they are different. These differences can include: • • • • • • •

What and who are described in the stories Whether the same events are covered in each of the three versions Whether the events are presented in the same order Whether and which facts are included such as dates, names, places How people in the story are referred to: pronouns, proper nouns (names) and descriptors The quotations from actual speech used in the news story: what is quoted, and which verbs introduce the quotation Whether the vocabulary suggests positive or negative responses (connotation)

Variations If your learners require support for understanding the news stories you have chosen, you can conduct this as a jigsaw reading activity. Start with grouping your learners in expert groups of three, where everyone reads the same version and the group ensures that everyone has reached a common understanding of what has happened. Then regroup your students in new groups of three, so that each group member represents a different text. If learners are in an English-speaking country and have the means to do so, ask them to buy a newspaper the morning of the class. If this would be useful, draw up a shortlist of three or four newspapers which you think would be appropriate and interesting for them, and ask them to choose just one from the list. The class could then work in groups of three with their own newspapers of the day, to find a story covered by each newspaper and compare the three versions. You can vary the amount of support and scaffolding that you provide for the learners. In advanced classes you could just ask the learners to compare the stories and see which categories of similarity and difference they come up with. In intermediate classes you might wish to provide a list of the differences and similarities they should focus on.

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Comments This activity offers the opportunity to work at both the discourse level, looking at the tone, purpose and organisation of whole stories, and the surface level, looking at how vocabulary, verb choice, use of pronouns, reflect tone and mood. In addition to the variations in terms of support (above) you can also adapt the activity to deal with specific points on the syllabus that you wish to practice: for example verb forms, pronouns, discourse markers, text organisation. One verb form that is often compared between different versions of the same news story is the Passive Voice.

Research connection This activity develops another of the ‘sophisticated processes’ described by Wolf and Barzilai (2009), in particular ‘analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection and insight’ (2009:32). It is also linked to narrow reading: although not everyone reads all three versions, in the discussion learners will be reading parts of these versions and thus benefiting from reading the same content and often the same words used differently.

ACTIVITY 2.5 WHY I READ: PERSONAL READING BEHAVIOURS Aims • •

Raising awareness of the learners’ personal reading behaviours Showing learners how much they actually do read during the day

Level Any level

Time 20–30 minutes

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Materials and preparation •

Prepare an A4 handout which includes a table with the following columns, and with about 10–15 rows. What Language How long for I read

•

On what My purpose for reading

Reading depth and strategies

Prepare a table with columns as in the blank example above. Prepare enough handouts with the table for each of your learners.

Procedure 4. Ask the class to think of an occasion in which they read something in the previous 24 hours. Fill in one or two rows of the table jointly with the class (e.g. on a Whiteboard or online with a projection). Here is an example from one of us detailing his reading during one morning during the writing of the book. What Language How long for I read

On what My purpose for reading

Reading depth and strategies

Email English

30 seconds

My laptop

Very quick.

Book

10 minutes – A Enjoyment – I about five to physical was also very six pages book curious to know what was happening in the story.

Steady reading; I have to skip quite a lot of legal words in the text.

5 minutes

Alternating between skimming and more constant reading.

German

News Hebrew

My iPhone

To make sure I understood what I was required to do.

I wanted to find out a number of items about the pandemic but got distracted into reading other news items.

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1. Alternatively, provide examples from your own day (as in the example above). 2. Distribute the handouts and ask the learners to fill in the table individually (5 minutes). 3. Ask learners to sit in groups of three to four students and compare their lists. Are there any general patterns that they observe?

Variations a. Ask your learners to fill this in at home, in real time: this may be useful to demonstrate to them how long they spend on each reading activity, and in some cases, the way in which they may switch back and forth between different types of reading. b. Ask learners to do this over a longer time period – e.g. 24 hours – to be able to understand in depth their reading patterns. c. Ask learners to compare the reading they do for school and the reading they do for other purposes.

Comments This is a versatile activity which can be used to discuss and demonstrate to students various points about reading in their own lives. Points that can come up in the discussion are: • • •

That we read for information on our mobile phones. That much of our social communication is now through writing and reading. That our reading and writing may be dictated by the technology that is available to us. (For example, if you have an iPad with an Apple pencil your use of technology will be different from that of colleagues or friends who work mainly on their laptop.)

Research connections In Part I, we examined two frameworks looking at ways we read – the CEFR (Council of Europe 2018), and Pugh (1978), and we briefly discussed the ways they map onto each other. This activity raises the learners’ awareness of different ways of reading, asking them to reflect on the way in which in the course of a day we move rapidly and often unconsciously through these different ways of reading, and the way in which a fluent reader will be able to move seamlessly from one kind of reading to another.

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Question 3: What knowledge do we bring to our reading? These activities build on the linguistic and schematic knowledge readers bring to texts. They develop what readers know about sound: spelling links (Activity 3.1), vocabulary (Activity, 3.2), grammar (Activity 3.3), cohesive links and the characteristics of different text types (Activity 3.4).

ACTIVITY 3.1 RHYME RACE: READING AND SOUNDS Aims • • • •

To consider the links between sounds and spelling To appreciate rhyme as a way of remembering and sounding texts To strengthen sound-print connections To strengthen phonological awareness

Level Beginners to advanced

Time 20 minutes

Materials and preparation • •

This activity can be done with any text you are preparing or working with. Each learner will need a copy of the chosen text. You will also need a whiteboard or way of displaying the outcomes of the activity.

Procedure 1. Divide the class into teams of five or six, depending on the size of your class. 2. Each learner should have a copy of the chosen text. Ask one member of each group to take a pencil, close their eyes and put the pencil down randomly on any word in the text. 3. Ask the groups to shout out their word, and then as teacher select one that you think has the most rhyming possibilities.

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4. The race is then for each group to list as many words as they can which rhyme with that word in 30 seconds. For example: TEA Me, he, fee, tree, knee, glee, sea, see 5. After 30 seconds stop the race and ask each team to count up all the different rhyming words they have found. 6. The team members need to work together to make sure no rhyming word is counted more than once. Words with different spellings but the same sound can be counted twice, e.g. read and red; feat and feet; mayor and mare. 7. The team with the largest number of correct rhyming words is the winner. This team is also the next one to choose the rhyme word in the same way: by one member pointing at a word with their pencil from the chosen text with their eyes closed.

Variations The rhyme race can be played with each new text as a ‘fun’ starter. It can also be developed by searching to see if any of the rhyming words can be found in the text.

Comments The lists of rhyming words could be built up on the whiteboard or displayed on the walls as a growing record. These could be referred to for checking different spellings of the same sound or in writing activities to create rhyming poems.

Research connections In Part I, Section A, we mentioned that in order to learn to read, the learner needs to have achieved a certain level of phonemic awareness – e.g. the ability to recognise rhymes, the ability to manipulate phonemes and syllables (e.g. to drop the first sound of a word or change the order of syllables in a word). However, as Bigelow and Vinogradov (2011) show, the relationship between literacy and these sound manipulations is reciprocal: literacy changes the way in which adults perceive oral language. Literate adults are more aware of sound patterns in words and able to manipulate phonemes and syllables more easily than their non-literate counterparts.

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ACTIVITY 3.2 WORD BAGS: KNOWING ABOUT WORDS Aim •

To reveal to learners how much they ‘know’ about words.

Level Any level

Time 45 minutes

Materials and preparation •

Create three types of ‘bags’: Inside one type of bag put in 5 or 10 labels each with a verb. Inside one type of bag put in 5 or 10 labels each with a noun. Inside one type of bag put in 5 or 10 labels each with an adjective.

• •

Prepare enough labels for your class – each group will have one bag. The words you select can work at any level and be tailored to your specific group. With EAP or ESP learners you could choose words from their discipline. With younger learners you could choose words from the texts that they have read recently.

Procedure 1. Divide the class into groups of four or five learners. 2. Hand out one bag to each group. 3. Ask the group to look in the bag, and discuss what all the labels in the bag have in common. Why are they all there? 4. When the group have decided on what the words have in common, they are asked to complete ten blank labels with more examples. 5. Collect all the bags and put them at the front of the class. 6. Now invite one member of each group to run to the front of the class, dip into each bag and pick one label from each. 7. Running back to the group, they have to either construct a sentence with the three words they have or discard the words because they do

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not work as a sentence. Only when the choice has been made by the group does the next member go to the front of the class. 8. The procedure is repeated until all the labels have gone. 9. The winner is the group with the most correct and meaningful sentences. 10. This can then lead to discussion about: which sentences worked and why? Which ones did not work and why? What did the words in each bag have in common and how did you know?

Variations Further ‘word bags’ could be created: e.g. adverbs, conjunctions, with the same procedure as that suggested above. Alternatively, each group could be given three empty bags, labelled nouns/verbs/adjectives and asked to fill blank labels themselves. The most bags correctly filled with completed labels in a set time is the winner.

Comments This does not appear to be a reading activity, but it contributes to fluent reading by raising the learners’ awareness of word classes, thus contributing to their grammatical awareness, which is a prerequisite for reading. It also deepens the learners’ knowledge of vocabulary, through both awareness of word class and awareness of semantics and collocation.

Research connections This activity connects to our understanding of the importance of vocabulary for reading and reading comprehension and is further connected to the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti and Hart 2002) and to research into what it means to ‘know’ a word (Nation 2008). It encourages the teacher to develop each of these ways of knowing, by playing with a single text. When we make sense of a text, we are deploying skills which go far beyond simply the recognition of letters and words on the page.

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ACTIVITY 3.3 LANGUAGE DETECTIVES: READING AND LANGUAGE PATTERNS Aim • •

To look at the syntactical knowledge we bring to texts as readers To look at the way writers use language patterns to construct meaning

Level Pre-intermediate to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation • •

This activity can be practiced with any text you are reading in class. In preparation, decide which two language patterns or structures you would like your learners to focus on. The example below refers to the Present Simple and the Past Simple.

Procedure 1. Explain to your learners that they are going to act as language detectives, reviewing your texts to find out how the author is using language. You are going to search your text for language patterns to work out what the author is trying to do with words and meanings. 2. Divide the class into pairs: Partner A and partner B. 3. Give the class just 5 minutes for the scanning game. 4. Group A should scan the text for all the occurrences of the present simple tense. They should count how many times and where in the text it appears, underlining occurrences if they can. 5. Group B should scan the text for all the occurrences of the Past Simple tense. Again, they should notice how many times and where in the text it appears, underlining the occurrences.

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6. After 5 minutes, ask the class to stop. 7. Ask A and B partners to compare what they have found. 8. How many Present Simple forms did they find? How many Past Simple forms did they find? 9. Where were they in the text? Were they all clustered in the same place, or were they evenly scattered around the text? Does the text change from one tense to the other? 10. Can they explain what the author is trying to do/say with those patterns?

Variations The activity can be played with any syntactical form you are teaching or wish to focus on. Other forms you could search are: Pronouns: I/he/she/it/they v. proper nouns, names of people or places Simple sentences v. complex sentences Positive adjectives v. negative adjectives Reported speech v. direct quotations Noun+noun combinations v. adjective+noun combinations.

Comments Different types of text and genre would lend themselves to different structures. For example, a review of a book or film would be interesting to search for positive v. negative adjectives; a story would be interesting to search for ways past time is conveyed or for reported speech v. direct quotation; a newspaper article about a celebrity would be interesting to search for pronouns he/she/it v. proper nouns.

Research connections Hyland (2009) shows that different text types use language in significantly different ways. For example, a social sciences newspaper article uses personal pronouns and direct speech, whilst the science article uses very few or no personal pronouns and includes charts and statistics. Searching for patterns is a way of appreciating the language qualities of different text types.

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ACTIVITY 3.4 TEXT GUESSING: READING AND TEXT TYPES Aim •

To recognise the differences between text types

Level Pre-intermediate to post-intermediate

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

• • • •

This relies on longer term preparation, building up a store of authentic texts in the L2: for example, travel brochures, bus timetables, restaurant menus, information leaflets, advertisements, theatre programmes. Bring to class enough of these so that every learner can have one example. These do not have to be finely tuned to the language level of your learners. This is a mingling game so it works best in smaller classes of 12 or less. Larger classes could play a modified version of this, in pairs.

Procedure 1. Explain this is a guessing game. 2. Each learner is going to be given a text. They will have 30 seconds to look at their own text and find out what it is, who it’s for and where they would find it. For example, if it’s a menu they would find it in a restaurant. If it’s a train timetable, they would find it at the station. • • •

The game is to guess what kind of text others have by asking questions about it. However, the answers can only be yes or no. If they guess right they can keep the text. The winner of the game is the person who has the most texts after 10 minutes.

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3. Elicit some of the questions they might ask: for example • • • • • •

Does the text include numbers? Does the text include names – of people/of places? Does the text include descriptions of food? Does the text include pictures – of places, people, streets? Does the text include charts and diagrams? Does the text include lists? Are the lists numbered/in sequence?

Each person is allowed to ask only five questions. After five questions learners should change partners. For each text type guessed correctly, they should note the text type and which student had it.

Variations With larger classes, the activity could be done as pair work, with partner A guessing the text of partner B. The winner would be the first pair to guess correctly. Then the teacher could collect the texts, shuffle them and hand out a new set to each pair. This 5 minute activity could be dropped into the class at intervals with different texts and text types.

Comments The aim of the activity is to show that much can be learnt about a text from rapid review of its layout, presentation on the page, use of words or numbers. The texts need not be read or understood in detail for learners to recognise whether they are menus, maps or timetables. This gives learners the chance to see texts which are more difficult than their usual language level, and to encounter the kind of reading they will meet in the real world.

Research connections Appreciating and recognising different text types is a useful part of reading knowledge. Part of our conscious or unconscious reading knowledge are the expectations and conventions of text types (Nesi 2012), and response to generic cues (Swales 1990). We can make decisions about the text and how to use it. However, when we respond to a text type the eye is also rapidly interpreting the purpose from the layout of the page, the density of words on the page and the way these are arranged and broken up.

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ACTIVITY 3.5 READING BETWEEN THE LINES: READING FOR NUANCE Aim • • •

To develop critical reading To interrogate texts for evidence, opinion and bias To read between the lines for inference, authorial voice and hidden meaning

Level Intermediate to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation • •

•

Bring two reviews of the same play, film or book. Before sharing with the class notice for yourself the different opinions expressed by the two reviews, and how these are expressed. Ideally, the more different the opinions, the more interesting this exercise can be. Learners should have access to both texts, either in hard copy or online.

Procedure 1. Distribute the two reviews to pairs: Partner A and Partner B. 2. Give the class 2 minutes to scan the review rapidly and then answer the question: Does the reviewer like or dislike the book? 3. Partners should then compare their answer. 4. Now give the class 5 minutes to find as many reasons as they can to explain their answer. It could be words, phrases, what is included or left out, the way the author is referred to.

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5. After 5 minutes see how many reasons each member of the pair has found. The winner is the one who can ‘prove’ the reviewer’s opinion with the most number of reasons to be found in the text.

Variations The activity can be as ‘roughly-tuned’ or as ‘fine-tuned’ as you wish depending on the level of your class. A ‘roughly-tuned’ activity would mean the text is slightly above the language level of the group, but you do not require them to understand in detail. The task would be simply to decide which of the two reviews is positive, and which is negative. A ‘finely-tuned’ activity would entail closer review of the text, picking out what words and phrases suggest opinion; what is said and what is ‘between the lines’ in more detail. In this case you could ask specific questions, such as: • • • • •

How is the author referred to: pronouns, proper nouns (names) and descriptors Which aspects of the book or film are described What is quoted and which verbs introduce the quotation Whether vocabulary suggests positive or negative responses (connotation) Whether and how facts are included such as dates, names, places

Comments Critical skills are an important aspect of reading proficiency; in other words, being able to recognise bias in a text, and tease out an author’s position. It is also useful to be able to see how this bias is conveyed through language, and to recognise that this might be conveyed as much by what is missed out of a text as what is included.

Research connections Hyland (2013) researched different subject disciplines and noticed that they had very different approaches to praise and blame when other authors are discussed. For example, electrical engineering authors tended to praise other authors much more highly than authors in philosophy journals.

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ACTIVITY 3.6 BORDER CROSSING: READING CULTURALLY Aims • • •

To look at the cultural knowledge we bring to texts To look at ways we process culturally distant texts To look at the ways we connect what we do not know with what we know

Level Intermediate to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

•

If your group share the same first culture, explore the internet to find a description of a cultural event which is distant or different for them. Examples are: • Wassailing and mumming: National Trust link to history and traditions https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/ritual-and-revelrythe-story-of-wassailing • Carnival: website with links to carnivals in all continents of the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival • Tea ceremony: https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2096.html • Weddings: https://www.beau-coup.com/cultural-traditions-weddings.html Draw the chart below on the board, or make it available for learners to use or copy into their own notebooks. They will be filling this chart in as they read the text. A Words/ideas I don’t know

B My guess of meaning

C Why do I think so?

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Procedure 1. Invite learners to copy the chart on the board into their notebooks. 2. Each learner should also have a copy of their own of the chosen text. 3. Explain the text is about a festival or custom in another culture/region. The text, however, has been written for locals so there may be some words, phrases or ideas that are unfamiliar. They have been asked to ‘translate’ some of the ideas into clear and easy English to help a tour guide. 4. They are therefore going to read the text three times: •

•

•

First: read the text quickly for overall meaning and note down as they go each word or idea that is unfamiliar to them in Column A of the chart. Second: read the text a second time and this time, return to the unfamiliar words and try and find a familiar idea, word or concept to replace them. Write that new word in Column B. Third: read the text a third time and write in Column C one ‘clue’ that helped them translate each word.

Whilst the text should be in the target language you are teaching, if your class share a first language, then the chart and discussion of the chart could be in the first language.

Comments In Part IV we develop this activity into a small-scale research project so you can ask further questions about how learners process culturally distant texts and compare your results to Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984).

Variations If your group are from many different cultures and regions, invite them to bring in a short text that describes a festival/custom/event familiar to them.

Research connections This activity derives from the one used by Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984) in their study of readers from India and the US. We described this in Part I; the readers’ task was to read two letters about weddings, one from their own culture and one more culturally distant. Pritchard (1990) and Malik (1990) discuss similar findings a similar study.

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Question 4: What is the relationship between L1 and L2 reading? The activities under this heading take the radical step of bringing first language reading into the classroom, to give learners the chance to compare, think and read between two languages. There are variations suggested for classes where learners share a first language, and where they do not.

ACTIVITY 4.1 BOOK COVERS CROSSING BORDERS Aims •

To decode letters on the page, comparing first and second languages

Level Beginners to advanced Children and young learners

Time 30–60 minutes depending on available class time

Preparation and materials Each learner will need: a blank sheet of paper crayons, pens and pencils If your learners share a first language, bring to the class a collection of books in the first language. These might be from the school library or from your own collection of favourite reading. If your learners do not share a first language, ask them to bring to class one book in their first language that they have read/enjoyed. Each child, or pair of children, should have one book.

Procedure 1. Distribute the blank paper and ask your learners to fold it in two so the paper looks like the outside covers of a book.

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2. With large classes, divide into groups of three and hand each group one of the books. With smaller classes, display the books on a central or front table, and ask each group to send one member to choose a book they like. 3. Explain they have been asked by the author to change the book cover for English-speaking readers. They can draw a new picture and invent one that is suggested by the title. However, they must change the title and author on the front cover into English. 4. Discuss whether the actual letters being used will look different or the same; whether that means changing the direction of the text, or the kind of letters being used. If the title is a name, would that be the same in English? 5. When the front covers have been finished, display them around the room. Ask the class to vote for the book they would most like to read.

Variations The activity could also be done in reverse: the books could all be in English, and children asked to translate the front cover back into their first language. If access to books is impractical, make copies of three book covers and display these so they are clearly visible. Each group could then choose one of the covers to translate. It will then be interesting to see how each group have translated the same book cover.

Comments The activity will have different degrees of challenge depending on whether learners’ first languages use the Roman alphabet. Some book titles may require vocabulary help to translate. Book titles that are names also may need thinking about. Some cities have different names in different languages, but names of people do not always change from one language to another.

Research We saw earlier, in Part I, Section A, that one basic difference between any given two languages may be the writing system. Languages may employ

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an alphabetic writing system (as do English, Arabic or Russian); they may employ a syllabary (as Japanese partly does) or be logographic, with each character representing a word or morpheme (like Chinese). They may be written from left to right (like English) or from right to left (like Hebrew and Arabic). These differences have implications for the areas of the brain being activated (Wolf and Barzilai 2009).

ACTIVITY 4.2 TEXT MEMORY GAME Aims • •

to compare memory and processing of texts in a first language and in a second language to see if re-reading in the L1 helps comprehension

Level Any level Learners need to share first language. The teacher needs to be familiar with both the learner’s first language and English.

Time 10 minutes in each of two lessons, separated by one week or more

Materials and preparation For this activity you will need a short text in both the first language and the second language. To achieve this you could find a parallel text of a story or poem; or translate a short paragraph from the coursebook, newspaper, blog or story yourself. Some newspapers or websites have the same content in different languages, for example in the original language of the newspaper, and in English for a global audience. Learners need to have access to both the text in the original language, and the text in translation, but these two readings will be separated by one week.

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Procedure You will need time in two separate class sessions, separated by a week or more.

Phase one Give each learner a copy of the text in the target language. Give them 5 minutes to read the text. Then ask them to hide the text and write down key words (words important for understanding the text as a whole) they remember from the text for just 5 more minutes. At the end of the 5 minutes ask them to turn over the paper and count how many pieces of information they had written down correctly. Ask them to keep their piece of paper until next week.

Phase two A week later introduce the same text in the first language and repeat the activity. Give them 5 minutes to read the text. Then ask them to hide the text and write down key words they remember for 5 minutes. Ask them to turn the L1 paper over and count how many correct pieces of information they gathered. Compare what they remembered the first time in the L2 and what they remembered the second time in the L1. What did they remember this time and not last time? What did they remember last time and not this time? Which was easier, the L1 reading or the L2 reading? Ask them to add up the number of correct pieces of information from the two exercises. The winner is the one with the most pieces of correct information.

Variations You could also reverse this process, so the first encounter is with the L1 text, and the second with the L2 text. It would be interesting to compare the differences between starting with the L1 text, and starting with the L2 text, and notice for yourself as teacher which way around gave learners the most correct recall of the text.

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Comments As we have suggested in some of the earlier sections, the important part of the activity is to experience reading in the L2, so discussion, and even note-taking and memory recall could be done in the first language, and especially so for younger or less advanced learners.

Research connections The activity is inspired by an idea from Statman (1987), described in Part I, Section A. She asked participants to read a text in their first language and summarise the first paragraph; several weeks later, participants read a similarly structured text in their second language. The results showed the readers experienced more anxiety in their second language and thus found the task more difficult.

ACTIVITY 4.3 FIRST LANGUAGE STORY SHARING Aims • •

To bring the reading pleasure and fluency of the first language into the second language context To give learners self-esteem in being able to share their first language reading enthusiasms

Level Pre-intermediate to advanced All ages This activity is especially effective where the learners in the class have multiple different first languages and cultures.

Time 60 minutes

Materials and preparation •

The teacher needs to prepare the learners by asking them, at least a week in advance of the lesson: •

To think about a story or book they are reading or have enjoyed in their first language

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• •

To be prepared to share their story with others in the class, in any way they like but they need to do this in the target language. If there are any words, phrases or ideas they find hard to translate into the target language, they can use the first language as long as they make its meaning clear in other ways (e.g. mime, pictures, acting out).

Procedure 1. For larger classes, divide the learners into groups of three or four and give each learner 5 minutes to share their story with others in the group. 2. With small classes, and confident learners, you might want to start each lesson with one of the 5-minute stories recounted to the whole class. Shy or less confident learners might prefer to share their story with a partner, so the class could be divided into pairs. 3. Encourage each storyteller to use both the target language, and where this seems untranslatable, to use the first language and try and convey its meaning visually, or in other ways. Explain they have a maximum of just five words from the first language they can use in the story. 4. Try and keep a record of these first language words. Keep these as a ‘store’ for future use, as suggested in the comments section below.

Variations This activity works well with learners from many languages and cultures. Ideally, the teacher might give each learner the chance to showcase their language and favourite story. The procedure section has suggested that shy learners might prefer to exchange stories in pairs, whilst others might feel their self-esteem is much boosted and confidence enhanced by being a storyteller for the whole class. These variations need to be fine-tuned by the teacher in response to her individual learners.

Comments It would be very interesting for the teacher to keep a store of the words which were ‘untranslated’ in each story, and spend time over a series of lessons, focusing on one word at a time which seems culturally rich, or which does not translate across cultures. The learners might continue to add to this store, and to be informants as to their meaning.

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Research This activity is based on a vignette described by Vallejo Rubinstein (2020) and discussed in Part I, Section A, in which a child in an after-school literacy club explains the contents of a story she is reading in a mixture of Catalan and Spanish with English and Punjabi words and terms. Vallejo Rubinstein suggests that the child ‘builds meaning within, between and beyond named languages’ (2020:240). This research is also discussed in Part IV where you are invited to try out Vallejo Rubinstein’s research design in your own classroom.

ACTIVITY 4.4 TALKING TO THE AUTHOR: ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT A TEXT Aims • •

To think about questioning as an aspect of fluent reading in an L1 To think about transferring questions from a first language reading text to a second language reading text

Level Pre-intermediate to advanced

Time 40 minutes

Materials and preparation • •

The material is any reading text you are using or plan to use with your class. This could be from the coursebook or a class reader. Each learner needs to have a copy of the chosen text, and to be encountering this text for the first time.

Procedure 1. Divide the class into pairs. Partner A will read the text aloud to Partner B slowly, stopping after each sentence.

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2. The second member of the pair will listen, and after each sentence or group of sentences, write down or record a question she/he would like to ask the author. The kind of questions might be, for example: • • • •

What does x mean? Why have you mentioned x three times? Why is x important? Who is x that talks in the third sentence? How are character A and character B related?

3. After 10 minutes ask the partners to exchange roles. 4. Compare the questions Partner A and Partner B have noted down.

Variations • • •

The questions could be recorded and the learners then might listen back to their questions, or share them with other learners. Alternatively they could be written down. If this helps your learners, the questions can be in the first language, as long as the reading itself is in the target language.

Comments We know that asking questions is a useful and important part of reading fluently, helping the reader to create a situation model of the text which we discussed in Part I. The idea of ‘talking to the author’ makes this questioning more dynamic and allows the reader to feel that reading is part of a dialogue. Questions also acknowledge that some readers may find some things difficult and challenging and give them permission to do so.

Research The activity is based on Janzen’s (1996) research into the ways language learners process second language reading. She asked students in a reading class to think aloud as they read. It also bases itself on the understanding that reading proficiency ‘transfers across languages and that students who have developed literacy in their first language will tend to make a stronger progress in acquiring literacy in their second language’ (Cummins 2000:173). Part IV invites you to try think-aloud strategies yourself to gather information about reading and thinking.

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ACTIVITY 4.5 COMPREHENDING ACROSS LANGUAGES Aims • • •

To consider the relationship between L1 and L2 reading To help learners process L2 texts more quickly and more easily To demonstrate to learners the ways in which their previous knowledge can help them in comprehending texts

Level Intermediate to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation Build a text bank of L1 and L2 texts on the same topic. These could be, for example: • • • • • • •

Newspapers from the same day, one in the L1 and one in the L2 Copies of stories or poems in parallel text Encyclopedia or Wikipedia entries on the same topic in L1 and L2 Advertising/marketing texts about the same product in L1 and L2 Reviews of the same film or book in the L1 and L2 Labels on a product in L1 and L2 Instructions in a manual or on a product in L1 and L2

Choose one of these text pairs for your lesson. Prepare in advance a list of any differences you notice between the two versions: information missing in one but appearing in the other; or an angle or viewpoint different in the two versions. Prepare a class set of the L1 text, or make it available to your learners online.

Procedure 1. Ask your learners to read the text at home and to prepare notes, either in their first or in their second language.

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2. In class, divide the learners into pairs. 3. Ask learners to exchange with a partner what they think are the three most important points about the text. 4. Hand out the L2 text. Ask each pair to see if those three important points are also apparent in the L2 text. If not, what is different and what replaces those points? 5. In plenary discuss if and how the text in the L1 helped them to read the text in the L2.

Variations The activity could also be conducted in reverse. This time the L2 text is read in advance, and the three main points noted down. In class, the L1 text is exchanged to see what is the same and what is different. The discussion could compare which order of reading is the most helpful and makes a difference to their L2 reading comprehension.

Comments If you as a teacher build up a bank of parallel texts, variations of this L1/ L2 reading activity could be peppered throughout your reading syllabus so the learners become familiar with it as a practice. Part III suggests ways you might build your resources so you have a varied bank of activities to use whenever there is a ‘gap’ in your teaching.

Research connections The skills in this exercise reflect one of the competences described in the CEFR (2018), that of using the L1 to mediate L2 reading and knowledge. There is increasing recognition that the first language allows learners to read and think at their best cognitive level, and can only help the literacy process in a second language (Cummins 2000). The dual language activity also allows for close reading, and for identification of cultural differences and distinctiveness. If you are using texts about your local context, this becomes an excellent opportunity to teach the English for local terms and phenomena that are specific to the country and culture you are working in.

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B:  TEACHING READING AS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE Introduction This section provides activities for students to track their own reading choices, extend their reading opportunities, identify the reading they most enjoy and appreciate what a difference this makes to their reading experience. It will also give the teacher guidelines for building extensive reading libraries in class, and access online reading resources in a principled and effective way.

Question 5: Why and how do people read for pleasure? Researchers have asked several questions in relation to reading for pleasure, and one of these is how far a teacher can actually inspire learners to become readers for pleasure. Activities 5.1–5.3 help teachers understand what their learners enjoy as readers. These activities invite learners to think about times they have enjoyed reading, what they enjoy and what they can learn from this. It gives teachers ideas for bringing these good reading ideas into their own classrooms, even to the point of writing reading materials themselves that map onto their learners’ preferences.

ACTIVITY 5.1 FEELING STORIES Aim •

To consider the strategies we use when reading fluently, and the connection between fluent reading and emotional engagement

Level Intermediate to advanced

Time 20 minutes

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Materials and teacher preparation Prepare four cards, each with one of these questions written clearly. There should be one set of cards for each group of five in the class. • • • •

Why did you like that story? What does it make you think about? What does it make you feel? Who is your favourite character in the story? Why?

Procedure 1. Ask students to remember a story that they much enjoyed in childhood. It could be a story told to them by a parent, read as a child or seen on stage, film, pantomime. 2. Ask learners individually to prepare a mind map/set of pictures/key words mapping out the story, so they can retell it to others in the group. Make clear they do not have to write the story but only notes to help them remember it as they are going to tell it to their friends in a small group. Circulate amongst the learners to help them. 3. When everyone has finished planning, divide the class into groups of five and ask each person in the group to choose a number between 1 and 5. 4. Now call out a number between 1 and 5 (or ask one of the learners to call out this number). That learner is the first to tell their story. 5. Ask the learners to tell their stories, ideally without their notes. 6. When they have finished, distribute to the others in each group the four question cards. Each learner should have a turn to ask their question and the storyteller to answer it. 7. Repeat the cycle, calling out the number of the storyteller between 1 and 5 until everyone in the group has told their story and answered the questions. Note that for variety and unpredictability, numbers 1–5 do not have to be called out in order. 8. At the end, bring the class together to share and compare answers to the questions: • • • •

What do we like about stories? Which characters do we like? Are they better than us? The same as us? What do we feel like when we enjoy stories? What do the stories make us think about?

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Variations The storytellers could also be set up in pairs to give more time for each exchange of stories and questions. A follow-up task could be to bring to class the written story you yourself enjoyed as a child and re-read it. How was your memory of the story different, rereading it as an adult? How was it the same?

Comments We have discussed in earlier sections the value of the first language in second language classes, to build confidence and give learners the opportunity to talk and think at their cognitive level. This activity could be trialled both in the first language and in the second language, or split between the two: for example the story being retold could be read in the first language, but the retelling in the second and shared classroom language. This is a particularly rich variation where your class is multilingual.

Research connections Reading extensively has been found to benefit reading speed and comprehension (Day 2015; Suk 2017). We know that reading fluency has mechanical elements to it, such as the use (or lack of) eye movements, and the ability to appreciate text from shapes, and to predict words. But there is also an essential cognitive and emotional element to reading fluency too. Research suggests that physiological responses of enjoyment correlate with a higher comprehension and reading fluency (Daley et al. 2014).

ACTIVITY 5.2 THE DREAM BOOK COMPETITION: UNDERSTANDING READING PREFERENCES Aims • •

To share criteria for books which have been enjoyed To apply L1 reading preferences to planning the ‘dream book’ in the L2

Level Beginners to advanced

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Time 60 minutes

Procedure 1. Explain that the class has been asked to draw up instructions for a writer to write the dream book for them in the L2. 2. The instructions will be based on what they like best about books in their first language. 3. In groups of 3, ask them to draw up instructions for the L2 writer based on their preferences. Provide examples of criteria from the following list: • • • • • • • •

If they like reading about their own setting/situation/country If they like reading with illustrations If they like reading about people/characters the same as themselves or different If they prefer stories or history/biography/science/factual writing If they like stories with sad or happy endings If they like stories which are frightening or surprising If they like L2 reading with a glossary of new vocabulary Any other criteria for the dream book?

Variations Vary the number of criteria you provide to the groups. With intermediate or advanced learners, it may be enough to provide just one or two examples. For low-intermediate learners and lower levels you may provide a longer list of criteria and ask the learners to decide on their answers to each of them. If your learners are active readers in their L1, you could ask them to bring to class one book they have most enjoyed and to share their feelings about the book with others in a group of three or four. From these favourite books, a similar list of criteria could be drawn up.

Comments As a writing task you could give the learners back their own dream criteria, and ask them to write a class reader that fits these criteria. Alternatively, you as teacher might like to think about writing the dream book, based on the criteria drawn up by your learners!

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Research connections Gagen-Spriggs (2020) researched reading for pleasure in a school context and found that it was in fact the passionately engaged librarian who made a difference, helping children to select books that would appeal to them. Making the right reading choice emerges in many research studies, as an important part of enjoyment, for example Merga (2017). But what exactly is the source of appeal for one book rather than another? Duncan and Paran (2018) found that the teachers in their study believed that this appeal might come from identification with the characters: teachers chose novels with narrators who are also teenagers, or a play with an all-female cast for an all-female class. Part IV invites you to research this question for yourself, as a way of informing your choice of texts as a teacher.

ACTIVITY 5.3 READING SPURS AND BLOCKS: WHAT WOULD MAKE YOU READ MORE? Aims • • •

To reflect on what encourages reading and what discourages it For learners: to recognise their own reading choices and best experiences For teachers: to recognise ways good reading can be experienced in the classroom

Level All levels

Time 60 minutes

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Materials and preparation •

You might like to record answers to these questions in a notebook, or orally on a recording device so you can return to your answers later.

Procedure •

Ask yourself the questions below and record your answers in a notebook or on a recording device so you can return to them later. Have you read something from start to finish in the last year, and enjoyed doing so? If yes answer the first set of questions; if nor, answer the second set.

What encourages reading 1. What attracted you to that reading? (the front cover, a recommendation, the topic) 2. Do you have a favourite place where you read? (for example, in bed, in a cafe, in a library) 3. Do you have a favourite or best time where you read? (for example, before going to sleep, travelling on the bus) 4. Do you read with distractions like people talking and the phone ringing? Or do you need quiet? 5. Do you read in short bursts of time, or do you like reading ‘flow’ (reading for hours without a break?) 6. Do you enjoy reading material that is easy for you or do you prefer more difficult texts that present a challenge?

What blocks reading Which of these reasons block you from reading? 1. I can’t find anything to read that interests me 2. I have nowhere to sit quietly and read 3. I am too busy. I don’t have the time. 4. I have distractions all the time: phone going, work to do, people needing me 5. I only like reading short texts that don’t require sitting down and reading at a stretch. Reading is too difficult.

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If you answered questions 1 to 5 above fill in Column A below. If you answered questions 6 to 10 fill in Column B below. COLUMN A-Best conditions for reading

COLUMN B-Changes that would make me read

Attraction to reading and interest Place for reading Time for reading Distractions Reading flow Reading level

Once all learners have completed their table, share the results and prepare a ‘class profile’ of best reading conditions. Following the class discussion, ask learners in pairs to make a list of their own action points to create the best conditions for reading for themselves.

Variations The questions could also be prepared on cards. Learners walk around the class asking classmates for their answers to the different questions. They write down answers in the two columns on the card, thus preparing a mini-profile of the class.

Comments This activity also connects with the next activity, 5.4, where learners are invited to interview lifelong learners and find out the conditions and qualities which make them read.

Research connections Sheldrick Ross (1999) found that the avid readers in her study were conscious of the need to ensure they had time and opportunities to read in their daily routines. The activity itself is based on the study by Merga (2017), who asked children in Years 4 and 6 what would make them read more. Her answers were then divided into five themes. Do these themes compare with those your own learners might suggest? In this activity you are invited to replicate Merga’s activity, both with learners and in a later section, with yourself and other teachers.

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ACTIVITY 5.4 PROFILES OF LIFELONG READERS Aim •

To find out about the motivation and strategies of lifelong readers

Level Learners of all levels; teachers

Time Setting up the interviews: 10 minutes in class Interviews out of class: 60 minutes Bringing together answers in class: 30 minutes

Materials and preparation • •

This activity is prepared in class through discussion, but interviews are conducted outside class. However, an alternative is that you the teacher become the interviewee; or you invite a colleague into the class who might act as a role model of a lifelong reader.

Procedure 1. Tell the class that they are going to interview someone they consider to be a lifelong reader. It could be a teacher or librarian in the school, a member of their family, a friend or someone else in the class. For young learners encourage them to interview someone of an older generation. Introduce the idea of the interview and ask learners to think about who they might choose. 2. Elicit from the learners the questions they would like to ask. Here are some to start with: • • • •

When did you start reading? Has your reading changed over time? Do you still like the same things you read when you were a child? What kind of reading do you enjoy most now?

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• •

Do you talk about your reading to other people? Do you belong to any book groups or reading circles? If so does it make a difference to what or how you read?

3. Give the class one week to set up their interview and plan a date when they bring the results to class. 4. In class, invite their answers to their questions. 5. Build a portrait of lifelong readers with the class, by inviting them to finish this sentence with findings from their interviews. Lifelong readers _______________ 6. If necessary, complete the sentence with a few suggestions to start the discussion. For example: Lifelong readers • • • • • • • •

actively seek books to read that they might enjoy. follow up reading recommendations or good book reviews. enjoy talking to other people about their reading. read books in book groups they might never have chosen for themselves are often pleasantly surprised by books they knew nothing about before reading are happy to read new authors follow up films or TV programmes with further reading enjoy browsing in bookshops and libraries to find something new

Variations If it is impractical for your learners to find a lifelong reader to interview, consider being the interviewee yourself, or invite a colleague, friend or family member into your class to be the interviewee.

Comments You could take this activity one step further by inviting your learners to visualise themselves in 10 years’ time. What kind of reader would they be? What would they read for work and what would they read for pleasure?

Research connections We know from research by Dweck (2016) that ‘growth mindset’ is a critical aspect of success. She defines a growth mindset as the belief that ‘talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others)’ (n.p.). We view lifelong reading as an aspect of a growth mindset

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and as part of the work that we all put into developing ourselves, as well as being open to new ideas and to change. In Part I, we also mentioned the virtuous circle between the teacher who reads and the reading classroom. Nathanson, Pruslow and Levitt (2008), for example, report that teachers who had enjoyed their experiences with literature as learners were more enthusiastic about reading than teachers who had not, and that this communicated itself positively to their own learners.

Question 6: Can reading change the way we think and feel? In Part I, Section B, we discussed the different ways in which reading can change the way we think as well as the influence of texts on our feelings. In this activity we ask learners to focus on books that have been crucial in the development of human thinking and to evaluate the influence of these books on all our lives.

ACTIVITY 6.1 NOBEL PRIZE CHAMPIONS: BOOKS WHICH CHANGED THE WAY WE THINK Aim • •

To think about the way the written word has changed thinking To think about the value of reading in a second language, in order to have access to ground-breaking reading

Level Intermediate to advanced

Time 45 minutes

Preparation Your learners will need access to online websites for this activity either on a mobile device or on a computer. The activity can also be done in groups with three or four learners sharing a device.

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Procedure 1. Divide the class into groups of three or four. 2. Explain the Nobel Prize has created a new category: books that changed the way we think. They are on the panel advising which book should win. 3. Invite each group to browse the websites below, and/or those selected by you. 4. Give time for the learners to browse the examples on the websites, find out more about each book (for example by searching for dedicated websites about it), and decide as a group which book to champion. This does not need to be a book they have read already, but one which they agree sounds exciting, interesting and important. 5. After 30 minutes, invite each group to present on their chosen book for 2 minutes, explaining: What is the book about? What did it change? (for example, how we thought, how we lived, what we believed, what we understood, what we did next?) Why is that important? 6. At the end, each individual should vote on the book they think should be nominated. A second vote could be for the book they now most wish to read. Websites with lists of books: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/07/10-books-thatshaped-the-world The list on this website includes: Charles Darwin Simone de Beauvoir Sigmund Freud Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

The Origin of Species The Second Sex The Interpretation of Dreams The Communist Manifesto

https://contentwritingjobs.com/blog/life-changing-books This is a blog in which the author (who is unidentified) has chosen contemporary books that they consider life-changing, among which they list: Yuval Noah Harari Paulo Coelho Carol Dweck

Sapiens The Alchemist Mindset

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The Open Education database includes both classic books as well as more recent works, both fiction and non-fiction (https://oedb.org/ilibrarian/50_ books_that_changed_the_world/): John Stuart Mill Edward Said Murasaki Shikibu Richard Wright

On Liberty Orientalism The Tale of Genji Native Son

Variations The search and reading of websites can be done as homework. In class, you can then group learners randomly and ask them to agree on a chosen book, or you could group together students who chose the same book. If your learners do not have access to online resources you can make an initial selection of between five and ten books, print out the description of these books and ask your learners to discuss them. You can make a shortlist of books which changed the way we think that are universal and have had international influence, or a list of books that are relevant and sensitive to the culture and context of your learners. For lower level learners you could provide a restricted choice of two or three books and ask them to agree on the winner in this category. You could also elicit from your learners books they believe changed thinking/changed the world.

Comments You could collect the chosen titles from the class and display the front covers round the class with quotations from or brief explanations about each. Discuss with your class the language in which each book was written. Try and ensure that you display or discuss a book written in the first language of each learner in your class. Invite learners to make those suggestions themselves if they can.

Research connections In Part I, Section B, we discussed research by Sheldrick Ross (1999) who asked interviewees to think about books that changed and transformed their lives. This activity takes this further by asking learners to focus on books that have been crucial in the development of human thinking in general and evaluate the influence of these books on our lives. This should lead to a heightened understanding of the role of books in our society.

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ACTIVITY 6.2 RE-READING OVER TIME: RETURNING TO CHILDHOOD STORIES Aim •

To think about the way response to reading changes over time

Level Teenage and adult learners Pre-intermediate to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

•

• •

Choose a children’s book which is typical or likely to have been read in childhood by your learners. If your learners come from many contexts and cultures, choose a children’s story which is visible in the culture where your class takes place, because of a recent film (e.g. Paddington Bear; Harry Potter), popular knowledge (e.g. Mary Poppins), cartoons (TinTin, Asterix) or something that may be known to them from younger siblings (The Hungry Caterpillar). Prepare an extract from the written version of the story that captures a moment in the plot or introduces the most important characters. This could be from the opening paragraph, or a ‘denouement’ moment in the middle or nearer the end. If you have access to copying or displaying the extract, make this available so all your learners can see and read this. If you do not have access to this, practice reading the extract aloud, adopting the voices of the characters and indicating moments of suspense or surprise.

Procedure The activity is specifically for learners who are able to look back on childhood, so it works best with teenagers and adults. Explain they are going to re-read a children’s story to see how their thinking about it has changed over time.

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Explain: I am going to read an extract from x. How many of you have read this or knew this as a child? Take a note of who in your class are returning to a story from childhood and how many are meeting this for the first time. If you can, pair learners who know the story in advance with those who do not. Ask the learners in the class who know the story to tell their partner: What do you remember about it? What did you like about it? Read the extract aloud from start to finish, or invite the learners to read the extract to themselves from start to finish. Then discuss in pairs the questions below. Some responses from a group of trainee teachers of reading are given below as examples: What do you notice about the children’s story, reading it as an adult? Paddington Bear: ‘actually the whole premise of the story is very sad, even though it’s funny – it’s about being a refugee, misunderstood, finding it hard to understand what’s going on around you. I just thought he was sweet when I read it as a child. Now I have been through something similar to him myself I see it much more seriously’. Does it have a particular meaning to you now as an older person? Winnie the Pooh: ‘I love his philosophy of life. He knows what he likes and needs and pursues his own comfort without ever being mean or selfish’. Do the characters suggest situations or people you know? ‘I now see that all the characters in Winne the Pooh do represent human types that I know very well, like Toad who is obsessive about his car is just like my boyfriend!’

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Does the language seem to you more humorous, complex, surprising or more simple than you remember? Mary Poppins: ‘when I read the book I had no idea how funny and clever the language is and the relationships are so much more interesting than in the film’. Do you find the situations satisfying as an adult or too simple? The Hungry Caterpillar: ‘It is just a simple story but the idea of that hunger and trying to find what satisfies your hunger is really very interesting looking at it now as an adult’. Are there hidden meanings or messages which you see now but did not see as a child? The Wizard of Oz; ‘it’s so obvious now when I look at it that the Wizard of Oz story is about seeking what you want somewhere else and not realising you have it right here in front of you. Dorothy had these wonderful friends right there but got whipped up into looking for something else that might be better. It’s pretty much a metaphor for the way we are living today’.

Variations A variation of this activity is to ask learners to bring in an English language version of their childhood book and to ask the same questions.

Comment The richest way to manage this activity is to invite your learners to bring in a children’s book of their own. This is ideal if it is practical for them to do so. The children’s book should be in the language in which they first read it, as the activity is about re-encountering reading at different stages in life. We discussed in the activities for question 2 that the first language plays a useful role in building confidence and cognitive capacity in the second language classroom. As a principle in this and other activities, if the reading is in the L2 then discussion can be in the L1; or in this case, if the reading is in the L1, then discussion should be in the L2.

Research connections Research suggests that re-reading gives us a deeper and refreshed insight into a text, even where there has been no conscious learning between

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the readings. In the MINUS approach to reading discussed in Part I above (Macalister 2011), we were introduced to five phases in the lesson: meaning, interest, new learning, understanding and stress-free tasks. This approach can be taken not only within lessons, but across a cycle of several lessons so a text can be returned to for fresh meanings, new learning and new understanding.

ACTIVITY 6.3 READING IN LAYERS Aims •

To consider the value of re-reading as a way of making deeper contact with texts

Level Intermediate to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

•

This activity can be practised with any text you are working on in class from the coursebook or class reader. It is best with a text the class is encountering for the first time. It also works best if the text has more than two paragraphs, even if these are short paragraphs. The learners will need a copy of the text, and a notebook for writing down their responses after each reading.

Procedure 1. Explain to the learners that they are going to read the text five times, in five different ways.

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2. Ask them to draw a table in their notebook like this. What I understand/like

What I don’t understand

First reading Second reading Third reading Fourth reading Fifth reading

3. Ask the learners to read the text right through without stopping or checking unknown vocabulary. After this first reading, they fill in the chart with brief notes or key words about what has been understood, and note down any words or sections which have not been understood. 4. The learners then read the text a second time and this time pick out any new vocabulary. They may use a dictionary or any form of checking to explain the new words. 5. Ask the learners to read the text a third time and this time, read just the opening lines of each paragraph. They should make sure they understand those opening lines, and use a dictionary or ask a neighbour to help if they do not. 6. The learners then read the text a fourth time, and this time read carefully the first paragraph and the last paragraph only. By now they should know the difficult vocabulary, and have understood what the opening sentences are saying. 7. Finally, the learners read the text right through again without stopping.

Variations You can make these different ‘layers’ of reading as specific as you like, to focus on any aspect of language you are working on. For example, see the language patterns in Activity 5.3. Other readings could include: return to the text and search for • • • • •

Pronouns: I/he/she/it/they v. proper nouns (names of people or places) Simple sentences v. complex sentences Positive adjectives v. negative adjectives Reported speech v. direct quotations Dates

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Comments The important stages of this exercise are the first and last, two whole-text readings separated over time. Whilst the activities suggested here can all be done in a single reading class, another variety of this activity might be to spread the readings over several days to see if extended time to absorb ideas and meaning makes a difference. This might be especially useful with more complex reading, for example for students in academic literacy classes reading specialist texts.

Research connections This activity might invite you to think about the two approaches to text mentioned in Part I and first described by Johns and Davies (1983): TALO – text as linguistic object – where the text is a resource for language investigation; or alternatively TAVI – text as vehicle for information – where the text is recognised as carrying meaning and purpose. Returning to the text several times is an interesting way to work with a text from several angles, and in this case, thinking about how it carries and changes meaning on each encounter.

ACTIVITY 6.4 PERSONAL READING HISTORIES Aims •

To reflect on the ways in which reading might have shaped and changed thinking

Level For you as a reader and teacher of English Adult readers Intermediate to advanced

Time 60 minutes

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Materials and preparation • •

The questions listed below need to be available to the learners – either on the whiteboard or in another form that is accessible to all of them. Invite your learners to bring in a notebook or a recording device so they can return to their answers later.

Procedure 1. Divide the class into pairs. Partner A should interview partner B for 15 minutes. Then they should change places. •

•

•

•

•

What reading do you remember as a child? Did you read with pictures, comics and cartoons, or listen to books being read aloud? Did you read at school? Did this lead you to reading the books for yourself? Can you mention one thing you read at this time in your life? What reading do you remember as a teenager? Did you enjoy the books you read at school? Did you prefer books recommended by friends or family? Can you mention one thing you read as a teenager? Did/do you read for work or study? Would you read that same thing for pleasure? Why or why not? Can you remember one work or study-related book? Do you read now for your own interest, not for work or for studying? What do you like to read if you have free time and free choice? Can you remember one book you read freely and with enjoyment? Has any of the reading at these stages in your life changed the way you think? Has any reading inspired you or is there any reading you think about often?

2. After these interviews have been exchanged, bring the class together. 3. Ask the learners to come to the board in turn and write up the name of one of the readings they described. See if there are any readings that class members have in common, or any that could now be recommended to the class as a whole. 4. See which of the books were read in the L1 and which in the L2. Notice patterns depending on where you are teaching: for example, if English was the medium of study, or if the learner moved from one country to another to study, did this affect the language in which they read?

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Variations For some learners you could draw a timeline on the whiteboard and ask them to copy this into their notebook. Adapt the timeline to the age range of your learners. Childhood 6–12

Teenage years 13–19

Young adulthood 20–30

Middle age 30–50

Then ask them to write down the name of one story, book, film, comic or cartoon, or other text-based reading which they remember from that time in their life.

Research connections Spiro (2014) analysed the personal reading histories of 50 teachers engaged in an in-service teacher development programme in a UK University between 2011 and 2014. The teachers identified and explained specific readings since childhood which shaped their beliefs and practice. Through their personal histories, connections could be clearly traced between early reading blocks and enthusiasms and the shaping of values and beliefs internalised and translated into their everyday and professional lives. The personal reading histories were triggered by the questions above which might help you too to explore the join between reading and the development of inner life.

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C:  TEACHING READING AS COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE Introduction Reading is often perceived as an isolated activity that we need to do alone and in quiet places. However, in many contexts reading brings people together. In gurdwaras, temples, churches and synagogues stories are read aloud, and become ways in which values are shared and a sense of belonging and community is created. Educators such as Aina (1999) and Berkowitz (2011) have described how telling stories aloud encouraged children to turn to books and to build literacy so they could follow the story and join in with its recounting. This section suggests several activities designed to create in the classroom the pleasure of sharing, joining in and reading collectively.

Question 7: How far and in what ways is reading a collective act? Activities 7.1–7.4 are designed to bring learners together,sharing their cultures, performing, choosing and discussing texts with one another.

ACTIVITY 7.1 PERFORMING READING Aims • • •

To explore the purpose and nature of texts written and performed collectively. To explore the role of texts as belonging to a community and emerging from it. To explore the language of praise.

Level Lower intermediate to advanced

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation Make available to students the following texts, which were written by other learners of English. The texts could either be projected on an interactive

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whiteboard, prepared as posters around the room, or be made available to learners online. My aunt* is a river I sail with her into the deep blue sea, far away She makes me think, She makes me dream She helps me grow *(she is 92 years old) My husband is a flower He makes me happy and brings me joy. He gives the house fragrance and adds colours to our life Kitty (Hong Kong) My friend is like a shell he never says what he feels his eyes never lie I like his eyes ‘cause they never lie Idina (Peru) My father is the sea, rough as he is, quiet as he is. My mother is the tree, shelter she is, shade she is.

Procedure Share the following instructions with your learners. 1. These are some poems written by students of English. They are all poems in praise of someone or something. Choose the poem you like best and explain why you have chosen it to a partner. Which words or phrases show you what the poet feels about his/her subject? 2. In a group, plan how you would turn your chosen poem into a performed poem, beating rhythms with your feet, clapping to the beat, repeating and chanting some of the key words in a group with all your voices, dancing or moving to the beats, repeating a chorus or a cry in between the lines. 3. Give each group the chance to perform their collective text.

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Variations The texts triggering response could be those written and performed by students in your class from former lessons or in former years. Alternatively you could set a theme to correspond with the time of the year: e.g. starting again (for January); turning points (for spring and winter solstice). Ask learners to find a text from the school library, class resources, from home or recommended by friends or family which they might want to ‘perform’ with others in the class. Set a session in your class for planning and directing the performed texts, to include: reading aloud chorally; clapping rhythms; accompanying texts with musical instruments; singing or chanting lines from the text.

Research connections Research studies in Part I introduced us to readers inspired and encouraged by reading as a social act. We met the 12-year-old boy who enjoyed telling others about the science books he had read (Alexander and Jarman 2018), and the Latino teenagers in Moje et al.’s study (2008) who read together. Social pleasure is one of Wilhelm’s (2016) five aspects of the lifelong reader. These and many other studies suggest that reading is far from an isolated act, but one which ideally connects us with others and helps us belong and contribute to communities.

ACTIVITY 7.2 DREAM CIRCLES: BUILDING READING CIRCLES Aim • •

Introduce to learners the idea that reading is not necessarily a solitary activity but can connect them to other people Introduce the idea that reading in groups can be sociable, fun and mind-expanding

Level Upper-Intermediate/Advanced.

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Time Class time: 1 hour

Materials and teacher preparation Prepare a worksheet, or write these questions on the whiteboard: • • • • •

Would you like to join a reading circle? Why, or why not? What would happen in the dream reading circle? How would books be chosen? How would reading circle meetings be organised? Who would be in the dream reading circle?

Procedure 1. Clarify that reading circles are run by readers without a teacher. They are not for the purpose of passing an exam, doing homework, or language exercises, but simply for enjoying reading together, discussing books and recommending books to one another. 2. If you have the facility to do so, show this video clip which is a discussion about literature reading circles: https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/ discipline/english/literacy/readingviewing/Pages/teachingpraccircles. aspx 3. After this, and if practical after the showing of the video, explain the class are going to plan the dream reading circle in groups. • • • •

What would happen in the dream reading circle? How would books be chosen? How would reading circle meetings be organised? Who would be in the dream reading circle?

4. Ask them to form groups of four or five and discuss their answers to the questions. 5. After 15 minutes invite the groups to share their answers. 6. Prepare a class profile of the ‘dream reading circle’, drawing up a notice to display on the all or build up together on the whiteboard. DREAM READING CIRCLE CONSTITUTION

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Variations If the class are positive about the idea of reading circles, or some in the class are, encourage these circles to take place ‘for real’. You can either set up a reading circle in class, using some of the techniques and classroom set ups described in Part I. Alternatively, you can facilitate an autonomous reading circle which the learners run for themselves, working with the constitution that they have discussed in class. You can facilitate this by: • •

•

Providing a ‘sign-up’ sheet for learners to opt into a reading group Providing in-class planning time for the reading group to make decisions: where and when they are meeting, which book they are going to start reading and how they are going to organise their meetings. Making known to the class where and how they can obtain multiple copies of books: in the school library, discounted in the bookshop, in the class collection or online.

Comments Reading circles were discussed in Part I, Section C. If you wish to deepen your understanding of what happens in different reading circles, the following websites might be informative: http://prisonreadinggroups.org.uk/our-reading-groups/how-dogroups-work/ https://traresources.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/entries/document/ 1374/Reading_Circles_Book.pdf https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/ discipline/english/literacy/readingviewing/Pages/teachingpraccircles.aspx https://www.classroomnook.com/blog/literature-circles The strength of the reading circle is that it is self-run, and that your learners can make their own rules and have their own choices about what to read. It might also expand closed friendship circles so that more isolated or shy learners become included as keen readers. However, you could provide incentives, such as a Reading Circle day, where reading circles present what they have read to others; or provide learning gold stars or assessment points for reading circle involvement. Part III will say more about reading circles, building reading classrooms and assessment strategy.

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If your learners do set up a reading circle of their own, make sure that both their expectations and yours are not too high. Even if in a class of 30 only one or two groups set up a reading circle that is a great achievement.

Research connections We have suggested that collective reading encourages and enhances readers’ enthusiasm. In the first language this has been researched by Duncan (2012) and in the EFL classroom by Shelton-Strong (2012); and as a community process by Liu and Young (2017). Duncan (2012) made a distinction between reading circles which are one-way kinds of interaction, for example when there is one storyteller and the others are listeners: and ‘true reading circles’ where everyone contributes equally. In Part IV, we invite you to research the differences between these two kinds of research circles, and to think about the roles people might play in a ‘true’ reading circle.

ACTIVITY 7.3 CHOOSING TOGETHER Aim • •

Choosing a book to read together Discussing ways of reading

Level Any level

Time 45 minutes (1 class hour)

Materials and preparation •

If this is practical, bring in copies of books which you think are appropriate for your learners’ age, level and context. One book per learner would be ideal.

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• •

If you have a classroom book resource, this can be used. Alternatively, if you have a school library, this activity could be conducted there. If none of these options are practical for you, make copies of the first pages and back covers of books which you think may be appropriate for your learners. Around ten examples would be ideal, to give learners the chance of choosing.

Procedure 1. Ask students to form groups of four or five. 2. Explain they are going to evaluate three or four books and choose the one they would like to read in a reading circle. Ask them to copy the grid below into their notebooks. For each book and each criterion they are going to give a mark between 1 and 5. 1 __________ 2 __________ 3 __________ 4 __________ 5 I dislike it a lot      I am neutral          I like it a lot Criteria

Book title 1

Book title 2

Book title 3

Book type (e.g. novel, biography, science fiction) Topic of the book Language of the book Characters in the book Author of the book Your own criteria

3. Ask students to peruse the books: look at the first pages, back covers, front covers (if they have the hard copy book), and fill out the grid. If they are in the school library, ask each member of the group to pick one book at random and bring it back to their circle. 4. Each learner should fill in the grid individually, based on their own personal preferences. After 15 minutes invite them to compare their ‘grades’ for each book with others in the group and come to a decision which of the books is the most popular. 5. Bring the class back into plenary and ask each group to share their choices, with a brief description about the book.

Variations With experienced readers in the first language, you could invite their own suggestions for criteria. An alternative is to offer no grid or criteria at all,

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and ask your learners first of all to make intuitive decisions. Once these have been made, it would be interesting to unpack the decisions and move backwards from choice to criteria rather than the reverse.

Comments The discussion with peers about the book could be in their first language if this is a shared language. However, when you bring the class together at the end to share their decisions, the plenary language could be English. This links to our point in earlier activities that the first language contributes to confidence and higher level thinking. We have suggested a principle of combining second language reading with first language discussion, or vice versa.

Research connections Choice is an important element in education in general; Guthrie and Wigfield (2000) summarise a large body of research that shows that learners who are given real choice in choosing books, feel more investment with the reading. In fact, the process of choosing a book becomes part of the ‘literacy event’.

ACTIVITY 7.4 READING SHAPING THE CHILD Aims •

To consider the way texts can be interpreted to represent different cultural values, depending on audience

Level Advanced learners Adults Teachers and trainee teachers

Time 30 minutes

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Materials and preparation •

•

Below are two stories told orally to children in China. Prepare to read one of these aloud to your class, so the meaning is clear, and the characters and storyline are clear. You might also build a resource of other such stories which have been told to you or to your learners from different cultures and contexts, so you can repeat this exercise with different content.

STORY 1 One day, after Confucius (409 B.C.) finished his lessons, his student Zi Lu came to him and asked him for advice, saying that ‘Sir, if I hear a very good idea, can I apply it to practice immediately?’ Looking at Zi Lu, Confucius said slowly: ‘you should ask your parents and your brother whether you should implement it and how to implement it’. Just as Zi Lu departed, Ran, another student, came in the front of Confucius, and asked: ‘Sir, if I hear a good idea, can I apply it to practice immediately?’ Confucius replied immediately: ‘Yes, you should implement it immediately’. A student, Gong Xi, who was present during both these conversations, was surprised and asked: ‘Sir, the two students asked you the same question but why did you give them two different answers?’ Confucius smiled and said: ‘Ran is humble and hesitant when making decisions so I encouraged him to do things decisively while Zi Lu is careless and not comprehensive, so I advised him to listen to the opinions of others and give things a second thought before doing it’.

STORY 2 More than 2,000 years ago, there lived a young man in the Shouling area of the State of Yan. One day, he met some people on the road who were chatting and laughing. One of them said that people in Han Dan walked most gracefully. And that was just what he wanted most of all, so he went to Han Dan which was far away to learn how to walk. As soon as he arrived in Han Dan, he was dazzled to find that everything was new and surprising. He learned from the children there how to walk, because he thought that the children’s walking gestures were lively and pleasing to the eye. He learned from the old people there how to walk, because he thought the old people’s walking gestures were steady. He learned from the women there how to walk, because he thought the women’s swaying walking gestures were beautiful. That being the case with him, in less than half a month he

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forgot completely how to walk for himself. As he had already used up his traveling expenses, he had to crawl back home. Zhuang Zi (3000 BC)

Procedure 1. Explain that you are going to tell a story that was told orally to children in China, and which has passed from mouth to mouth for over 1000 years. You are going to read the story twice. 2. The first time ask them to listen and think about how they would discuss or develop this story with children. 3. After you have read the story ask them to write down their responses. 4. Now read the story a second time, and this time explain the story is for them as adults. Ask them to listen and think about how they would discuss or develop the story for colleagues, trainee teachers, future or current teachers of children. 5. After you have read the story ask them to write down their responses. 6. Divide the class into pairs and ask them to share their responses to the first and second reading. What was different for them about the two readings? What was the same and what was different between the responses of each partner?

Comments In Part I, Section D, we discussed the view that reading is not an isolated act but the reverse, that it creates and builds community and can be the way values and cultural knowledge are communicated. Stories are chanted in temples, gurdwaras, churches, synagogues and mosques. They are also shared between parent and child and passed on through generations. This activity shares stories which shaped thinking for children brought up in a Confucian philosophy; but the universal quality of these stories mean that they can be constantly and variously interpreted, depending on age, audience and first culture.

Variations You might share with your students the stories which they heard in childhood and create a ‘story bank’ to use in class. Using these stories in class, you might ask a group of intermediate to advanced learners to tell these stories aloud to one another and share what they think the ‘message’ is.

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Research connections In the study into reading histories cited above (Spiro 2014) teachers from China identified these stories as significant in shaping their values and practice towards their learner. For many it became the core ‘story’ that led them to notions of differentiation and individualisation of learning. In the oral storytelling setting, stories are a means for the values and mythologies of the community to be communicated. Hodge et al. (2002) show that traditional storytelling in native American communities promoted wellbeing by giving listeners a sense of belonging and connection.

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D:  TEACHING AND TRAINING READING PEDAGOGY Introduction The activities in this section are designed for current and future teachers to think about their own development and aspirations as a teacher of reading. The activities offer opportunities to think about best practice, and to apply and develop general principles of reading pedagogy. They are also a reminder of some of the knowledge areas which are helpful for the teacher. Activities 8.1–8.4 invite teachers to review some of the principles for constructing activities for written texts. Activities 9.1 and 9.2 are reminders of what teachers of reading need to know about language. Activities 10.1–10.4 present ideas for discussing the general principles for using reading activities and the qualities of effective reading teachers.

Question 8: What pedagogies are used in the teaching of reading? The four activities in this section are specifically aimed at practicing teachers or student teachers to develop their thinking about teaching reading. Activities 8.1–8.4 provide opportunities for teachers to build their own reading activities, based on generalisable pedagogic ideas, such as information transfer, information gap, and task-based reading. They encourage teachers to build up their bank of texts which can then be used in a variety of ways. These activities can provide teachers of reading with toolkits useable with any group of learners and at every level of reading and readers.

ACTIVITY 8.1 COMMUNICATING WITH TEXTS Aims •

To develop ways of interacting with information in texts through information transfer and information expansion

Level For future, pre-service, training and developing teachers

Time 30 minutes

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Materials and preparation •

•

The best materials are those you might have in your own collection of authentic texts: for example travel brochures, train timetables, advertisements, theatre programmes, instruction manuals, restaurant menus. Prepare on the whiteboard the chart below. COLUMN A Text type

COLUMN B Activity

COLUMN C Transform into

compare, draw, summarise, describe, complete, reorganise, label, list, guess, add, remove, correct

Procedure 1. Brainstorm with your group texts which they read in everyday life. Write these on the board in Column A. Texts might include, for example: travel brochures, train timetables, advertisements, theatre programmes, instruction manuals, restaurant menus. 2. Brainstorm ‘activity’ verbs and list these in Column B. Example verbs are: compare, draw, summarise, describe, complete, reorganise, label, list, guess, add, remove 3. Divide the group into pairs. Ask each pair to choose one text type in Column A. They then have to work together to devise as many activities for this text type as they can, using the activity verbs. For example: Restaurant menu: • • • • • •

List the ingredients the chef will need to buy Reorganise the menu to separate vegetarian and vegan options Add two more suggested ‘special’ menu items Ask questions about different dishes – ingredients, preparation, etc. Describe the menu items to a diner Label the menu items to show which might include nuts and which are gluten free

Note that some of these are actions by staff, whereas others are actions by diners. Also, some of them result in written language, and some result in spoken production. 4. Join the pairs to form groups of four. If the groups have the actual texts, invite each pair to try out their activity with the other pair. If they do not, invite them to explain their ideas and give one another feedback.

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5. Ask the groups to ensure that they also list the type of text that the original has turned into (e.g. menu has become a list; train timetable has become a labelled map; theatre programme has become a diary entry.) 6. Gather the groups together into plenary and elicit examples of what their texts have changed into as a result of their activity 7. Gather these ‘new text’ ideas in plenary and write them in Column C. The chart can be used as a summarising record for future lesson planning. 8. Finally, ask the teachers to think of activities for learners that would require this type of information transfer.

Comments In order to transform the menu in all the several ways suggested above, the teachers have needed to do the following, all of which are useful reading strategies: • • • • • • •

Pose questions about the text Find answers to posed questions Connect text to background knowledge Summarise information Make inferences Connect one part of the text to another Reread

Research connections By changing the text in some way, as well as expanding it, readers are employing a number of strategies we know to be part of fluent reading. The strategies above are amongst those listed by Grabe and Stoller (2002:16) as they bring together research from multiple sources that tease out the processes of fluent reading. However, this activity pushes the reader/teacher towards creative approaches to language and text type, and towards text rewriting as a form of appreciative reading. Pope (1995) has made this the founding principle for a dynamic way of reading texts. He calls this ‘textual intervention’ and shows that, entering the text to ‘subvert’ it builds critical appreciation of both surface and deep features.

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ACTIVITY 8.2 TEXT ACTIVITIES: INTERACTING WITH TEXTS Aims • •

To develop ways of integrating reading with other skills To introduce and practice the principle of information transfer

Level For future, pre-service, training and developing teachers

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

•

Choose a text from your collection of articles. This can be a travel brochure, theatre programme, short news reports, instruction manuals, descriptions from catalogues, etc. Prepare on the whiteboard the chart below. COLUMN A Verb

COLUMN B Activity

compare

… one holiday destination with another

draw…

…the holiday destination on a map

choose

…. a holiday destination

summarise describe complete reorganise label list guess add remove correct

COLUMN C Target audience (optional)

…for a specified traveller

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Procedure 1. Bring your chosen text to the session. Ask your participants to read the text quickly and think of activities they could use with the text. 2. Present the table on the whiteboard and ask the participants to use the verbs in the first column to help them generate ideas about activities. 3. Do this activity in pairs or groups and then compare ideas in the plenary.

Variations The activities can be developed into more detailed lesson plans – e.g. choosing a holiday destination could be developed into a lesson involving a pre-reading activity as well as choosing a destination for a specified traveller – e.g. an elderly relative, a family with children, etc. Ask your learners in groups of five or six to micro-teach their lessons to each other. As a follow up ask your participants to choose a text of their own and develop their own activity for it.

Comments Many of the verbs in column A of the table lead the learner to integrate reading with other language skills such as writing or speaking.

Research connections As we suggested in Part I, Section D, there are different ways of reading, and these different ways will diverge according to our purpose for reading as well as according to the genre (Duke and Roberts 2010). This activity encourages teachers to think about different text types and different genres, and think about the different functions that each genre fulfils, and the different teaching activities that can therefore be generated from that text.

ACTIVITY 8.3 TASK-BASED READING AND THE REAL WORLD Aims • •

For teachers to consider real-world tasks and how they can be replicated in the classroom To introduce and practice the principle of task-based reading

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Level For teachers and trainee teachers of reading For advanced learners

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation Think about community projects which your group of participants may be interested in or have experienced. Below are some ideas, but it would be useful to choose those that your own learners may genuinely be involved with, or interested in. •

•

•

Your village/town community wish to use energy in a more sustainable way. You are part of a group helping to advise and suggest ways for doing this. Your village/town have been awarded a grant to develop the facilities in the youth centre. You are part of a group planning how this money might best be spent. Your village/town wants to start a local newsletter. You are one of the team planning what should be included in the newsletter.

Write these community project ideas on the board so they can be read by all participants. Draw the chart below on the whiteboard in preparation for the activity. Text

Purpose

What next?

Procedure 1. Divide the class into groups of three or four. Ask each group to choose one of the community projects that interests them. 2. Ask each group to list possible texts which they may need to read as part of that community project. Each group should list at least five

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different kinds of texts. An example for the sustainable energy project might be: • • • • • • •

Statistics about climate change Newspaper articles showing the impact of climate change on communities Photos with captions Plans, manifestos and reports of community initiatives Transcript of talks, lectures, TV programmes (e.g. Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough) Manifestos from political parties – e.g. the Green Party in your country Manifestos from charities – e.g. Greenpeace

3. Invite the groups to think about each text type and ask themselves what their purpose for reading it would be. For example: a. Statistics about climate change: to provide evidence to those who are sceptical based on factual and readily visible information b. Newspaper articles: to develop empathy for others in this situation c. Reports of community initiatives: to gather recommendations and examples of good practice from other communities 4. Explain that the groups are now going to translate this community project idea into a classroom set of activities, spread over one or two classes, and to include the reading materials they have listed at step 2, and the reading skills they have listed at step 3. They should spend 30 minutes thinking about: what materials need to be prepared; what the different steps are in the activity; what learners should do; what the end-product should be; what the teacher should do. 5. After 30 minutes invite the groups to join up and share their ideas. Ask each group to give one another feedback.

Variations Your participants could also suggest community project ideas they have experienced or been involved in.

Comments The activity is designed to develop closer links between real world reasons for reading, and classroom activities.

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Research connections Researchers of pedagogic tasks such as the authors in the collection edited by Bygate, Skehan and Swain (2001) analyse the many ways tasks can be constructed. They describe task-based learning as capable of closely replicating real-world tasks, and combining many skills especially useful for the teacher of reading: problem-solving, collaboration with others, and the integration of reading with speaking, listening and writing.

ACTIVITY 8.4 ACTIVITY DETECTIVE: MINING FOR PRINCIPLES Aim • • •

To scan reading activities and identify pedagogic principles To view activities from the perspective of pedagogic strategy and their generalisability to other texts and classes To create a framework for evaluating reading activities

Level Current and future teachers of reading

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

•

Participants will need a copy either of this book, or the coursebook they are using which teaches reading. The examples in Column C are all activities in this book. Prepare in advance on the whiteboard, online or on a handout, the chart below so each participant has a copy. Include as much or as little information in the boxes depending on how much information you want to elicit from the teachers you are working with or how much you need to give them as a starting point. This will depend on their stage of development and familiarity with the concepts.

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A Pedagogic principle

B Description

C Examples

Information transfer and extension Textual intervention

Text is transferred or extended into something new: an action, a drawing, a different text type

Activity 8.1, 10.2

Information and opinion gap

Partner A and Partner B have different texts or information and need to communicate to exchange information

Activity 2.5, 4.2

Task-based reading

The reading activity is dropped into a real-world activity that includes collaboration to solve a problem or complete a task

Activity 4.1, 5.4, 10.1

Layered reading Re-reading

Reading several times, each with a different focus of attention Re-reading over time

Activity 4.2, 6.3

Races and competitions

Speed, or constraint is built in and ‘first to arrive’ or ‘most number of points’ is the winner

Activity 2.3, 3.1

Other principles?

Procedure 1. Discuss the chart above with your participants. If they are experienced teachers or familiar with the principles, you could provide an empty chart and invite them to suggest the principles and definitions themselves, or alternatively the chart could be partially filled in for them to discuss and complete. 2. Ensure each participant has either a coursebook or resource book which includes reading activities, or this book. Explain they are going to skim the activities and analyse/identify the principles behind them. If the activity falls clearly into one of the categories in the chart, they should note down the activity name, page or number for easy reference. 3. If an activity seems not to follow any one of those principles, see if they can work out what the underlying principle is and articulate it at the end of column A.

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4. After 30 minutes bring the class together and share suggested further principles to add to the chart. Create a numerical checklist of which pedagogic principles seem to be the ‘favourite’ in each resource/ coursebook and discuss their views of this. Do they think the activities are sufficiently varied and balanced? Is there a pedagogic principle missing? 5. As a result of their findings invite them to choose one of the activity principles they feel is underused. For homework, or as a follow-up, invite each learner to develop an activity based on that principle, using coursebook texts or a text they are aiming to teach.

Variations For teachers earlier in their development, you could work with just one of these pedagogic principles. Invite learners to trawl their coursebooks, or this book, to find examples of that activity, and discuss its merits and limitations.

Comments Most of these pedagogic principles work at the activity/lesson by lesson level, by definition. It would be interesting to think through whether focus on pedagogic principles such as these offer a toolkit of ‘tricks’ rather than a ‘reading for life’ approach. How would you critique these principles and/or expand them so they take the reading experience beyond the classroom?

Research connections These activity types and principles are generalisable across all the language skills, and their strength is indeed that they create a flow between these skills. Using these activity principles mean that reading becomes part of a cycle integrating writing, speaking and listening too. Bygate, Skehan and Swain (2001) identified these as helpful principles and effective task types for second language learning. However, underlying these activities are other ideas brought in from outside the language teaching field, such as Pope’s idea of ‘textual intervention’ which takes the information transfer idea one step further (Pope 1995).

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Question 9: How should teachers of reading teach language?

ACTIVITY 9.1 GENRE BENDING: UNRAVELLING TEXT TYPES Aims • • • •

To explore the knowledge we bring to our reading of different text types To explore the discourses of different genres To explore the difference between surface and deeper meaning To develop critical and appreciative reading skills

Level For current and future teachers of reading Advanced learners

Time 60 minutes

Materials and preparation • •

•

Choose a text from any distinct genre such as: instructions, recipe, advertisement, recipe. Type 10 lines of the text and subvert the text in some way: for example set the text out like a poem, or exchange some of the vocabulary items with those from another genre or text type. The example below comes from notices found along the seafront, subverted to form a poem and with new ideas imported in to suggest irony.

Seaside signs There will be no feeding of seagulls, making of picnic noises, eating of ice cream by children, dogs, or other. There must be no leaving of litter, lipstick, lovenests, shells, shingle. Dunes

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must be collected before departure. This water is not for drinking, swimming, activity of fish that may cause offence. If in distress contact the lighthouse headquarters in Slough, the freefone on the Devon freeway junction 18, the lifeguard centre in Woking, the rubber ring heart fibulator at the client care centre in Caerphilly. This Tor was donated by this cliff was bought by this wind, this air, this cloud, this cowslip, this cow was the generous gift of the Duke, Earl, Prince, Lady, to the people of Cornwall. Only enter sandcastles with hard hats. The sea is closed for vital repairs. (Spiro, J. 2015:14)

Procedure 1. Introduce the text to your learners so each has a copy. Explain it is a text type but something has changed/is missing or has been subverted. They are going to work through language questions to find out more about this. Exploring text types syntactic knowledge Are the sentences commands, statements or questions? How many commands? How many statements? How many questions? What does that suggest about the kind of text it is? semantic knowledge Do the words refer to human or non-human life (animate), or to something that is not living (inaminate)? Are the words being used in an unusual way, so these boundaries cross over: for example, something inanimate is being given animate qualities, or the reverse? morphological knowledge Underline all the words you find made up of two parts: e.g. freefone, lifeguard, lipstick, lovenest What information do the parts of words give? Do the separate parts help you understand the meaning of the word? Is there anything unusual about these words? Are there any word patterns you notice in the text? (Continued)

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genre knowledge What type of text is this? Where would you see it and who is it written for? Is there anything strange about this as an example about that text type? What’s wrong, missing, or different? topic knowledge What is this text about on the surface? Do you think the text is about something different under the surface? general world knowledge What do you need to know about the world to interpret the text? (e.g. in this text do you need to know about the perils of walking along the coast, the behaviour of seagulls?) sociocultrual knowledge Why and how might a text be subverted in this way? What is the effect? What are the possible meanings and reasons? Have you met examples of this in your own reading?

2. Now they have analysed the text, and identified what it seems to be, what it is and what it is not, invite them to change the text back so it is a ‘straight’ example of the text type. 3. When they have done this, hand out, display or make visible to the group the original text you started with. Notice what is the same, and what is different from their version.

Variations This activity could be set up with any text ‘found’ in your linguistic landscape or in your resource bank of authentic texts – such as an instruction manual or a restaurant menu, and retype it, setting out the lines as above so it suggests a poem. Your learners could also bring in a text of their own, and prepare it for their peers in the same way. The activity then gives learners permission to make a creative leap from reading to rewriting.

Comments You could also use this activity to explore with trainee teachers the different levels and kinds of language knowledge they applied to answer each question. Here is an example of what you might say for the particular text above (which can be used without copyright).

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What you know when you read •

•

•

•

•

•

•

You know that the structures will be/must be are all verbs in a form which suggests obligation: rules or commands. You know whether the first three lines are a sentence a question, a statement, or a command. How do you know? This is syntactic knowledge. You may not know the word lovenest, but you might know the words love and nest. You might understand that, whilst nest usually relates to the home of birds, when combined with love it may change its meaning and become: somewhere cosy and comfortable for lovers to be together. This is semantic knowledge. You may notice that there are many words which end –ing: feeding, making, eating, leaving, and all of these can be used after ‘no’: no feeding, no making, no eating. In other words, the –ing ending has changed each word from a verb into a noun. You can answer the question – what information do the parts of words give me? This is morphological knowledge. You know from the very first line that ‘seagulls’ relates to the subject of the seaside. In case you are unsure, more words such as water, swimming, shells, fish add to the picture. You could also add words of your own to this topic, if required. You could answer the question – what is this text about and how do I know? This is topic knowledge. You know (at least at first glance) that this text includes rules about how to behave at the seaside. However, the lines are set out in a way that is unusual for rules: there are short lines which split the rules in two. The way these lines are laid out, to make you stop and think about the words and line lengths, suggests that this is more of a poem than a set of signs. You can answer the question – what type of text is this? Where would I see it and who is it written for? This is genre knowledge. However, if you look more closely at the text, you might notice the instructions become more and more unreal and impossible. How can you take away a dune (mounds of sand)? How can you possibly stop the ‘activity of fish’ unless you fish them out of the sea? How does the text fit with what you know about the real world? How does the real world help you understand it? Why do you think the rules have moved from possible to impossible? You are now using your general world knowledge. The text is in fact a ‘found poem’ based on real signs along a seafront; but they have been made impossible and ‘surreal’ in order to draw attention to the unreasonable nature of signs cluttering up the beach.

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The poem is called Seaside Signs. You will probably now rethink whether the instructions are intended to be taken seriously, or if they are instead an example of the impossible and unrealistic. This would make the title and the text coherent, and would connect with what you know of the real world. In effect you are reframing your reading to include what you know about intrusive rules and regulations, or what writers of poems try to say as compared to writers of public notices. You are asking the question: how does the cultural and social context affect my understanding of the text? How is the text, indeed, shaped by the context in which it was written? This is sociocultural knowledge. These knowledge areas, and the questions they answer, are a useful checklist for you as a teacher. They are questions which it is useful for you to encourage in your learners.

Research connections This activity enables and practices both lower level reading skills and higher level skills. Grabe and Stoller (2002) describe lower level processes as recognition of vocabulary items (lexical process) or sentence structure (syntactic parsing). However, higher level skills include the capacity to identify and analyse genre, and something they call the situation model of reading. This includes integrating ‘text information with a well-developed network of ideas from the reader’s background knowledge’ (Grabe and Stoller 2002:28).

ACTIVITY 9.2 LANGUAGE DOCTOR: UNRAVELLING A TEXT Aim • •

To explore the kinds of knowledge a teacher needs to unravel and edit a written text To look at connections between surface knowledge of language, and knowledge of underlying conventions and discourse

Level For advanced learners and for training and current teachers of reading and writing

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Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation •

•

Choose a text the group have not yet met but which you might wish them to read in future sessions. This could be a professional paper about reading, or a student text they might need to teach in the future. ‘Subvert’ the text so surface features such as vocabulary choice, register and language accuracy are changed. However, unlike activity 8.1 above, make sure the genre of the text is unchanged and clear; for example, if necessary provide the title and source. You are going to ask your readers to place side by side the original and the subverted versions of the text. The examples below are from a history of reading.

VERSION A from The History of Reading by Alberto Manguel In 1984, two small clay tablets of vaguely rectangular shapes were found in Tell Brack in Syria, dating from the fourth millennium BC. I saw them, the year before the Gulf War, in an unostentatious display case in the Archaeological Museum of Baghdad. They are small, unimpressive objects, each bearing a few discreet markings; a small indentation near the top and some sort of stick-drawn animal in the centre. — All our history begins with these two modest tablets. They are – if the war spared them – among the oldest examples of writing we know. (extracted from Manguel 1996:177) VERSION B (subverted version) Some time in the last century, someone found a couple of little bits of mud which looked pretty ancient and turned out to be. They were in this museum but you could easily miss them - titchy, scratched about a bit. Scratches could depict animals. Doesn’t look much at all. Turns out they are actually first attempts at writing. Amazing! •

Draw the chart below on the board, or make it available to learners on screen or on a handout so they can edit and add to it.

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Original version

Changed version

Comments

Procedure 1. Make sure your participants have access to both texts, either in a handout, on screen or on the board. 2. Ask them to copy out the chart into a notebook. 3. Ask them to compare the two texts and complete the chart, showing the differences between them and deciding why the original is more suitable for the specific genre than the changed version. 4. After 15 minutes bring the class into plenary and discuss: which individual words have been changed (e.g. mud = clay; little/ titchy = small; a couple = two) which phrases have been changed (e.g. some time in the last century = in 1984; didn’t look much at all = modest) which structures have changed (e.g. Turns out = They are —) what is included in the original (e.g. date 1984; place Archaeological Museum, Baghdad) what is omitted in the original (e.g. Amazing!) 5. Discuss why these changes are appropriate to the genre of the text. 6. Discuss what kind of genre the subverted text might belong to.

Variations An interesting exercise would be to hand out only the subverted text. Ask participants to rewrite it to fit the original genre. Then compare their rewritten version with the correct one. Participants could bring in their own text, in both the original and subverted by them, and exchange with a neighbour.

Comments In Part III, we also suggest simplifying a text to match the level of difficulty to your own learners. An alternative way of ‘subverting’ a text, then, is to follow some of these simplification principles listed and demonstrated in

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Part III and place the two versions side by side, inviting learners to notice differences between the original and the revised text.

Research connections An activity of this kind, as with 8.1 above, activates many levels of language knowledge. This includes the reader’s ‘schema’, or what they know of the world; for example, the link between mud and clay; the broad period of time that might be defined as ‘ancient’. These knowledge areas, however, are culturally distinct: is our perspective of ‘ancient’ specific to our own cultural setting, for example? Other terms and phrases are relative: for example, small, little and titchy are all associated here with the idea of being modest, unimpressive or insignificant. Is this relative too? So as the reader unravels text at the surface level, deeper references and associations are being activated.

Question 10: What does it mean to be an effective teacher of reading? Activities 10.1–10.4 consider the qualities of the ideal teacher of reading and encourage you to visualise yourself in that role and to learn from best practice.

ACTIVITY 10.1 FINDING A STAR TEACHER 1: CRITERIA FOR STARDOM Aim • •

To consider the qualities of good teachers of reading To draw up criteria for the ideal head teacher of reading, to develop a ‘reading school’

Level For teachers and trainee teachers

Time 30 minutes

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Materials and preparation •

•

Plan an incomplete (or even incorrect) set of criteria for appointing a head teacher of reading, divided as below into essential and recommended columns. This could be drawn on the whiteboard, or copied online or as a handout for participants to complete for themselves. Head teacher of reading: appointment criteria Essential

Desirable

Be an enthusiastic reader themselves Be an excellent classroom organiser Have good ideas about selecting and building up reading resources Have good ideas for building reading into language teaching Have good ideas for developing reading for enjoyment outside class Have a wide repertoire of strategies and activities for developing reading fluency Engage in research about reading

Procedure 1. Divide participants into groups of three. 2. Explain they are on the panel of a language school, hoping to appoint a new head of reading to make it a ‘reading school’. 3. Look at the draft drawn up by Human Resources, which is incomplete and in some places incorrect. You have been asked to edit, develop and expand the criteria with other participants in your group. Decide on these changes with others in your group and complete the grid, showing which criteria you consider to be essential and which recommended (or not essential). 4. After 30 minutes invite each group to explain their criteria. Notice which criteria have been chosen by more than one group, and decide as a class on shared and commonly agreed criteria. These will be used again in activity 10.3

Variations A variation of this activity is to draw up criteria for a competition to find the Star Teacher of Reading competition. Participants could draw up ‘thumbnail sketches’ of teachers they have known, as entrants to the competition.

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Another variation is to compare criteria for competitions for teaching awards. Here are a few websites with comments and criteria for such awards: https://www.globalteacherprize.org/global-teacher-prize/eligibilitycriteria/ https://www.teachingawards.com/what-makes-a-good-entry/ You may find similar websites about your own context.

Comments Participants could also be invited, before drawing up their criteria, to share examples either of excellent practice or an example of very bad practice in teaching reading. These examples could be used to work out what is and is not good teaching of reading.

Research connections Richards (1989) and Johnson (2019), discussed in Part I, came up with lists of criteria for effective teaching of reading. It could be argued that this whole book is about this topic, and researching this topic, so you could reflect on whether this book has changed your mind about reading and the teaching of reading. In your view, is research into reading important for the teacher? Should a teacher of reading also be a researcher of reading, or engaged in reading about research? Think about whether you would include this in your list of criteria for the star teacher of reading.

ACTIVITY 10.2 FINDING A STAR TEACHER 2: ASKING QUESTIONS Aim •

To establish the qualities of good reading teachers

Level Advanced learners; teachers and trainee teachers of reading

Time 30 minutes

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Materials and preparation •

• •

The activity starts with criteria drawn up for the star teacher of reading. This could be the same criteria drawn up in activity 10.1, or criteria developed and planned by you. A copy of these criteria needs to be made visible to all the participants in the activity, either online, on the whiteboard or in a handout. An additional column needs to be included as below:

Head teacher of reading: interview planning Criteria

Interview questions

Be an enthusiastic reader themselves Be an excellent classroom organiser Have good ideas about selecting and building up reading resources Have good ideas for building reading into language teaching. Have good ideas for developing reading for enjoyment outside class. Have good ideas for integrating reading with the other skills Be a researcher of reading in their own classrooms

Procedure 1. Explain that the class have been asked to plan interview questions for the new head teacher of reading. The interview questions need to give applicants the chance to show that they meet the specific criteria for the job. 2. Hand out or display the chosen criteria (either from activity 10.1, or criteria developed or edited by you). Ask participants to work in groups of 3 to reframe each criterion into one or two interview questions. These need to be open questions which start with question words such as: How? Why? What would you do if ----? 3. After 30 minutes, invite pairs to join into groups of four. Try out their questions with one another. Notice the ones which could be answered with yes/no; the ones which lead to the most useful information. 4. In teams of four draw up the best questions that yield the richest answers. Ask the group to keep these questions for use in future sessions.

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Variations Instead of starting with criteria, and then developing questions, groups could formulate their own questions from scratch, planning questions first, and then deciding what the criteria are for answering them well.

Comments The criteria suggested here are intended to be critiqued, as are the questions which follow. For example, a group of trainee teachers may wish to prioritise knowledge of reading activities and strategies, and focus less on the building of resources and the extending of reading beyond the classroom. More experienced teachers may want to expand their own expertise by looking beyond lesson planning at the wider ‘reading life’ of their learners and the school. Activities 10.1–10.4 focus on these two kinds of approach – the ‘lesson-based’ approach, and the ‘reading life’ approach – and it might be interesting to fine-tune this activity for the stage of its participants.

Research connections Research into reading pedagogy tends to give us a very helpful notion of what reading teachers should include in their lessons. For example Grabe and Stoller (2002) drew up a list of the strategies a reading teacher should include in their repertoire. Day and Bamford (1998) explore the ‘power of extensive reading’ which takes reading beyond the classroom into a reading life. What we do not see explicitly is research into the ideal teacher of reading. Should the ideal teacher of reading combine lesson-specific strategies, and outside-class activities? Should the ideal teacher of reading engage with research as a reader of research, or a teacher-researcher themselves? The activities here and in Part III and IV open up this conversation.

ACTIVITY 10.3 STAR TEACHER OF READING COMPETITION Aim • •

To give readers of this book the chance to visualise themselves as best practice teachers of reading To encourage readers of this book to plan for their own development

Level Teachers and trainee teachers of reading

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Time 60 minutes

Materials and preparation • •

A list of the questions drawn up in activity 10.2. If these questions have not been formulated, below is an example set. Make these questions available for each learner, through a handout, display on the whiteboard, or online.

Criteria

Sample questions

Be an enthusiastic reader themselves

Do you enjoy reading yourself? Can you give examples of what you read for enjoyment? Can you give examples of what you read specifically for your job as a teacher of reading?

Be an excellent classroom organiser

How would you use class time to encourage your learners to read? How would you organise a large class to develop reading activities?

Have good ideas about selecting and building up reading resources

What kind of reading resources would you ideally like to have in your classroom? What kind of reading resources or activities would you ideally like to have in the school as a whole?

Have good ideas for building reading into language teaching.

How would you use reading to help develop language? How would you use language to help develop reading? What language knowledge do you think is useful for you as a teacher of reading?

Have good ideas for developing reading for enjoyment outside class.

How would you encourage your learners to read for pleasure outside school? What kind of out-of-class reading activities would you suggest?

Be aware of the skills and sub-skills of reading and how to develop them

What skills do you think are specific to reading? Can you give examples of any activities you might use to develop these? How important do you think it is to integrate reading with the other language skills? Can you give examples of any activities you might use for doing this?

Engage with research into reading classrooms

Do you think research about reading is useful for teachers? Why – or why not? Do you think researching your own practice as a teacher of reading is useful? Why, or why not?

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Procedure 1. Divide the class into pairs. Each pair should have a copy of the questions formulated in Activity 10.2, or otherwise a list of questions as above. 2. Give partner A 20 minutes to interview partner B. Partner A should note down each time that Partner B demonstrates that they fulfil the criteria. 3. Now reverse and give partner B 20 minutes to interview partner A. Partner B should note down each time that Partner A demonstrates that they fulfil the criteria. 4. After 40 minutes invite each partner to count the number of examples of fulfilled criteria they have listed for their partner. 5. Bring the class together and share examples of criteria gathered by the partners. 6. The star teacher in the class is the one with the most number of matches with the criteria.

Variations If your class do not have experience as teachers of reading, you might ask them instead to share memories of one teacher of reading at school or college. They should answer the questions in relation to that teacher, and what they remember. You could draw up a poster of the ‘star teacher of reading’ to display on the wall, with a list of his/her best activities or qualities.

Research connections The questions suggested here map over the two approaches: understanding the many strategies needed to make the reading lesson active and engaging (as in Grabe and Stoller 2002); and understanding the many ways reading might be taken out of the classroom to become a reading life (as in Day and Bamford’s description of extensive reading (1998).

ACTIVITY 10.4 WALKING INTO THE SHOES OF STAR TEACHERS Aim • •

To draw up plans for best practice To identify strengths and areas for change

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Level For teachers, trainees and developing teachers of reading

Time 30 minutes

Materials and preparation • • •

If you have worked through activities 10.1–10.3, have your notes, or display copies of ‘star teacher’ criteria so you can refer to these. Ask participants to bring with them to class the list of positive qualities that were noted in activity 10.3 above. If these preparations are not practical, the activity can also be managed without reference to any other materials.

Procedure 1. Explain each participant is going to ‘walk into the shoes’ of star teachers of reading. If you have done activity 10.3 with the group you might remind them of the qualities of the star teacher of reading, 2. They are going to imagine themselves in the shoes of this teacher, short-term, mid-term and long-term. Ask them to have a notebook nearby, and to close their eyes as you speak. After each question, they are invited to open their eyes and write down whatever comes to mind, for 2 minutes. 3. Read out each group of questions, slowly and clearly. After each one, invite participants to open their eyes and write their responses for 2 minutes. These could be in note form, bullet points, key words or longer phrases. Imagine yourself next week after teaching an excellent lesson that included reading. What did you do in that lesson that you are pleased with? What did your learners do in the lesson that you are pleased with? It is the beginning of a new year at school and you are excited about new changes you are about to make in the way you teach reading. What are those changes? Imagine yourself in five years’ time, nominated star teacher of reading by your students and colleagues. What did you do that your students enjoyed and benefited from? What did you do that your team/school learnt and benefited from?

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4. Give participants 2 minutes at the end to review what they have written, add or change this. Then invite them to work in groups of three to exchange their thoughts. 5. Invite them to write their ‘good ideas’ on postcards or post-its and display these on the walls. The class can now circulate and view these good examples, taking a note of any they would like to borrow.

Variations This could also be run as a grid-filling exercise. Draw the grid below on the whiteboard for learners to copy. Vary the questions to suit the expertise and level of your group, and invite them to fill in the grid, first individually, and then to compare with a partner. IDEA 1

IDEA 2

IDEA 3

My strengths as a reading teacher What I would like to do differently next week Changes I would like to make in the next month/year

Research connections We know that reflection is an important part of being a good teacher; Schön (1983) describes the complex reflections that professionals engage in, to help them arrive at best practice. He offers the idea of reflection before action takes place, during the lesson itself, and afterwards. Visualising in this activity enables teachers both to think back on lessons taught and experienced; but also to think forward to lessons in the future, and to imagine the bigger picture too. The good teacher not only influences their learners, but could make a positive impact too on the school or team as a whole.

Part Three FROM APPLICATION TO IMPLEMENTATION: TEACHING READING IN TIME AND PLACE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041382-4

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Introduction Part I introduced you to the many questions we can ask about reading, and the many ways research has tried to answer these questions. Part II suggested activities for translating these research insights into classroom activities. Part III asks how these ideas apply to different kinds of teachers, classrooms, learners and settings. We share stories of teachers who tried out these ideas for themselves, made changes in their classroom and helped their learners become more confident and enthusiastic readers. These are teachers we have met on workshops, development programmes and project supervisions. In line with ethical guidance, their names have been changed and contexts generalised so they can’t be traced back to individuals. However, their stories come from many contexts, including state primary schools, after-school classes, private language schools and university departments, and their experiences, though transformed into vignettes, are authentic. Whatever kind of teacher you are, however limited your classroom resources and whoever your learners are, there are always ways that reading can become more exciting, more integrated and more relevant.

A:  BECOMING A READING TEACHER: CONNECTING WITH OTHERS Every teacher needs refreshment, and every value and belief benefits from a fresh look. It may be that you or your students have become tired of the usual reading activities such as jigsaw reading, prediction activities, comprehension questions. It may be some of the strategies which you first learnt were taboo have come back into fashion, such as reading aloud, translation and dictation. It may also be that research has opened your thinking to new ideas such as bringing the first language into the classroom, introducing reading choice or offering chances to re-read over time. What can a teacher of reading do to manage these tides of change and to keep abreast of them? Teachers we have met in development programmes and training workshops have made multiple suggestions in answer to this question, but there is one that seems to be the most important: connection with other teachers. The lists in Table 3.1 offer ideas for teachers to keep in contact with one another in multiple ways: what other teachers are thinking and writing, their materials and teaching ideas, resources, frameworks, journals, conferences and events other teachers are engaging with. To be a teacher of reading is to keep alive to changes and developments so you both learn from them and contribute to them. Here is one teacher, Darren, talking about the way connections refreshed his thinking. Darren had been teaching English in a company in Japan for many years, had a set of business documents he was given on arrival

From application to implementation 155 TABLE 3.1  Building reading connections

Connections

Links

Connecting with other teachers of reading through teacher associations

IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign language www.iatefl.org ) with Special Interest Groups (SIGs) such as Literature SIG; Teacher Development SIG; Materials Writing SIG, Research SIG and many more Country specific Teacher Associations such as JALT ( Japan), TESOL Spain, ETAS (Switzerland), IATEFL Chile, BrazTESOL, MELTA (Malaysia) as well as Teacher Associations based in specific regions or towns.

Connecting with professional organisations

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE; https:// ncte.org) National Association of Language Development in the Curriculum (NALDIC; https://naldic.org.uk) The Reading Agency (https://readingagency.org.uk)

Connecting with reading websites

Extensive Reading Foundation (https://erfoundation.org/ wordpress/) International Reading Association Literacy Links https:// www.reading.org/links/lit_tp.html

Connecting with journals about reading

Journal of Research in Reading Reading and Writing Quarterly Reading and Writing Reading in a Foreign Language Reading Research and Instruction Reading Research Quarterly The Reading Matrix

Connecting with reading frameworks

Council of Europe Framework of Reference (2018) Regularly updated www.coe-int/lang-cefr

Connecting with professional development

Free online MOOCS: • Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task-Based Approach (https://www.coursera.org/learn/esl-reading) • Dylexia and Foreign Language Learning (https://www. futurelearn.com/courses/dyslexia) Publishers’ training days and webinars Teacher Conferences: TESOL, IATEFL, and local teacher association conferences Webinars offered by Teacher Associations

that he kept re-using and had got into the rut of doing the same thing year after year. Thank you so much for suggesting I join JALT ( Japanese Association of Language Teachers), IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) and check out reading resources online.

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I can’t believe how much there is out there, and how many people have like me got sick of the same old thing and are doing something new. I just feel like I am starting again and feel excited about my job for the first time in years. (Darren: teaching Business English in a Japanese company)

B:  BECOMING A READING TEACHER: KNOW YOURSELF AS A READER The reading teacher is one who brings into the classroom some of the excitement and enthusiasms of being a reader. Some of these ideas have been shared in Activities 5.3, 5.4, 6.4, 10.3 and 10.4. Being an enthusiastic reader yourself is a great inspiration and incentive for your learners. Sharing your enthusiasms and book choices, and knowing yourself as a reader can both be a part of the reading culture of your classroom. However, what should you do if you are not in fact a teacher who is enthusiastic about reading? Many teachers we have worked with in training, research and development programmes have admitted they are reluctant readers themselves, and thus find it difficult to convey an enthusiasm that they do not feel. However, one answer does emerge as important, in answer to the question above: know yourself as a reader. In other words, look behind your view of yourself as resistant to reading, and ask if it is really the case and if so, where it comes from. For example, Moje et al.’s study (2008) showed that, when asked about ‘reading’, learners assumed they were being asked about their reading of ‘literature’ – novels and poems. They thus dismissed other kinds of reading they naturally did as not significant. In fact, they did a great more reading than they realised. Here is one teacher, Isobel, reflecting on her reading life: I found reading difficult at school and I started reading late, so it always felt like a struggle. I just ‘learnt’ that I wasn’t a good reader. Then when you asked me to reflect on it, I had to struggle to ‘see’ what I really do: I skim a daily newspaper every morning; I read student applications daily; I read and comment on their personal statements; I read all the reports and policy documents and find them interesting; I read rapidly and get to the main point of about 50 emails a day. In fact, as I began to look behind my idea of being a reluctant reader, I saw that I engaged with reading all the time, yet I never thought any of it was ‘real’ reading because it wasn’t the kind I was expected to do at school. (Isobel school admissions officer) As a teacher of reading, it is always interesting to review your own attitude to reading and see whether there are assumptions which have become fixed over time: that you are a reluctant reader as Isobel believed she was; or that ‘reading’

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only means long and literary texts. ‘Knowing yourself ’ as a ‘reading teacher’ can communicate itself to your learners. It does not mean you read the way you were expected to at school or college; rather, it means you know what engages you and what does not, you recognise your own reading enthusiasms and habits, and you pursue reading that matches these. Research Question 6 in Part IV suggests a variety of ways you can research your own reading and come to understand your enthusiasms and personal reading blocks.

C:  BUILDING READING RESOURCES We saw in our overview of reading research that choice is an important part of reading enjoyment, and often this is far more connected with content, topic and other hidden factors and not at all to do with reading level. Here is my own ( Jane’s) reading choice story: I was in the reception class at primary school, which was the year children were taught to read. The problem was, I had already learnt to read at home, and was accustomed to reading all the children’s books to myself. The books available for choice in the reception year were all picture books that modelled letters of the alphabet on each page and had very little text. I was bored, irritated and fiddly in the reading lessons. The teacher told my mother I seemed uninterested in books. My mother said that, on the contrary, I was already reading fluently and needed books at my level. As a special concession, the teacher allowed me to borrow a book in reading time from the class higher than me. I chose a book called Tanglewood Tales. To be sure my mother was not overestimating me, she asked me to read the first page to her. Of course I could do this with no trouble, but even had I stumbled over some words and phrases, still it was a book I was drawn to, challenged by, and really loved. After that I was allowed to choose higher level books, and I think the teacher stopped making assumptions about what we wanted to read. This story opens a question for the teacher building reading resources. How can you as a teacher avoid making assumptions about what will and will not be enjoyed in your class, and ensure you are giving every learner the opportunity to find what they enjoy reading? We suggested in Part II that teachers might build a bank of reading resources and use them fruitfully in multiple ways; to compare and contrast, rewrite and ‘intervene’, interpret and reveal, analyse, summarise, evaluate, illustrate and much more. But where and how can you start building a reading ‘bank’ and on what basis would you choose texts and resources? The research studies we discussed in Part I suggested several foundations for making reading selections

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as a teacher. These are encapsulated in the apparent opposites below. Consider where you stand in relation to these opposites, and whether as a teacher you would choose just one of these kinds of resource or rethink your assumptions about what will work for your learners and include both. Would you choose for your own class/es: •

texts at the level of your learners, such as graded or simplified readers AND/OR texts that match your learners’ interests irrespective of language level.

•

texts that are adapted for language learners in order to highlight aspects of language or learning (such as learner literature) AND/OR authentic texts that are not adapted or written in any way for language learners

•

texts exclusively in the target language AND/OR bilingual texts that place side by side the first language and the second language OR in the case of multilingual classes, texts in the range of first languages of learners in your class

•

texts which represent the kind of reading your learners need or do every day in their first language AND texts which represent a new challenge or opportunity, that they may not otherwise read (such as novels, poems, biography or other)

•

texts which reflect your learners’ own lives, communities and values AND/OR texts which offer new horizons, and introduce the culturally unfamiliar

•

texts which are required reading, such as study materials or coursebook texts AND texts from other contexts, registers and text types

•

online reading such as blogs, websites, social media AND hard copy reading

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•

texts chosen by you as teacher AND texts chosen and introduced by your learners AND texts recommended by friends, colleagues and lifelong readers

It is hoped that Parts I and II may have changed your answers to some of these questions and perhaps made you more ambitious about what you introduce to your reading lessons. Having navigated these many possibilities so your ‘dream resource’ is perfectly adapted for your own classroom, the next challenge is how you might build this resource. Quite a number of the options above are freely available online or in the typical outside world environment. Table 3.2 offers you some of these resources. You may find that authentic texts are relevant and helpful but need some adaptation to be comprehensible to your learners. In Part I we presented studies which show that learners need to know 95% of the words in a text in TABLE 3.2  Building teaching resources

Freely available resources Building online reading resources

Extensive reading foundation: https://erfoundation.org/ wordpress/ The Reading Agency https://readingagency.org.uk/ British Council freely available resources and lesson plans https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/resources

Creating a book exchange

Invite your learners and colleagues to bring books to the classroom to share and exchange

Building an authentic text store

Magazines, newspapers, advertisements, labels in the L1 and the L2

Displaying reading

Images of language in the landscape around the walls

Learner literature and published reading resources

Learner literature and graded literature listed on publishers’ websites: Cambridge University Press (https://www.cambridge.es/en/catalogue/readers) Oxford University Press (https://elt.oup.com/teachers/bookworms/) Pearson (https://www.pearson.com/english/catalogue/englishgraded-readers.html) Black Cat/Cideb (https://www.blackcat-cideb.com/en/)

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order to reach ‘a standard of minimally acceptable comprehension’ (Laufer 2020:1077), and we know that if learners know only 90% of the words in the text, they are able to infer only half of the unknown words. In such a situation learners will not achieve adequate comprehension and they are also likely not to enjoy their reading. In such a situation you will need to bring more difficult texts within the reading range of learners through grading and simplification. Here are some useful principles for simplifying texts, derived from simplified reading guides such as Cambridge University Press (CUP 2020): • • • • •

Shorten sentences: for example, sentences with several clauses might be broken up into separate sentences with one main verb/clause each. Change abstract nouns to concrete nouns: for example, ‘friend’ is easier to understand than ‘friendship’. Change specific nouns (hyponyms, such as ‘geranium’, ‘lily’, ‘hyacinth’) to general nouns (superordinates, such as ‘flower’). Change phrasal verbs into single verbs: for example, ‘I never expected him to come out with that’ is much harder than ‘I never expected him to say that’. Replace idioms with simpler language: for example, ‘he changed the office root and branch’ is harder to interpret than ‘he changed everything in the office’.

Although this simplified language may be less colourful, it may also help to bring new texts and ideas within the range of your learners. Table 3.3 presents an extract from a tourist guide to Oxford in the original version and in the simplified version. Notice the several grading principles which have been used. The abstract noun ‘incursion’ has been changed to the concrete noun, ‘visitors’. The idiomatic verb ‘pinched’ has been replaced by the verb ‘stole’. The phrasal verb

TABLE 3.3  Simplifying a text

Original version

Simplified version

The city’s most important football club was founded as a village team. They played at the recreation ground on the frontier between the villages of Headington Quarry and Headington. Here the main hazard was losing the ball – youths from the Quarry, resenting incursion on their territory, simply pinched it and went off with it.

Oxford City football club began in a village called Headington. They played in a field near another village called Headington Quarry. There was one big problem. The Quarry villagers didn’t like visitors on their playground. They simply stole the football and ran away with it.

Extracted from Garrett (2014:129)

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‘went off with it’ has been changed to a more transparent phrasal verb, ‘ran away with it’. The very specific noun ‘recreation ground’ has been changed to ‘playground’, with ‘play’ being a more common and frequent vocabulary item. The longest sentence in the original version is 24 words long, including the embedded phrase, ‘resenting incursion on their territory’. This sentence has been split into three sentences: the longest is 10 words long. This simplified version makes an unexpected and amusing anecdote about Oxford accessible to learners.

D:  BUILDING A READING ASSESSMENT STRATEGY In Part I we made several observations which challenge the teacher who is planning the assessment of reading. Firstly, we suggested that comprehension questions were not always an effective way of developing reading, and instead distracted from ‘deep reading’ (Wolf and Barzilai 2009). In fact, we went as far as to remind the reader of Nation’s description of comprehension questions as ‘a curse’ (Nation 1979) that locked teachers into a cycle of predictable and uninspiring teaching and assessing. We would also like to suggest that comprehension questions break up the reading and distract the reader; for us, this is connected with the problems that arise from multitasking while reading, which leads to distracted and disengaged reading (Kirschner and de Bruyckere 2017). If these challenges are the case, what should teachers do who are lucky enough to be able to develop their own reading assessment? What kind of tasks will lead to both good teaching and good assessment? One starting point is to establish what you are aiming for in your assessment. How would you rank the views of assessment in the list below in order of importance for your particular context? Which of these criteria match your own, and how would you adapt them to match your own? • • • • • • •

Reading assessment should be part of the learning process, and not simply a way of measuring learning. Good assessment activities should mirror good learning activities. Reading tests should assess natural and valuable reading skills and strategies, and not a set of skills constructed for test purposes only Reading tests should isolate the reading skill and clearly assess that, and not other skills such as writing about reading. Reading tests should enable learners to integrate reading with some of the other language skills, as would happen in real world reading. Reading tests should not be memory tests. Reading tests should be more than response to graded comprehension questions.

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• • •

Reading tests should include a full range of text types and be relevant to learner needs and interests. Reading texts should be more than tools for testing language. Reading texts should be used as vehicles of meaning.

If reading assessment is more than comprehension questions, as suggested by Nation’s (1979) critique, and more than language manipulation, what then is it we should assess? Table 3.4 provides a summary of the construct of reading ability according to Alderson (2000:127). As you review this, consider which of these goals are relevant and useful for your learners and which you would choose for your assessment of reading policy. How do professional organisations and testing centres manage these many competences and purposes for reading? As a connected teacher of reading, it would be useful to gather examples by browsing useful testing websites such as those below. The sample test frameworks in Table 3.5 are applicable both to foreign language reading and first language reading. How far do these test frameworks match the values about testing that you indicated above?

TABLE 3.4  The construct of reading ability (based on Alderson 2000:127)

What are you assessing?

Examples

Aspects of language knowledge

Vocabulary: semantics, register and connotation of words Syntax: language patterns and their meaning Cohesion: how texts are stitched together Coherence: meaning and purposes of discourse markers Text type: recognition of the clues and indicators that mark a text as a particular type

Reading skills

Skimming skills Scanning skills: locating information Critiquing: separating opinion from fact Connecting unknown with the known

Overall meaning and content

Inference: reading what is hidden under the surface Summarising: recognising overall shape and argument Extending world view: connecting with the outside world Deepening thinking: evaluating, critiquing and reflecting

Reading engagement

Number of books read over a term or a year Number of book recommendations written in the course of a term or year Quality of recommendations written over a term or a year. Participation in reading circles

From application to implementation 163 TABLE 3.5  Reading test frameworks

Council of Europe Framework of Reference Reading comprehension

https://www.coe.int/en/web/commoneuropean-framework-referencelanguages/reading-comprehension

Summary of Df E UK Department of Education Reading framework 2021

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/ summary-of-dfe-reading-frameworkjuly-2021-12556464

PISA Foreign language assessment framework for 2025

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/foreignlanguage/PISA-2025-FLA-Framework. pdfs

DIALANG Language Testing Research Group

http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/ltrg/projects/ dialang-2-0/

Cambridge First Certificate practice Reading and Use of English tests

https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/ learning-english/exam-preparation/

British Council reading skills self-testing

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/ skills/reading

E:  READING FOR MANY KINDS OF LEARNERS Many of the activities we have discussed above and in Part II have been presented as generic, applicable to many groups of learners. In this section we approach this from a different angle, differentiating between groups of learners and their specific sets of needs, and thinking of activities that would suit each group.

If you teach young children Teachers of young children have suggested several dilemmas when they include second language reading in their classrooms. One challenge is when children do not yet have literacy in their first language. If the educational context is an ESL situation, and the children’s education is in the second language, the second language teacher is performing a vital educational goal by not only teaching the reading skills we have suggested throughout the book, but by teaching literacy itself: the recognition of sound:spelling links and the translation of shapes on the page into units of meaning. In an EFL situation, on the other hand, it may be best to wait until the learners have been introduced to the alphabetic principle and have achieved some level of reading ability in their L1. This is particularly important in cases where the alphabet might be different. The second, related challenge, is whether or not to teach literacy by breaking texts into small components, such as the sound:spelling or phonics approach; or whether to expose children to more difficult or longer texts which they might enjoy more were they to be comprehensible. The activities in Part II have suggested certain ways of ‘cutting through’ language differences to bring younger learners’ abilities and enthusiasms into

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the class such as illustrating book covers, retelling stories in the first language, or listening to stories in the second language without the distraction of ‘comprehension’ tests at the end. Whilst these are activities that may help the reading-literacy gap and engage young learners, it might be helpful for teachers to arrive at a set of principles that are practical and generalisable, and can be used to adapt any activity or teaching idea. These principles are derived from several sources: from teachers of young learners themselves, who have explained in workshop and development programmes what worked for them; from observation of teachers in action and of what principles seemed to be successful and recurring; and also from literature about the young learner such as Vale and Feunteun (2001), Pinter (2006) and Cameron (2001). Which of these principles do you put into practice? Which of these principles are not practical in your context, and what would need to change for them to become practical? • • •

• • • •

• • •

•

Make reading physical – for example, to include dressing up, acting, miming and role play Make reading visual: for example, to include painting and drawing, colouring letters, matching words and pictures, pictures to accompany texts Connect reading with sounds: chanting, reading aloud to the learners, singing, sounding out phonemes, playing with rhyme, sounds and dance/ movement Make reading participatory: to include chanting, dancing, reading aloud together, taking parts around the class Make reading game-like: for example, to include game principles such as guessing, racing, competing Build in time for ‘deep reading’ rather than reading in short bursts and/or reading with multiple other connected tasks. Develop permission for fantasy: include opportunities to tell stories and read texts for pleasure only; avoid making reading predictable and always ‘topped and tailed’ with comprehension activities Bring in mother tongue stories to make the reading environment safe for all languages Create a book corner so ‘somewhere to read’ is part of the natural physical space of the classroom Explore book resources designed specifically for young second language readers: for example Cambridge University Press young readers collection https://www.cambridge.org/gb/cambridgeenglish/catalog/readers Involve parents/adults in telling stories or reading books with and for the children

Table 3.6 refers you to the activities in Part II which are suitable for young learners, and connects these with the principles above.

From application to implementation 165 TABLE 3.6  Activities for reading with young learners

Activity

Title/description

Principles Connects reading and sound Builds in game principle: racing Physically moving words into groups

4.1

Rhyme race: making rhyming word lists Word bags: knowing about words Book covers

4.3

Story sharing

5.1 5.2 7.1

Feeling stories Choosing a dream book Performing reading

8.1

Communicating with texts

3.1 3.2

Making reading visual by drawing front covers of books Giving permission for sharing fantasy worlds and time for ‘deep reading’ Giving permission for ‘deep reading’ Involving choice, likes and dislikes Connecting reading with sounds and movements Turning text into picture, map or diagram

If you teach adults Teaching adults to read in a second language has opposite challenges. Adults are likely to read fluently in their first language, and in their first language they can think and engage at their full cognitive level. It can be very frustrating to read simplified language that perhaps ‘dumbs down’ its message so language and cognitive challenge are equally simple. However, it can be equally frustrating to read texts which are linguistically too difficult to comprehend, so competent first language readers now feel deskilled and unable to reach messages and ideas that are interesting. It is the second language teacher’s challenge to balance these difficulties, so the text challenges but reveals, and engages without being patronising. Some publishing companies made it their mission to address this challenge, by commissioning literature for second language readers that is engaging and complex, but still modified linguistically to be comprehensible. This has burgeoned into an entire new and exciting genre called learner literature which now includes multiple publishers, writers and websites. We provided links to several publishers’ websites as examples above, and you will find that the concept of writing for language learners has very much evolved from the days when ‘easy’ reading also meant blander reading. Many of the examples of learner literature deal with challenging situations and real world dilemmas, such as Antoinette Moses’s JoJo (Moses 2001), which is the story of a child soldier in an unnamed country, originally and authentically written for its audience of low level learners. Which of these principles do you follow when you teach adults second language reading? Which of these might you trial in the future? Which are not practical in your setting?

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•

•

•

• •

Ensure that the texts you use are cognitively engaging and challenging, whilst still being suitable for the language level you are teaching. The learner literature resources in Table 3.2 will provide you with many examples. Remember that adults may already be fluent and enthusiastic readers in their first language. Draw on those preferences and choices and find out about them. Ensure learners have choice in what they read. Make reading options available to them, either with a book resource in the classroom, or a set of links to reading online. Reflect on your own reading and reading preferences and on the ways in which they may be similar to the preferences of your learners. Consider becoming a writer yourself of learner literature, or of simplified texts. Principles for simplification are shared earlier in this part at Table 3.3. In addition Activity 5.2 in Part II gathered ‘dream book’ ideas from your learners. You might like to fill that gap for yourself.

If your learners all share the same first language When your learners share the same first language, there are opportunities for the learners to retell second language texts using the first language, to compare reading processes in the first and second language, to set first and second language texts side by side for analysis, and to draw on a shared first language reading repertoire. The activities in Part II above which can draw on this involvement of the first language are: Activity 4.3 Sharing stories in a first language Activity 4.5 Comprehending across languages Activity 6.2 Returning to childhood stories If the learners share a first language there might also be a shared repertoire of children’s literature you can draw on.

If your learners have multiple different first languages In contrast, where your learners have many different first languages, you can draw on this as a rich resource for sharing and comparing languages, cultures and reading backgrounds. Activities in this book which encourage this kind of cross-linguistic sharing include: Activity 3.6 Border crossing; looking at texts across cultures Activity 5.1 Feeling stories: comparing stories from different cultures Activity 6.1 Books which changed the way we think: sharing notions of life-changing texts in different cultures

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Activity 6.2 Re-reading: returning to childhood stories and re-rereading them as an adult Activity 7.4 Sharing the way childhood stories helped to shape values

F:  READING FOR DIFFERENT KINDS OF CLASSES In this section we think in terms of the context and purpose of the class – large classes, small classes or one-to-one teaching, teaching for specific purposes, and whether the educational context is set within the target language or not.

If you teach large classes A teacher of large classes can make the variety and number of learners a teaching opportunity. The large class can become a survey group; a cluster of reading circles; a reading advisory group; a reading aloud ‘theatre’, a text exchange group. As you review the ideas in the list below, consider: Which of these ideas would be practical in your own class? What would you need to do or change to make them possible? •

•

A large class is an excellent opportunity for setting up a class vote, when you select new texts to read. Invite a show of hands for each text on your shortlist. Create a survey of reader preferences and choices with a quick show of hands. Questions such as these might yield interesting results: • Who prefers fiction to fact – stories, novels, plays, cartoons: raise your hand • Who prefers fact to fiction – science, biography, history, politics: raise your hand

Create clusters of reading circles, each with up to 6 members, by grouping learners according to their reading choices and preferences. There could, for example, be separate groups for biography; graphic novels, cartoons and comics; newspapers, based on interests. If you have the scope to do so, build quiet reading time and reading circle discussion time into your classes for the circles. Draw on the range of interests and backgrounds of your learners to build a Recommendations Folder. Invite each learner, or each reading circle, to contribute a recommendation to the folder each month/term. These recommendations could be in the form of book cover images or titles of books with number of stars from 1 to 5, or with a short explanation of the reason for the recommendation. You can then use this folder as a recommendation list for other classes too, and build this up over years.

168  From application to implementation TABLE 3.7  Reading in large classes list of DON’TS

In a large class DON’T assume all your learners like reading the same thing make all the reading activities ‘lockstep’ so learners can never read at their own pace set up activities where learners are waiting and doing nothing for lengths of time (e.g. waiting for their turn to read or answer a question).

Where this is practical, a large class might provide an instant natural reading resource if each learner brings in just one text in the target language that they are prepared to share. A text exchange, carefully and respectfully managed, can make reading choices wider and richer. Turn the large class into a ‘theatre’ for reading aloud and bringing to life stories and texts. Maximise the range of voices to create a ‘soundscape’ for the text. The class could be divided into, for example, a ‘chorus’, a narrator, characters and a sound effects group. Although this may seem an activity best suited for children, older learners can become fully engrossed in this activity too. This ‘class theatre’ is very different from the traditional reading aloud around the class, as in a class theatre all the learners are involved all the time, making decisions and working in groups to do so, and working towards an end product. If you have more than one class, they could even present to one another. Teachers we have observed and worked with in reading projects also suggest a list of don’ts for large classes, and we list them in Table 3.7.

If you teach small classes or one to one Teachers teaching very small classes face the opposite challenge. On the one hand, it is possible for you to pace lessons to match your learners’ own reading pace. It is easier to discover and select texts that they like and to match your lessons to their precise needs and interests. On the other hand, the main challenge in very small classes is the potential lack of stimulus. For example, it is harder to create dialogue and discussion, and there is a risk of running out of ideas as a teacher. Below are a number of suggestions for dealing with these challenges: • • • •

Build in homework tasks that include talking to others outside the class about reading, such as friends and family Invite your learners to bring in texts that interest them in the first or second language Create online reading buddies between learners who do not meet in real time/places Use online YouTube and radio to hear other voices and speakers talking about reading, such as book review programmes and talking books.

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If you are teaching reading for special purposes A starting point would be to imagine yourself as your learner in their specific situation: for example, as a student studying for a degree in a second language. Note down all the text types you are likely to encounter in that role. In the case of the second language university student, some reading they are likely to meet includes: registration forms, rules about academic conduct, handbooks about their study, assessment guidelines, advertisements for student products, invitations to events and talks, lecture timetables. In mapping out all these reading needs, it is clear the ‘target situation’ for this learner entails not only, and much more than academic and scholarly reading. As a teacher supporting this learner, you might take into consideration not only these many text types, but also the different kinds of reading these text types require. Specific ways you might consider these are: • • •

• •

analysing the genres and text types your learners are likely to meet and giving them the skills to do this too, as suggested in Activities 9.1 and 9.2 supporting the learner to take notes in different visual and graphic ways for quick recall, as suggested by the ideas in Activity 8.1 giving learners the chance to return several times to challenging academic texts, viewing them each time from a different perspective as in the ‘layered’ reading activities 6.2 and 6.3 practising with learners the skill of separating fact and opinion as in Activity 2.4 practising with learners the skill of recognising bias and nuance in their text types, as in Activity 3.5

These are skills which are not only relevant to the reading practice of adults in academic settings, but also contribute to critical thinking and critical writing. In Part IV below, we shall see how one teacher-researcher tried to research the connections between reading well and writing well. Certainly, these ways of critiquing and appreciating texts at both surface and deep levels support the academic learner to write mindfully themselves, with an awareness of how texts are put together and how language is used to convey messages both hidden and overt.

If you are teaching English language reading in an English language context If the reading world around your learners is in the target language, you have an instantly ready and relevant resource to draw on. In addition, for your learners in a target language setting, they have a genuine reason to read. •

Draw on opportunities for authentic reading. Build in homework tasks that draw on reading in the environment: for example invite

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•

learners to collect f lyers, leaf lets, posters or letters, and use these in class. Encourage reading in the linguistic environment. Invite learners to notice photograph labels, signs and posters as reading material to practice eye recognition. (See Activity 2.1).

If you are teaching English language reading in a second/foreign language context In contrast, where English is culturally and geographically distant, part of your challenge is to make target language reading relevant and meaningful. •

•

•

•

Identify target language reading groups and appropriate social networks online, so learners have a reason to use, read and write in the second language. Include texts more readily available to learners in the first language and draw on these to develop other skills such as recognising text type from layout, or comparing first and target languages. The ‘book cover’ activity 4.1 is an example of this. It is even more helpful for your learners in this context for you to build a resource of authentic first language texts: for example, birthday cards, instruction manuals, letters, magazines and newspapers and draw on these in the several ways suggested in Part II above. Invite learners to notice where the target language does appear in their home context. Even in second and foreign language settings, it is surprising how often this might be visible: for example in street names, labels and names of products.

G:  READING OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM We have seen throughout this book, the suggestion that reading ideally becomes one of the natural skills of daily life and leisure. How can the teacher help to facilitate this move from reading as a learning task that takes place in school, to reading beyond and outside the classroom? One way is to draw up a ‘toolkit’ of homework activities which take reading outside the classroom. Below are some suggested principles for doing so. The outside class reading activity needs to: • •

practical for learners to follow up, with minimal resources safe to follow up, in that talking or interactions are within a friendship or family group

From application to implementation 171 TABLE 3.8  Activities for reading outside the classroom

Activity 2.1 5.4 6.1 7.2

• • • • •

Title/Description

Principle

Reading the landscape: noticing and acting in the linguistic landscape Profiles of lifelong readers

Involves ‘noticing’ in the landscape Classroom follow-up: display signs and shop names Involves talking to others Classroom follow-up: Compare lifelong reader profiles Involves talking to others and booksearching outside the classroom Involves reading collectively Talking to others

Books which changed the way we think Dream circles: building reading circles

Involve noticing language locally in your place of learning/teaching Connect reading with talking to others Be an activity which is different to what can be done in the classroom Be an activity which leads to natural classroom follow-up activities: can be interestingly discussed, shared and displayed Give an opportunity for reading to be done at leisure, and at the learner’s own pace

Table 3.8 presents a list of the activities in Part II which take reading outside the classroom, matched to these key principles.

H:  CREATING A READING CULTURE If we were to add up all these principles of effective reading classrooms, enthusiastic reader-teachers and connections between reading and the outside world, what would that look like? The optimal combination and practice of all the principles we have shared in this section is to create a classroom, or a school, which has a reading culture. Here, the teacher has put into practice both short-term and long-term goals: to plan effective reading lesson by lesson, and also to pave the way for a reading life beyond lessons and classrooms. A reading culture creates a climate in which reading is part of life rather than an add-on skill; and where learners equate books with enjoyment, quiet time, enrichment and a personal inner life. This section pulls together all the principles shared thus far to illustrate what a classroom looks like when all these are joined up, believed and practiced. Emile’s story below shows us what a school looks like that has a reading culture. Reading took place in this school in at least four languages, including: English, Spanish, German and French. This is what I observed, walking into Emile’s language school as an education governor.

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Emile and the senior leadership team had planned a book day, and this part of it was ‘dress up as a book character’. All the children were dressed up as their favourite book character (from a book in any language of their choice) and were assembled together across all the age groups, in the main assembly room. There was a fabulous sense of excitement. Even the teachers were dressed up as book characters and each time a teacher walked into the room there were screams of delight. Each child had also been asked to bring the book of their character to school that day, or borrow it from the classroom or library. They were organised to form a circle around the hall, with an inner circle for the smaller children. Each child announced their character and held up their book with huge pride, and with applause after every announcement. The characters, books and explanations happened seamlessly in all 4 languages of the school: Spanish, English, German and French, even though children had only one shared language they all understood. (Emile: state primary school in the UK with multiple first languages, English as shared language) The conditions that made this day work were numerous. First, the event was organised by a team of five school leaders who were all committed to the idea of a ‘dress up as a character’ day. Change implemented by a team is far more sustainable than change initiated by one leader, however charismatic. The prime takeaway point from this, is to gather around you likeminded colleagues who are committed to the same vision as yourself, and ensure initiatives are jointly managed. Secondly, good ideas take a while to filter through. In Emile’s school, the team made sure the topic was introduced months earlier, prepared for and built into lessons. As a result, the children all knew what they were expected to do and felt well prepared for this. The takeaway point from this is to plan steps towards change and give time for it to be fully owned by everyone involved. Thirdly, the day was well resourced. There was a comprehensive selection of age-appropriate books in each classroom so the children had been encouraged and supported to make choices and were given time to do so. In addition there was a very generous dressing-up basket that had been equipped over several years, from discarded clothes, costumes from school plays, interesting oddities found or left behind like a ballet tutu, a toy mayor’s chain, rabbit ears on an Alice band, a Santa Claus red cape. This meant no child needed to worry if they could not make their own costume. Finally, parents had been informed several weeks in advance so the children were fully supported at home. It may be that these many conditions would not be practical for you in your own teaching situation: for example if you are not a school leader or

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member of a leadership team that can initiate and implement new ideas at a school-wide level, or if your school or class is not resourced with books or materials that might be needed. However, every teacher has a small margin for change, and it is inside this small margin that you might bring a reading culture to your class. Here are examples of small-scale changes you might make inside a class which can make large-scale differences to the reading culture. Firstly, encourage your learners to bring into the classroom books they are enthusiastic about, whether in the first or second language. We know that reading in a first language builds fluency and enthusiasm for reading in a second language too. So encouragement of reading across languages can only be helpful. In Emile’s school above, it was immaterial in which language children read their books, as long as they did indeed read, take home books and relate to one of the characters. The enthusiasms were contagious so children began to find out about books and characters that interested them and borrow books in the second language to find out more. If it is practical, use class time for learners to talk about the books they bring in, share their enthusiasms and exchange readings. If learners, friends, colleagues are prepared to donate books, and if it is practical to do so, create a reading corner in the classroom so books have a continuous presence there. Encourage the use of this reading corner, for example, by building in a book exchange – take one book and put one back; or by making ‘take a book home to read’ an ongoing activity. Another idea easily implemented in your own classroom is reading choice. Samantha describes the change in her classroom, when she moved from a ‘round the class’ reading aloud of set texts, to learner reading choices. The school policy was to read texts aloud around the class. There was almost nothing my class liked about this. The students were so fixed in ‘reading their bit’ they didn’t pay any attention to what it was about, didn’t listen to one another, became very quickly bored and I don’t blame them. I begged the school director to let me change this. I ordered, borrowed, begged, learner literature, anything I could find, all different levels; books friends had finished reading, books teachers had discarded. I didn’t try to just make all the reading exactly fit their level. After 3 weeks of asking around I had a box of 50 books. Then I built into class time ways of choosing books, looking at book covers, skimming through them to get the feel of content, looking at pictures and print. When we had worked with the box of books for a few classes, the learners couldn’t wait to choose one to read. The second thing I did, was to use the 20 minute ‘reading around the class’ time instead as quiet time for the learners to read their books. They really respected that quiet and

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they came to expect it and love it. The change was so phenomenal that eventually the director of studies let other teachers try and the whole reading policy was changed. (Samantha: after-school children’s class in China) So Samantha started the change in her own class, and introduced not only choice, but quiet reading time built into the day. This is time uniquely absent from most lessons and teaching days. If it is practical for you to build this in, try this with reading chosen by your learners. The enjoyment and presence of a reading culture is also something you might make visible in book displays around the classroom. Here are ideas from teachers of both children and adults: We don’t have a dedicated classroom, so I created an ‘online wall’ where the students sent in links to books they had enjoyed and added their own summary or recommendation explaining the link. The books could be in their first or target language. Once a week we would spend 20 minutes or so in the lesson browsing people’s suggested links and talking about them. (Audrey: teaching English to adults, private language school in Spain) When I ‘grew’ my box of 50 books, then I taped a blank page into the front cover and asked the children to draw stars for how much they liked the book (and a few words about why, one sentence). So each book came with recommendations and some lovely comments to encourage others to read. (Samantha: children’s after-school class, China) These activities show learners that reading is not an isolated activity, but one that connects them with others. An exciting way of taking this one step further, is to invite reading visitors into the class. Activity 5.4 suggests interviewing a lifelong reader, either inside or outside class. Hearing about other people who read or write can offer role models to learners, or suggest and widen the pool of recommendations and shared knowledge. If it is practical, think about friends, colleagues or contacts who have something interesting to say about books: maybe they were inspired by a book to travel round the world, maybe they used books to research a topic, maybe books helped them to choose a career; or maybe reading books helped them to write one of their own. We know that reading circles can make a huge difference. Their value has been evidenced by Duncan’s (2012) research described above, and by stories of reading circles meeting even in a climate of great danger, such as one women’s reading group in Iran (Nafisi 2003). If your learners have been gradually

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inspired to make their own reading choices, to bring in and exchange books, to listen and talk to other readers, then reading circles are a natural next step. In Activities 7.2 and 7.3 above we suggested ways you might start your class thinking about reading circles. You might even give space in the school day for these reading circles to meet. In Emile’s primary school described above, after the display of costumes in the main hall, children chose a reading circle to join based on the kind of story they wanted to read: fairy stories, adventure stories, stories with animals, stories with giants. Each circle was run by a teacher who had example stories to read to them, and then others within that genre for them to choose. The reading circles were spread around the school for the purpose of the reading day, including the main hall, the gym and even the head teacher’s office. The beauty of the reading circles was that they were formed based on preference, rather than age, first language or target language level; and the meetings all around the school meant completely rethinking the physical spaces of the school. This large-scale way of thinking about reading circles may not be practical in your situation, but a small-scale version of this could be something like Samantha’s class as she moved her class yet further towards a reading culture. After one term of exchanging books, I realised that each book by now had a useful record at the front of children’s responses and recommendations. So I could do something with that. I could hold up a book and say: everyone who liked that book go to table A in the room: everyone who liked this book go to table B etc. That was the beginning of starting reading circles of children who liked the same kind of books; once a month we had ‘reading circle’ time in those different preference groups for them to just talk to each other about what they had read that they liked. At the end of the reading circle each would take away one new book they wanted to read. For Nafisi (2003), the reading group she formed came from a higher education literature class. When the class was shut down, she moved the group to her house. The women attended her class at great personal risk, since going out without a male escort was dangerous, if not illegal. The women chose classic English literature they might have read as part of their formal studies, including Jane Austen, George Eliot and Nabokov’s Lolita, and discussed the ways in which these books from another place and time connected with their own lives and dilemmas. Nafisi (2003) describes these reading meetings as a lifeline, not only keeping minds and hearts open but ensuring the women had connection and solidarity with one another. Reading was the means and purpose that brought them together. The grid in Table 3.9 summarises the takeaway strategies for creating a reading culture, drawing on everything this book has suggested thus far:

176  From application to implementation TABLE 3.9  Creating a reading culture

Celebrate books: create a book day

Bring books into class Create book exchanges Build quiet reading time into lessons

Examples

Level/context

Include dressing up as a character; reading aloud in interest groups across ages; bringing in and showing/ sharing favourite books Encourage learners to bring in their books Bring in books you enjoy Encourage learners to bring in a book/take home a book Create a book box or corner in the school or classroom Timetable into your lesson and lesson plan dedicated reading time, even if it is only ten minutes. Choose your own book Class vote for the class reader

Children State sector schools Can be adapted for evening or after-school classes as a ‘special event’ class All levels

Involve learners in choosing texts to read Display reading and Build displays of evidence of reading recommended book covers in the classroom Post up titles of recommended books Build a reading corner with books and comfortable chairs Invite reading Invite into class colleagues visitors and contacts who have much to share about reading or writing lives Build and encourage Create interest groups of reading circles likeminded readers in the class Invite learners to build and create their own circles. Create class or school time for reading meetings or Build in out-of-class reading Celebrate the reading circles in class time

All levels and contexts If you have a dedicated classroom All levels and contexts

All levels Where you can choose your own classroom materials Where you have your own dedicated classroom

All levels

Older learners For younger learners prepare and manage reading circles in class time

I: CONCLUSION This Part has dealt with creating a reading culture in your classes. This is a long-term project, but it is made up of small steps which every teacher can take. Even one small step is progress. It will initiate your learners’ walk towards becoming lifelong readers and may encourage you to take additional steps with them towards this goal.

Part Four FROM IMPLEMENTATION TO RESEARCH

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041382-5

178  From implementation to research

Introduction: researching as a teacher Each time you walk into a class you gather information about your learners and how they develop as readers. When you adapt teaching materials, or prepare your own lesson plans, you are testing teaching ideas and evaluating how well they work. Research takes this knowledge one step further. It enables you to ask questions about learners and learning and then gather information systematically from more than one source to answer them. Research helps you arrive at precise answers which you can use practically to change and improve your teaching. In previous sections, we showed many questions researchers have asked about reading, arriving at helpful new insights. Part IV invites you to take these research steps for yourself, in practical ways that can be easily managed in the classroom and in teaching time. An important first step in researching your reading classroom is to ask the right questions. Compare, for example, the questions in Table 4.1, Column A, which are very broad and difficult to answer, with the questions in Column B, which are much more specific, and therefore more practical to answer. The sections that follow lead you through ten questions, showing how the teacher might gather information, try out new methods and techniques, and analyse what happens next in order to find answers unique to their own learners and classrooms. There are several ways you might add to the repertoire of activities you already use in the reading classroom, to help you answer questions. Table 4.2 summarises these different ways of gathering information. Before we start with our first research question, it is useful to draw up a few guidelines which principled researchers and teachers need to follow. 1. Make sure your learners know and understand what your research is about and have agreed to be part of it. This is called informed consent. 2. Include in your research only those learners who have chosen to join in. This is called voluntary involvement. TABLE 4.1  Broad and narrow research questions

Column A How can I be a better teacher of reading?

Column B

What do learners consider the qualities of a successful reading lesson? How can I help my learners read more fluently How many words do my learners need to and successfully? understand for a text to be readable? How can I help my learners enjoy reading? What makes readers choose books?

From implementation to research 179 TABLE 4.2  Methods for gathering information about reading

What

How

Think-aloud

Think aloud into a recorder as you complete a task.

Why

When you want to understand thinking processes. Read-read Read one text and perform a short When you want to compare task (e.g. underline new words + reading two different kinds grade text 1–5 for enjoyment). of text: e.g. one in the L1 Then read a second text and and one in the L2; one perform the same task. simplified, one in the original. Observations Attend a lesson and choose one When you want to see what aspect of the lesson that interests happens to teaching and you to observe in detail. learning in practice. Reflective diary Keep a diary over a period of time, When you want to explore and record whatever occurs to reader or teacher reactions you as interesting or important. and feelings over time. Interview Talk to a learner individually to When you want to learn about their thoughts/ideas understand how individuals in response to planned questions. feel about a specific question. Focus groups Bring learners together in a small When you want learners to group (e.g. six to eight) to discuss develop their ideas with one a specific question that interests another and arrive at you/them. collective answers. Questionnaire Draw up five to eight closed When numbers would be questions e.g. respond to helpful. E.g. how many statements on a scale of 1 to 5, learners strongly agree that strongly disagree to strongly they read for pleasure. agree.

3. Explain to your learners why your research is beneficial, and is intended to improve your teaching, or understanding of your learners. For example, it would not be good practice to try out a method you know doesn’t work just in order to compare it with a better method. 4. If you are going to share your research with your teaching team, or publish it for other professionals, it is best practice to change or hide the names of individuals. This is the principle of confidentiality.

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A:  RESEARCHING READING AS LINGUISTIC PROCESS Research Ideas 1–4 ask questions about reading as a complex set of linguistic processes, from interpreting shapes on the page to applying sophisticated processes to make meanings and connections. Whilst we select just a few questions which you as reader can research for yourself, these are examples amongst many you might ask, using the research tools in Table 4.2.

RESEARCH IDEA 1 HOW FAR DO LEARNERS FIND CULTURALLY FAMILIAR TEXTS EASIER TO UNDERSTAND THAN TEXTS WHICH ARE CULTURALLY UNFAMILIAR? In Part I, we mentioned the research of Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984), in which readers from the US and from India were asked to read two letters about weddings – one from each country. The readers processed the text from a familiar culture in a very different way to their processing of the unfamiliar culture. Research idea 1 invites you to try out the question and design for yourself, to compare how learners read culturally distant in contrast to culturally familiar texts. Research methods: read-read + list 1. Select two texts that share a similar topic, but come from two different settings, one familiar (Article A) and one unfamiliar (Article B). Here are some examples and links to places where you might find useful texts: • • • • •

Carnival: website with links to carnivals in all continents of the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival Weddings: https://www.beau-coup.com/cultural-traditionsweddings.html Going to school Birthdays and name-days City tour (a familiar city v. an unfamiliar city)

2. Introduce Article A to the learners through its title and topic. Then ask them to read the article through. 3. After reading, ask your learners to list as many points as they remember from the reading. Allow the learners to choose in which language to write their list (as long as you share their L1). They can be key words, bullet points, or any quick ‘memory aids’ to record what they remember.

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4. Collect the lists just from those learners who have chosen to opt into your research. Keep a record of how many bullet points/notes/key words have been listed by each participant. 5. Repeat this process the next day, or a week later and this time ask your learners to read Article B. Again, collect the lists when they have finished and make a record of how many points have been noted by each participant. You can now compare lists from Article A (familiar culture) and Article B (unfamiliar). You have information that would help you answer these questions: •

•

•

Comparing Articles A and B, were the number of points listed very different or very similar? For example, did your learners tend to remember many more points with the familiar text in contrast to the unfamiliar one? Or the reverse? Or little difference? Comparing individual responses to Article B, did some learners understand many more points than others? Or were the responses very similar? Were there any surprises, insights or new information as you compared the way your learners read the two articles?

What next? •

• •

•

If you found there was a wide gap between what was remembered in the familiar text versus the unfamiliar one, you could spend more time preparing and practising with culturally diverse reading. You could create a bank of culture 1 and culture 2 texts that share topics. If your class includes learners from many cultures and backgrounds, you could also draw on their insider knowledge to write or exchange texts about these shared topics for class reading. You could repeat the steps of this research idea several times during a year, to see if the gap between reading familiar and unfamiliar texts becomes narrower over time, as a result of your teaching.

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RESEARCH IDEA 2 HOW FAR DO READERS ENJOY L1 TEXTS MORE THAN L2 TEXTS? Statman (1987) used a similar research tool, comparing learners’ response to two different texts. In her research, however, the texts were in two languages, one in the first language and one in the second language. Her research included interviews and revealed the finding that fear of the L2 text was a factor in blocking reading and making learners give up before finishing. This research enquiry works most smoothly where your learners share a first language. Research methods: read-read + question and text grading 1. Choose the opening paragraph of the same text in the first and in the second language. There are many publishers that publish short stories in first and second languages: for example Corvina in Hungarian/ English, and Penguin parallel texts in Spanish/English, and French/ English. Alternatively, if you share the same first language as your learners, you could prepare a translation yourself of an easy text. 2. Set up a timed reading slot in your lesson. Ask the learners to read the L1 text from the beginning and stop them after 10 minutes of quiet in-class reading time. 3. Ask your learners to give their reading a number of stars from 1 to 5 for enjoyment: 1 if they didn’t enjoy it at all, 5 if they enjoyed it very much. Then ask them to finish the sentence: I chose *** stars because and hand their response to you. 4. Take in their papers and make a record of how many stars were awarded by each individual. Then make a separate list of their sentence endings. 5. The next day or week, set up a 10-minute timed slot for quiet reading of the L2 text. Statman separated L1 and L2 reading by a period of six weeks but do what is practical for your own class. Again ask your learners after 10 minutes to mark with stars from 1 to 5, and to finish the sentence: I chose *** stars because and hand this to you. 6. As with 4) above, take in their papers and note stars for the second text and make a separate list of sentence endings. You now have information for comparing how much your learners enjoy L1 reading as opposed to L2 reading; and their reasons for doing so. You might ask yourself:

From implementation to research 183

• •

Was the difference between L1 and L2 reading enjoyment bigger or narrower than you expected (even though the text was the same). Were the reasons your learners gave connected with language or content?

What next? You could set up this research activity several times over the course of a term, to see if the enjoyment of the L2 text changes with practice over time. This research design might provide justification for building a parallel text reading resource and for using the first language more frequently as a route towards second language reading.

RESEARCH IDEA 3 DOES TRANSLANGUAGING HELP READING IN THE L2? In Part I, we referred to Vallejo Rubinstein’s study (2020) which included a vignette of a child in an after-school literacy club explaining the contents of a story in a mixture of Catalan and Spanish with English and Punjabi words and terms. In describing this vignette we said At all levels of language learning, teachers need to be aware of the help that using the learners’ other languages may provide for developing their reading (p. 19 above) This research project invites you to take up the challenge and develop a research enquiry using the first languages of your learners. Your aim would be to find out if they feel differently about second language reading when they have the chance to explain it in their first language. This research design works best where your learners share the same first language. Research methods: story retelling + focus groups 1. Explain you are going to invite your learners to retell a second language story. Tell them that you want them to enjoy the retelling so you will allow them to retell the story in their L1 if they want to. 2. Invite your learners to choose from a selection of short texts. It could be any story from the coursebook you are reading, or an opening paragraph from a class reader, or their own choice of learner literature from the classroom library.

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3. Give your learners one week to choose their reading. They can then do the reading at home, or you can offer dedicated class time for this. 4. Set aside dedicated class time (or a whole lesson) for them to share the retelling. Remind the learners that they can retell the story in the L1, in the L2, or in a mixture of both. 5. Divide your class into storytelling groups of four to six. Explain that each member of the group has 5 minutes to tell their story to the others. 6. When each group has finished sharing their stories, ask each storytelling group to discuss these questions and report back to you after 15 minutes. • •

Did you enjoy reading the second language text more, knowing it could be summarised in the first language? Did summarising in the first language help you understand the text?

What next? Research Idea 3 seeks research evidence that first language speaking, retelling and storytelling builds confidence in second language reading. If you find your learners do enjoy this process, you could build L1 retelling into your reading classes more frequently, then notice if reading enjoyment and confidence changes over time.

RESEARCH IDEA 4 HOW MANY WORDS DO MY LEARNERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND FOR A TEXT TO BE READABLE? In the discussion about text readability in Part 1, we saw there were several studies aiming to establish how much of a text learners needed to understand for it to be readable. There were various findings, such as 95% of a text (Laufer 1989), 98% of a text (Hu and Nation 2000) or the more complex situations described by Schmitt, Jiang and Grabe (2011) and Laufer (2020). All of these studies collected information from large numbers of learners and used statistical methods to reach their conclusions. In this Research Idea we suggest some practical steps you can do in your own classroom to answer this question for yourself. Research methods: read-read + underline and grade texts 1. Choose the opening paragraph of two graded readers/learner literature stories, graded at different levels. Text 1 should be at your learners’ level, and Text 2 at a higher level.

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2. Ask your learners to do these things with each text: 1. Read through Text 1 at a leisurely and comfortable pace. 2. Ask them to underline each word or phrase they do not understand. 3. At the end, ask them to grade the text: 1 star is I don’t want to read the rest of the story/text and 5 stars are I very much want to read the rest of the story. 4. Take in the texts and make a record of each individual: how many words they underlined + how many stars they gave the text. 5. Now repeat the process for Text 2. With the information you receive you can make the following comparisons: • •

Compare how many words they found difficult and how much they enjoyed the text Find out if learners chose the same words as difficult, or if there were variations

What next? This research design may give you a sense of how many difficult words your learners are able to tolerate before the text becomes unreadable. With this information, you might simplify texts, or plan which words to pre-teach, or select texts with more detailed insight into level of difficulty your learners will find acceptable.

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B:  RESEARCHING READING AS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE We have suggested in earlier sections, that reading is a personal experience. For a teacher to take account of this, it is important they seek out what it is that readers enjoy and give them the opportunity to choose their own reading. Another aspect of this, is that the teacher who reads is a more motivating teacher of reading. We now suggest two research projects which explore both learner reading enjoyment and teacher reading enjoyment.

RESEARCH IDEA 5 WHAT MAKES READERS CHOOSE BOOKS? In Part I, Section B, we mentioned the research project in which Sheldrick Ross (1999) asked 194 committed readers ‘how they choose or reject a book’. This research idea invites you to ask the same question and compare your results with Sheldrick Ross, and/or draw up new categories of your own. Research method: focus groups 1. Divide the class into groups of up to six. Explain that each group is going to have a conversation for one hour. Then allocate two roles in each group: •

•

Discussion leader: Your role is to open the conversation with this question. What makes you choose a book? What makes you reject a book? If the conversation goes away from the topic try and bring it back to this question. Note taker: Your role is to note down key words or ideas in answer to the question. You do not need to note down who has said them. At the end of the conversation the teacher will take a copy of your notes.

2. After the focus group, take in the notes from each note-taker. Make a record of patterns, themes and ideas which arise. 3. Write your list of ‘reasons for choosing books’ on the board. Then regroup the class into their original focus groups. Choose a new discussion leader and give them a card with these questions: • • •

Do you agree with these ‘reasons for choosing books’. Yes, no or partly? Is there anything that this list misses out? Draw up a list of books you have chosen that meet these criteria.

What next? The information from this activity can help you choose books for the learner library, or for purchase by the school.

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RESEARCH IDEA 6 WHAT ARE THE TRIGGERS FOR READING ENJOYMENT IN MY OWN READING LIFE? Our earlier sections have suggested that the best teachers of reading are readers themselves. We mentioned the study of Calafato and Paran (2019) who question whether teachers who do not enjoy reading can become role models of the engaged reader for their learners. However, we know that many teachers do not view themselves as enthusiastic readers, and even report blocks and setbacks to their reading experience. Below are several ways to help you understand your own reading life and its impact on your teaching. Research methods: reflective diary, think-aloud 1. During a 6 month period list all the reading you do, 2. Write a brief diary note of your thoughts after each piece of reading. 3. Mark each reading with one to five stars, depending on how much you enjoyed it. 4. Select one text and ‘think-aloud’, recording your thoughts while you read 5. Now review your diary notes, gradings and recordings, to fill in the chart in Table 4.3. This chart is based on Wilhelm’s categories of reading enjoyment (2016), described in Section 1. TABLE 4.3  Mapping reading enjoyment Kind of reading enjoyment

Brief explanation

Examples from my reading notes and diaries

immersive play pleasure

the pleasure you get from living through a story and getting ‘totally lost in a book’ (Wilhelm 2016:34) Intellectual pleasure reading for content, structure, language, ideas; to feel intellectually expanded the pleasure of work reading in order to do something practical ‘inner work’ reading to help you become the person you want to be: reaching your imagined best Any other kind of reading you enjoy?

What next? If you have been hitherto describing yourself as a reluctant reader, you might use this research to recognise where your enthusiasms really are, and build on these.

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C: RESEARCHING READING AS COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE RESEARCH IDEA 7 DO READING COMMUNITIES MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO MY LEARNERS? We know from research described in Part I (Duncan 2012) that reading circles in first language settings can make a difference to confidence and wellbeing. There are many challenges for a teacher in setting up reading circles. Your learners may not have any safe or realistic ways of meeting outside class time; and it may not be feasible for you to designate in-school/ class time for this. Parts II and III have suggested some ways of building reading circles, if not as regular events, as occasional ‘special’ events, for example on a school book day. This research idea depends on the possibility of being able to dedicate two teaching hours or equivalent to reading circles over a period of time. Its aim is to track whether reading circles make a difference to reading enjoyment and confidence. The following are qualities and conditions of reading circles, making them significantly different to the typical reading lesson: • • •

they are self-run by learners, even if the teacher has helped to set them up and guide them learners are free to choose the books learners are free to talk about the books in any way they like

Research methods: reflective diaries, focus group discussion 1. Set up time within school/class for self-run reading circles which meet the conditions listed above. Part III gives you several ideas for doing this. This may be something that engages the whole class, or just a small group within the class that are enthusiastic about reading collectively. 2. Ask the reading circle members to keep a written or verbal diary in which they record their thoughts in any way they like after each reading circle experience. 3. After three reading circle meetings or a period of three months (whichever is more practical) ask the group to join you for a focus group discussion, to respond to these questions. They can bring their reflective notes to help them answer the questions. •

Do you enjoy reading circle time? What do you enjoy about it? Can you give any examples from your reflections over time?

From implementation to research 189

•

• • •

Do you like conversations about reading where there is no teacher? Can you say why? Can you say how it’s different to reading lessons with a teacher? Do you like conversations when you can choose your own books? Can you say why? Has the reading circle changed what you read? Can you give an example from your reflective notes? Has the reading circle changed how you feel about reading? Can you give an example?

What next? The results of this research project might help you justify using class time for reading circles; justify asking for time and rooms to be made available in your school/college for reading circles; justify setting up interest-based reading circles across age groups/classes; provide an incentive for colleagues to join you in a similar collective research project.

RESEARCH IDEA 8 HOW DO MY LEARNERS INTERACT IN SELF-RUN READING GROUPS? This research idea aims to find out how learners interact differently in a teacher-led class in contrast to a self-run discussion group. It can also provide you further evidence of the value of self-run circles, or alternatively, further insight into how your own learners might make the most of these circles. Research methods: observation 1. Explain you would like to understand how reading circles work and ask if the reading circle group would mind if you sat quietly at the back of the room during one of their meetings. You are not going to intervene, and you don’t want your presence to change anything they usually do. 2. Give each member of the reading circle an easy ID – for example a number, or the first two letters of their name. Table 4.4 lists the discussion roles drawn up by Shelton-Strong (2012). Note the student ID in Column C each time you notice one of these roles being fulfilled.

190  From implementation to research

Review your table and notice: • •

If there are learners in the group who take a natural leadership role If there are learners in the group who tend to go off-track or are reluctant to contribute

Ask yourself: Are these the same kind of roles and patterns these learners adopt in class? Have these patterns changed over time (over the 3 months or three sessions)? What next? If it is practical, it will be interesting to observe several reading circle meetings over a period of time and see if learners become more confident, adopt more leadership roles or become more focused on the discussion over time. It would also be interesting to ask a colleague or friend to observe you teach the same learners in class, and fill out the chart at Table 4.4 to see how the learners behave and interact differently in a teacher-led lesson. TABLE 4.4  Discussion roles and patterns in a reading circle (based on SheltonStrong (2012)) A Types of group member

B Discussion role/patterns

Discussion leader

introduces, guides and leads the discussion

Summariser

summarises and clarifies contributions

Word master

checks/looks up vocabulary

Connector

connects the text to the outside world

Cultural collector

comments on cultural differences between the text and the learners’ own cultures

Passage person

chooses key passages from the text

Divergent speaker

tends to go off-track and needs pulling back to the topic

Lurker

tends to listen but not contribute unless invited

C Examples

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D:  RESEARCHING READING PEDAGOGY The many research studies discussed in Part I included questions such as: what do teachers value in their own lessons? What do teachers actually do in reading lessons, and what do they tend to neglect? The research questions in this section return to those studies and invite you as reader to replicate them for yourself, drawing on your own lessons as your source of information.

RESEARCH IDEA 9 WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO I USE IN THE READING CLASSROOM? In Part I, we suggested comprehension questions were perhaps over-used, and could in fact be a distraction from reading rather than the reverse. We also introduced the taxonomy of comprehension questions by Day and Park (2005): literal questions, reorganisation questions (requiring answers based on different parts of the text), inference, prediction, evaluation and personal response. Their study suggested that the last three, higher level questions that develop deeper response to the text, tend to be neglected; whilst teachers focus on the more literal and surface questions. This small research project invites you to research your own teaching and find out how you use questions, and what kinds of questions you use. Do you use them as a way of activating reading and if so do they work? Do you use a wide range of questions or just the more surface questions as Day and Park found in their research? If you do not use them, what do you do instead? Research method: observation 1. Record a lesson in which you teach reading. You can do this easily if you have a recording facility on your mobile device. Audio-recording is sufficient, as it is your questions and instructions which you are going to focus on: the way you set up activities verbally. 2. Listen carefully to your recording and transcribe/note down each time you hear yourself ask a question about reading. Make sure that you write down the actual words of the question, as sometimes the way you phrase a question or an instruction can make a big difference. 3. You are now going to use Day and Park’s categories as a coding frame. Your aim here is to see if what you do in the classroom matches what Day and Park suggest teachers do; or if, in fact, something quite different is happening. In Table 4.5 we provide examples for each category

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taken from an imaginary discussion of a film review that the class has read. TABLE 4.5  Coding your questions about reading (Day and Park 2005) Question type

Example Film review

Literal questions

Who plays the main part in the film?

Reorganisation questions

Where in the review do you find out what the film is about? Where do you find out who the actors are?

Inference

Does the reviewer like the film or not? How do you know?

Prediction

The reviewer does not tell us the ending of the film. How do you think it will end?

Evaluation

Does the reviewer tell you everything you want to know about the film? What else do you need to know?

Personal response

Will you now go and see the film? Why, or why not?

Your examples

What else?

• • •

What do you notice from this about your own teaching? Did anything surprise you? What aspects of your teaching are not included in this taxonomy? Can you develop new codes, themes, patterns of your own?

What next? Is there anything now you might like to add to, develop or change in your own teaching?

RESEARCH IDEA 10 WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES OF SUCCESSFUL READING LESSONS? Amongst their several ways of collecting information about successful reading lessons, Duncan and Paran (2018) asked teachers the following question in semi-structured interviews: Tell me about your favourite or most successful lesson which involved literature.

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Research methods: interview, focus groups 1. Write the following question on the board: Tell me about your favourite lesson involving reading. 2. Divide your class into groups of four to six and ask them to talk about this question. 3. Allocate one note-taker in each group to write bullet points, key words or notes to help summarise the discussion. 4. Take in the notes at the end of the session. Notice any patterns, themes, re-occurring ideas which emerge and draw up a list of these. 5. In another lesson, share with the whole class in plenary the list you have drawn up. Ask the class if they agree with these features of favourite lessons, and to discuss if there is anything you have missed out. As a follow-up there is a second part to this small research study. 1. Ask your colleagues if anyone would be able to give you half an hour of their time to answer the question: Tell me about your most successful lesson involving reading 2. Set up the interview at a time and place of your colleague’s choosing. Ask permission to record the session, or otherwise take notes as you listen. 3. Ask your colleague to tell you the story of a reading lesson which was particularly successful. 4. After the interviews are completed, review the notes and recordings and notice any recurring patterns or themes in the successful lessons. With this information you can find out: • •

if teachers and learners have the same ideas about what constitutes a successful reading lesson if the learners have any new ideas to help teachers plan successful reading lessons.

What next? From this research, you could draw up two or three recommendations for the construction of successful lessons in reading. Ideally, the outcomes from your research might be shared with your colleagues, and the learning derived from this research design be extended into their classrooms too.

FINAL REFLECTIONS The virtuous circle

What about us, as authors of this book? How congruent are we with the suggestions made in this book? What are the connections we make between being a teacher and being a teacher-researcher? To conclude this book, we asked ourselves two questions: How has teaching helped you to be a better researcher? Jane’s answer Teaching has been my research, rather than a separate thing. The questions have arisen from what I saw or experienced in the classroom: for example, I noticed assessment of reading made learners stop, or short-cut reading, rather than lead them towards it. I noticed the reading that teachers enthused about came from childhood, or from non-professional contexts and not from set reading at all. So I turned these into research questions such as: does the assessment of reading make us appreciate reading more or less? What is the reading that most influences us as professionals and educators? The research has been worthwhile because it has addressed problems, things that seemed troubling or confusing, and has directly fed back into teaching materials, courses and programmes, and session plans. So I think teaching has helped me ask the ‘right’ questions that connect with learning and might make a difference to it. Amos’s answer This is not a straightforward question, as my research has quite a lot of different elements to it. I think the connection that I had with my students when talking about literature helped me generate some of the questions for

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the questionnaire and the interviews in Duncan and Paran (2017, 2018), for example. But for my PhD I did some very focused psycholinguistic research, and I don’t think that was particularly informed by my teaching – more by my experience of reading in Hebrew after a long time of not doing it and feeling the ease of processing. How has research helped you to be a better teacher? Jane’s answer Generally the research which came from teaching did feed back into teaching. Either I made changes at the lesson plan level, or actually more far-reaching changes at the level of course design and curriculum. My questions about how we read and write reflectively, for example, led to collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines, and led to the study skill resource (Williams, Wooliams and Spiro 2020) and a whole teaching thread that now runs through from BA to Doctor of Education at my institution. Each research project, from my PhD onwards, has led me to ask: so what does this mean for learning and teaching? How can my present and future students benefit from these questions and insights? Amos’s answer During the first two years of doing my PhD (Paran 1994) I also wrote a Reading Comprehension book (Paran 1991). I brought into the book ideas about developing word recognition skills, which I had not been aware of when I was a teacher. I am not sure that the solution I found was optimal, but I was doing something which almost no one had done before me. That in fact is when I developed many of the ideas that are mentioned in this book. The book also focused on reading strategies quite a lot, mainly on strategies for inferring word meaning, which is now something that is seen as much more problematic than it was thought at the time. I think the important thing about research is that it doesn’t always give straightforward, unequivocal answers. It always leaves you with additional questions and issues to think and reflect about. As we shared our stories of second language reading, we identified several common themes in our story. First, we were both inspired by reading very early on, and remember specific moments of fascination. We had opportunities to find the kind of reading that engaged us and led to ‘flow’ and reading independence. Secondly, whilst both of us describe reading independently very early on, it was adult guidance that provided the opportunity and the range of readings from which we could make our choices. The reading environment helped us both, and shows the critical role of adults in providing reading opportunities. Thirdly, the context of second language reading is also

196  Final reflections: the virtuous circle

interestingly different: Amos’s motivation is sustained and life-changing as the second language has become the one in which he functions now as a professional and academic. For Jane the second language was encountered through song, music and travel; it is a matter of personal choice as she is lucky (or unlucky) that all her professional tasks are fully achievable in her first language. For that reason it is not surprising Amos is now an entirely bilingual reader, whilst Jane is not. Fourthly we both had burning questions from the start of our teaching careers, that sprang from our own reading experiences. Jane’s questions concerned the reading-assessment mismatch, Amos’s concerned the problems of word recognition between first and second languages. We both then took these questions further, into systematic research enquiries. Fifthly, both of us describe a complex set of factors that join teaching and research. We have many questions, many answers, and our thinking and teaching have gone in many directions. So a final interesting point to make from our two experiences, is that lives do not travel in a straight line, but with multiple diversions, forks in the road and switchbacks. In addition, those research questions which bubble up as a teacher may be slow-burning and take years to either reveal or resolve themselves. For Jane, starting to research assessment of reading began in 1991, and has resurfaced over many decades since (Spiro 2010; Spiro 2011) and in different forms. Some questions are slow to answer, and most lead to yet more questions. This book has aimed to map the virtuous circle between being a reader, being a teacher of reading, and being richly open to questions and research enquiries about each of these. In this journey we have suggested that the links between these three elements, reader-teacher-researcher, are not always straightforward and smooth. Teachers who do not believe themselves to be readers may in fact be so; learners may have reading proficiency but still not find reading that engages them. Research enquiries have aimed to fill these and many other gaps in our understanding. This book aims to show that the very areas teachers of reading find puzzling, are those that form the most richly rewarding research questions. The book also aims to show that much rich information can be gathered from the daily practice and interactions in the classroom, and this information, when harnessed in a systematic way, can shed genuine new light on reading and the teaching of reading.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in bold refer to tables. Abbott, M. 31, 32 activity detective 134–136 adults, teaching for 165–166 aesthetic reading 21 Aina, O. 116 Akamatsu, N. 10, 49 Alderson, J.C. 162 Alexander, J. 20, 24, 29 alphabetic literacy acquisition 25 alphabetic scripts 25 analogical skills 26, 58, 71 Anti-Grammar Grammar Book, The (Hall and Shepheard) 40–41 Auerbach, E.R. 30 Austen, J. 175 automaticity 10 background knowledge 10, 15–16, 33, 38, 47, 129, 141 Bamford, J. 148 Barzilai, M. 7, 17, 26, 35, 58, 71, 88, 161 beneficial research 179 Berkowitz, D. 116 Bernhardt, E. 15 Bigelow, M. 25, 75 Boers, F. 39 book displays 174 book exchange 159, 173, 176 book selection 186

border crossing 84–85; book covers 86–88 ‘bottom-up’ processes 10, 47 Bygate, M. 134, 136 Cain, K. 7 Calafato, R. 24, 187 Cambridge University Press (CUP): book resources 164; simplified reading 160 Cameron, L. 164 Carver, R.P. 13 Carter, R. 16, 38 CEFR see Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) children’s reading 123–126, 163–164, 165 choice of reading 23–24, 173–174 choosing together 121–123 Clark, C. 22 Clinton-Lisell, V. 26 cognitive development, reading and 26 coherence 41, 42 cohesion 33, 41 collective experience, reading as 4, 28–32; distance 28–30; EFL classroom reading circles 30–31; researching 188–190; teachers’ reading groups

Index 207

31–32; teaching reading see teaching reading, as collective experience Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) 12, 18, 62, 66, 69; on comprehending across languages 95; on personal reading behaviours 73 communicating with texts 127–129 comprehending across languages 94–95 Compton, D.L. 7 confidentiality 179 Cremin, T. 23, 30 critical analysis 26, 58 Crosson, A. 42 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 21 Cunningham, A.E. 26 CUP see Cambridge University Press (CUP) Davies, F. 33, 35, 113 Day, R.R. 34, 35, 98, 148, 150, 191, 192 de Bruyckere, P. 26, 161 decoding 8–10, 14, 47–49, 54, 64, 86 deductive reasoning 26, 58 deep reading 26, 58, 161, 164 Dellelo, J. 26 de Zoysa, S. 22 discourse elements 41–42 distracted reading 26, 35, 161 dream book competition 98–100 dream circles 118–121 Dronjic, V. 10, 15–16 Duke, N.K. 42–43, 131 Duncan, S. 23, 28, 30, 36, 37, 100, 121, 174, 188, 192, 195 Dweck, C. 104, 106 EAP (English for Academic Purposes) 31, 76; reading 44 effectiveness 43–44 effective teachers of reading 144–152 EFL (English as a Foreign Language) 15, 19, 24, 33, 36, 39, 42, 60, 121, 163; classroom reading circles 30–31 Eliot, G. 175 Elvebakk, L. 24 empowerment 53; reading for 12 English language reading, teaching of: in English language context 169–170; in second/foreign language context 170 Eskey, D.E. 10 Extensive Reading programme 23, 39

Farnia, F. 9, 10 feeling stories 96–98, 166 Feunteun, A. 163 Fenton-Smith, B. 31, 32 Flowerdew, J. 42 Freeman, D. 34–35 Furr, M. 31 Gagen-Spriggs, K. 22, 100 Garrett, M. 160 Garces-Bacsal, R. 23, 24 Geddes, M. 36 general world knowledge 139, 140 genres 12, 38, 39, 42–43, 45, 57, 79, 131, 142, 143, 165, 169, 175; bending 137–141; definition of 42; knowledge 139, 140; types of 42 Geva, E. 9, 10, 51 Gibson, S. 36 Gorsuch, G. 10, 49, 60 Grabe, W. 3, 11, 14, 38, 129, 141, 148, 150, 184 grammar teaching 39–41 Green, M.C. 21 grammatical knowledge 14 growth mindset 104 Guthrie, J.T. 20, 23, 123 Hall, N.: Anti-Grammar Grammar Book, The 40–41 Hansen, K. 25 heavy readers 23 Hodge, F.S. 126 holistic reading 58–60 Hollis, H. 21 Hyland, K. 79, 83 IATEFL see International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) IELTS test 9 immersive play pleasure 21, 187 inferential reasoning 26, 58 information and argument, reading for 12 information slant 69–71 informed consent 178 intellectual pleasure 21, 187 intensive reading 33, 35 interacting with texts 130–131 International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) 155, 155

208  Index

JALT see Japanese Association of Language Teachers ( JALT) Janzen, J. 93 Japanese Association of Language Teachers ( JALT) 155, 155 Jarman, R. 20, 24, 29, 118 Jerrim, J. 22 Jiang, X. 11, 14, 38, 184 Joag-Dev, C. 15, 85, 180 Johns, T. 33, 35, 113 Johnson, E.M. 43, 44, 146 JoJo (Moses) 165 Judge, P.B. 21 Kalamazoo Ladies’ Library Association 30 Kang, E.Y. 39 Kirchhoff, C. 21 Kirschner, P.A. 26, 161 ‘knowing yourself,’ as a ‘reading teacher’ 156–157 knowledge 14–16, 74–85; background 10, 15–16, 33, 38, 47, 129, 141; general world 139, 140; genre 139, 140; grammatical 14; lexical 14; morphological 139, 140; semantic 138, 140; sociocultural 139, 140–141; syntactic 138, 140; topic 139, 140; of vocabulary 14, 16, 38–39, 77 Kucirkova, N. 23, 30 Kung, F.W. 24, 33, 34, 35, 43 L1 reading (first language) 5; affective factors 18; beliefs and principles 45; book covers crossing borders 86–88; context, teaching English language reading in 169–170; genres 43; knowledge of vocabulary 15; and L2 reading, comparison of 182–183; and L2 reading, relationship between 16–19, 86–95; multiple different 166–167; self-concept 18; share the same 166; story sharing 90–92; transfer of skills and strategies 17–18; translanguaging 18–19 L2 reading (second language) 2, 5, 165; affective factors 18; automatic word recognition in 10; beliefs and principles 45; book covers crossing borders 86–88; context, teaching English language reading in 169–170; discourse elements 42; genres 43; knowledge of vocabulary 15; and

L1 reading, comparison of 182–183; and L1 reading, relationship between 16–19, 86–95; self-concept 18; transfer of skills and strategies 17–18; translanguaging 18–19 language comprehension 8–9 language detectives 78–79 large classes, teaching of 167–168, 168 Larsen-Freeman, D. 39, 40, 41 Laufer, B. 14–15, 38, 160, 184 layers, reading in 111–113 learner generated word chain race 52–53 learner literature 56, 158, 159, 165–166, 173, 183, 184 Lee, K.E. 31, 32 leisure activity, reading as 12 Lesaux, N.K. 42 ‘lesson-based’ approach 148 Levine, A. 18 Levitt, R. 24, 105 lexical knowledge 14 Lexical Quality Hypothesis 77 lifelong readers 20, 24, 118, 159, 174, 176; profiles of 103–105 Lima, C. 31 linguistic landscape 63–64, 139 linguistic process, reading as 3, 7–19; activities 7–11; knowledge 14–16; L1 and L2 reading, relationship between 16–19; reasons 11–14; researching 180–185; teaching reading see teaching reading, as linguistic process LIST acronym 36 literacy and sound manipulations, relationship between 25 Liu, I.F. 121 Littleton, K. 23, 30 logographic scripts 25 longer texts 13, 37, 41, 45, 163; choosing favourite bits in 64–66 long-term memory 11 Macalister, J. 33, 36, 111 Manguel, A. 142 Malik, A.A. 15, 85 Mazzocco, P.J. 27 Merga, M.K. 22–24, 28, 100, 102 MINUS principles 36, 111 Moje, E.B. 20–21, 29, 118, 156 Mokhtari, K. 26 morphological knowledge 139, 140 Moses, A.: JoJo 165

Index 209

Moss, G. 22 multitasking: effect on reading comprehension 26 Nafisi, A. 175 Nabokov 175 narrow reading 16, 38–39, 71 Nathanson, S. 24, 105 Nation, I.S.P. 14, 16, 35, 161, 162, 184 Newton, J. 10, 17, 32 Nilssen, J.H. 24 Nobel Prize champions 105–107 nuance, reading for 82–83 Nuttall, C. 22, 34 O’Grady, W. 16 online reading group (ORG) 31 opinion piece 31–32 ORG see online reading group (ORG) orientation, reading for 12, 62, 69 outside the classroom reading 23, 35, 37, 45, 63, 170–171, 171 Paran, A. 14, 23, 24, 36–37, 100, 187, 192, 195 Park, B. 10, 15–16 Park, J.S. 34, 35, 191, 192 Parrila, R.K. 7 Paxton, D. 30 pedagogy, reading as 4, 33–45; activities 127–136; beliefs and principles 44–45; effectiveness 43–44, 144–152; researching 191–193; teachers 37–43, 137–152; teaching and training 127–152 performing reading 116–118 personal experience, reading as 3–4, 20–27; behaviours 71–73; changes related to think and feel 25–27; histories 113–115; pleasure 20–25; researching 186–187; teaching reading see teaching reading, as personal experience phonemic awareness 25, 75 Pinter, A. 164 phonological awareness 10, 74 PISA see Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) pleasure, reading for 11–12, 20–25, 37; and academic success 22; teaching reading 96–105 pleasure of work 21–22, 187 Png, J. 44

Pope, R. 129, 136 post-reading stage 34 power of extensive reading 148 pre-reading stage 33–34, 38, 59, 131 prevalence of reading 7–8 Pritchard, R.H. 15, 85 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 22, 163 Pruslow, J. 24, 105 psycholinguistic guessing game, reading as 9 Pugh, A.K. 12–13, 69, 73 qualities of successful reading lessons 192–193 questioning 92–93, 146–148, 191–192, 192 quiet reading time 167, 174, 176 Ramírez, G. 9, 51, 53 Ravid, D. 25 RC see reading comprehension (RC) reading, framing: as collective experience 4, 28–32; as linguistic process 3, 7–19; as pedagogy 4, 33–45; as personal experience 3–4, 20–27 reading ability, construct of 9, 162, 162, 163 Reading Agency, The 12; on reading as collective experience 28; on reading for pleasure 20 reading aloud 28, 30, 36–37, 54, 55, 58–60, 118, 154, 163, 172–173; ‘theatre’ for 167, 168 reading assessment strategy, building 161–162 reading circles 28, 122, 174; building 118–121, 175, 188–190; clusters of 166, 167; discussion roles in 190; face-to-face 31; EFL classroom 30–31; long-term 32 reading communities 22, 28–29, 188–189 reading comprehension (RC) 3, 8, 9, 14–16, 18, 35, 60, 77, 95; background knowledge, effect of 15–16; categories for 12; genre and 42; L2 working memory, impacts of 10; multitasking effect on 26; situation model of 11, 13, 141; text model of 10–11 reading correspondence 12

210  Index

reading culture 84–85, 154, 180–181; creation of 171–175, 176 reading curriculum 4, 11 reading enjoyment 22, 24, 27, 37, 156, 183, 184, 186, 188; mapping 187; triggers for 187 reading instructions 12, 43 ‘reading life’ approach 5, 148, 150, 156, 171, 187 reading resources 96, 167, 183; building 156–160 reading teacher: becoming 1, 154–156 (see also individual entries); connecting with others 154–156, 155; engage with research 2–3; ‘knowing yourself,’ as a ‘reading teacher’ 156–157; see also individual entries reading test frameworks 163 reading visitors into the class, inviting 174 real-world tasks 131–134 receptive reading 13 recreational reading 12 Reichard, C. 26 re-reading 61, 88, 98, 108–111, 154, 166 researching, as a teacher 178–179; broad and narrow research questions 178; information gathering, methods for 179 responsive reading 13 Reves, T. 18 Richards, J.C. 43, 44, 146 Roberts, K.L. 42–43, 131 Robinson P.C. 37 Rodgers, J.M.H. 9 Rosenblatt, L.M. 21 run-on sentences 54–55 Sayer, P. 64 scanning 9, 11, 12, 13, 62, 69, 78 Schmitt, N. 14, 16, 38, 184 Schön, D.A. 152 search reading 13, 69 self-concept 18 self-run discussion group 189–190 semantic knowledge 138, 140 shallow orthography 16 shape of words 47–49 Sheldrick Ross, C. 12, 20, 23, 27–29, 102, 107, 186 Shelton-Strong, S.J. 31, 121, 189, 190 Shepheard, J.: Anti-Grammar Grammar Book, The 40–41

Shin, J. 10, 15–16 Silver, R.E. 44 ‘Simple View of Reading, The’ 8, 14; augmented 10 simplified reading 160, 160 situation model of reading comprehension 11, 13, 141 Skaar, H. 24 Skehan, P. 134, 136 skimming 9, 13, 17, 62, 64, 173 Snowling, M. 8 small classes, teaching of 168 social pleasure 22, 29, 30 sociocultural knowledge 139, 140–141 sounds 51, 53, 59, 106, 167; awareness of 10; distinction between 10; manipulations literacy, relationship between 25; reading and 74–75, 163; recognition of 163; units of 16 special purposes, teaching reading for 169 Spiro, J. 115, 126, 138, 195, 196 Stainthorp, R. 8 spurs and blocks, reading 100–102 Stanovich, K.E. 26 stardom, criteria for 144–146 star teachers: finding 146–148; of reading 150–152; of reading competition 148– 150; stardom, criteria for 144–146 Statman, S. 18, 60, 182 Steffensen, M.S. 15, 85, 180 Stillwell, C. 31, 32 Stoller, F.L. 129, 141, 148, 150 Stuart, M. 8 storytelling 60–62, 126, 184 Sturtridge, G. 36 styles of reading 12–13, 47, 62, 69 successful reading 35, 43, 192–193 Swain, M. 134, 136 Swan, M. 17, 32 syntactic knowledge 138, 140 Taguchi, E. 10, 49, 60 TALO (Text as Linguistic Object) 33, 35, 40, 113 Tarone, E. 25 task-based reading 127, 131–134, 135 TAVI (Text as Vehicle for Information) 35, 113 teachers: connection with other 154–156, 155; reading groups 31–32; of reading teach language 37–43,

Index 211

137–144; researching as a 178–179, 179; of young children 163–164, 165 teaching reading, as collective experience: distance 116–127 teaching reading, as linguistic process 47–95; activities 47–62; knowledge 74–85; L1 and L2 reading, relationship between 86–95; reasons and ways 62–73 teaching reading, as personal experience: changes 105–115; pleasure, reading for 96–105 teaching resources, building 159 text exchange 167, 168 text guessing 80–81 text memory game 88–90 text model of reading comprehension 10–11 text readability 184–185 text shopping 56–58 textual intervention 129, 135, 136 Tolchinsky, L. 25 topic knowledge 139, 140 translanguaging 18–19, 183–184 transportation metaphor 21 uni-directional reading 30 unravelling a text 141–144 Vale, D. 164 Vallejo Rubinstein, C. 18–19, 92, 183 verbal intelligence 26 Verhoeven, L. 15 Vinogradov, P. 25, 75

virtuous circle of reading 22, 194–196 vocabulary 15, 16, 26, 33, 41, 50, 52, 70, 71, 74, 83, 87, 99, 137, 141, 142, 161: knowledge of 14, 16, 38–39, 77; load 38; and reading, relationship between 38; unknown 17, 112 voluntary involvement 178 Wagner, C. 29 Walter, C. 10, 17, 32 Wellie, C. 42 Westbrook, J. 36, 62 while-reading stage 5, 33–35 Wigfield, A. 20, 23, 123 Wikipedia 66–69, 94 Wilhelm, J. D. 21, 22, 24, 29, 118, 187 Williams, E. 33, 34 Williams, K. 195 Williams, R. 35 Wooliams, M. 195 Wolf, M. 7, 17, 26, 35, 58, 71, 88, 161 word chain race 50–51; learner generated 52–53 words: automatic recognition of, in L2 reading 10; knowing about 76–77; reading (see reading); recognition skills 10; shape of 47–50; see also individual entries working memory: L2 10 Xu, Q. 31 Young, S.S.C. 121