Extensive Reading (Reviewing on graded books)
Han Seok Hee
1. Book title, author, publisher, publishing year
a. The USA, ALISON BAXTER, Oxford University Press, 2008
b. Martin Luther King, ALAN C. McLEAN, Oxford University Press, 2008
c. Australia and New Zealand, CHRISTINE LINDOP, Oxford University Press, 2008
2. Number of pages
a. The USA : 72pages
b. Martin Luther King : 72pages
c. Australia : 72pages
3. Book format
a. All of the three copies are about fact files and audio available with full-color illustrations.
b. Contents are comprised of introduction, 14-16 topics, glossary, activities (Before Reading,
While Reading, After Reading), about the author, and about the bookworms library.
4. Reading level : Young learners, Stage 3 from starter to stage 6.
5. My critical review on them
a. Incidental learning and fragility
The books have lots of interesting topics and stories by which the learners’ attention is focused on the story not on items to learn and learning gains can be fragile as well as providing quantity of input with substantial opportunities for vocabulary repetition.
b. Grammar and vocabularies
Each book, stage 3, deals with 1000 headwords and grammatical points such as should, may, present perfect continuous, used to, past perfect, causative, relative clauses and indirect statements with 42-46 glossaries, which is I think appropriate for the target level of readers’ grammatical improvement and lexical expansion by stages.
c. The allurements
You can lead a horse to water, but we can’t make him drink. I think the most important aspect of Extensive Reading Programs is how to keep our students excited about reading and wanting to read more. From this point of view, the series provide enjoyable reading in English, with a wide range of classic and modern fiction, non-fiction, and plays. Especially, the books I selected were fact files with lifelike full-color illustrations and fun real stories.
d. Quality
As I know, the OXFORD BOOKWORMS is a good extensive reading foundation and an excellent source of getting award-winning graded reader titles with various genres. The quality of the paper is good for young learners with medium thickness and printing size is a little bit small but clear to recognize. Last, the quality of pictures and illustrations are well taken and chosen for young learners to add interests while before, during and after reading.
e. Before, while and after reading activities
According to our textbook, an extensive reading program is only one part of a language course. Teachers need to make sure that other parts of the course are supporting extensive reading and that extensive reading is supporting other parts of the course. From this view, after reading a graded reader, the learner can spend a few minutes reflecting on new words that were met in the book and looking back in the book to revise them.
The books I chose consist of Before, While and After Reading Activities. Doing before reading activities, readers overview the main pictures of the book and match each photos with the names, which can help readers become motivated and focus on the main topic of the book.
While reading, readers rewrite the false sentences with the correct information from their reading chapter by chapter, choose best question-words to the answers, match halves of sentences and words, and complete sentences with the correct words. These kinds of activities are good for better understanding of texts the reader is reading through chapters, however in an extensive reading program, reading should be the main activity and other activities should occupy only a very small proportion of the time so that time is not taken away from reading. For this reason, I think it should lessen the numbers of the While Reading Activities questions to let students focus on reading not elaborate comprehension.
Doing after reading, readers match the people with the sentences using pronouns (he, she) and linking words (and, because, but, then, who), find words in the box, write an e-mail to a friend about the topic, find out more information about what they want to know more, make a poster or give a talk about it to their friends. These kinds of activities are very good to support and supplement extensive reading with language-focused learning and fluency development.
f. Simplified or Original Texts
Even though for some teachers and researchers, simplified graded readers are seen as being inauthentic and watered-down versions of richer original texts, vocabulary simplification is also seen as effective vocabulary control providing high frequency words of the language with little low frequency words for their gradual improvement through reading.
The series I chose includes original and adapted texts in seven carefully graded language stages, which take learners from beginner to advanced level with glossary at the end of each book. I think it deals with proper vocabulary and grammar points within the target level of the series by giving expatiation, for example, …were called tangata whenua (‘people of the land’).
g. Additional resources
As a teacher, planning and running an extensive reading program is worthwhile, but we need for more practical factors such as how to organize and manage a library of graded readers, how to obtain them, and how many are needed to set up a library.
The Oxford Bookworms Library offers tests and worksheets, advice on running a class library, using audio recordings, and the many ways of using them in reading programs. It offers resource materials that are available on the website.
6. Conclusion
Last year I went on a business trip to the ministry of education, science and technology for joining a conference. Several teams have been developing new curriculum based on graded readers. I got soon excited as I have been sick and tired of current primary English curriculum. The main problem is how we can choose and provide public schools and teachers with quality graded readers without concern of international copyright, money.
Mr. Han
I would like to ask the same question to you. If you are to develop 'readers' for your EFL students, what would you do? This question is connected to your TSL506 class project, too.
Thank you for the review.
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