Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Reading

Week 12 - Answers

Nuttall (1996), Chapter 8 - Answers

1. What are the two models for how reading develops in students and how does each work?

The two models that Nuttall describes in this chapter are one of failure and one of success. To a large extent it is these two models that this class is all about. Our goal in taking this class is to try to get our students to move from the one side to the other. In effect we wish to learn ways of getting the wheel turning the right way for our students, forwards, not backwards development. The whole point of taking this class and in endeavoring to understand more about literacy and reading process is simply because we know the reading is important and also we know that our students are not excelling in reading in English. It would probably not be unfair to say that most of your students, and even a great many of my students Grad and Undergrad alike, are currently well entrenched in this vicious cycle of failure as regards English reading. As with any problem the first step is knowing that you have a problem. A problem must first be identified before it can be effectively dealt with.

What you really need to do is ask yourself (or your students) very honestly about whether you (they) really enjoy reading in English. If your answer is `yes` then ask yourself another question: how often do I actually read in English? If the answer to this question is not particularly often then maybe you really don't enjoy reading English and you are just kidding yourself. Do you go out of your way to encounter English or do you go out of your way to avoid it even though it is there all around you. Think of it this way, we always find time to do the things we really enjoy. Our attention is set to notice the things we like and avoid the things we don`t. There are few excuses for not reading anything or reading much. Especially reading is easy to do in our spare time simple because it doesn't require a partner, travel, great expense or even very much time. Reading is something they can be integrated into everything you do during the day. If you have a spare minute - read.

As in most gaping holes once one is trapped or entrenched in a kind of vicious cycle is actually very hard to get out. It is so easy to fall into but very hard to get out of. As responsible, caring teachers our jobs is to try to reverse the trend, not just because we feel that we need to prepare our students for life, and truly literacy is preparation for life, but there's also the great advantage of being able to read well in a foreign language and particular language like English which is so widely spread particularly in written form. By getting our students to enjoy reading we are setting them on a different course and one filled with vast opportunities, but we don`t need to tell them that. They already know it. So what we need to try to do is really reverse this trend in the vicious cycle and get people into a more positive cycle. This is not going to be nearly as easy as Nuttall makes it sound in this chapter, nor as natural as Pilgreen makes it sound in her chapters for we are dealing with non-native readers, but we have to try. We owe that much to our students and also to ourselves.

The way I see it, the key to reversing the cycle is through reading speed. We've talked a lot about reading speed in this class. We mentioned how reading speed is linked to short-term memory and basic language processing and therefore enters its own vicious kind of cycle wherein because reading speed is slow people understand less: because people understand less they read slower. We also talked of ways of increasing reading speed. All this is key. Nuttall pushes the idea of enjoyment and how students first and foremost need to enjoy reading, but the way I see it even if they enjoy reading and enjoy a certain subject matter it is still not going to be possible to read about that in English unless their reading speed goes up. They need to read efficently.

The bottom line which we are facing here and which many teachers might not be facing in other countries is that Koreans are pretty damn good readers in Korean. Once more, literature of all kinds is available and widely available everywhere in Korea. This really lessens the need for English for children and young adults. English isn't really required because everything is out there in Korean. To make matters worse because they are good readers in Korean and Korean is truly much more useful in English for them they're not going to go through the tremendous effort it will take to get them to read more efficiently in English. Again getting people onto that positive cycle is going to be a hard task, but we have to do it we have no choice. The potential outcome is way to positive to ignore.

2. Why should reading occur in the classroom , or at least in school?

The answer to this question is simple. A teacher cannot expect students to do something that they themselves are not willing to do and actually do not do. This is probably the most important code for teachers to bear in mind. If you wouldn't do it you can not ask them (your students or students` parents) to do it. Following this very simple code or creed it is therefore important that at least a small portion of the reading is actually done in school and even in class. Teachers not only need to model, but schools provide excellent situations for interaction in and about the target language. In Korea school typically is the only place where people can interact in English.

From both sides (Nuttall and Pilgreen) we have heard that, even in the most extensive of reading programs, students need to do something in class. It not only underscores the importance of reading, but it also makes the reading more interesting for the students and allows the teacher to do a secret spy work on what students might actually be doing with their reading. This would also allow for short follow-up exercises and activities in which the students can show off, and preferably in small groups, what they have been reading and whether they liked it or not. Particularly in Korea, were students are still very much used to strong control both in school and outside of school it might be best to first integrate something within the classes in the school at least for a few minutes a day.

3. What are some of the techniques we can use to help our students to read?

There are several techniques we can use in order to help our students read more extensive types of materials and also raise their enjoyment and therefore their motivation and reading. These different techniques of course would depend on the age of the students and the purpose of our language program. For older students, and here were really talking middle school second-year up to high school and university, one well tested approach is that of CBI. Content based instruction would allow the teacher to make the reading somehow more useful to the students by using subject matter which they already doing in their other classes and need to to learn, and hopefully want to learn, and integrating that with English reading skills. Basically what we do here is have them read English about subjects that they need to study anyway. The danger here is finding the proper balance. If the reading is too difficult then the students are going to be frustrated and aggravated and they're going to fall even further into that vicious cycle of failure. If the content is too difficult, even though the reading is easier, they still might have difficulty. If the content is too easy to students are going to be bored. So what we really need to do is find a good balance between reading difficulty and content. This will probably require the English teacher to actually communicate often with the content teachers and teachers of other subjects to find out what they're doing and what books in English might actually be available. The teacher might also be required to, and I say this with all kinds of caution, simplify the materials slightly so that the students can deal effectively with content which is useful but so that the text itself easier for them. The bottom line is that there has to be some give-and-take. Another way of doing this is through a task-based approach in which we change not the text itself but what the students are supposed to do with the task.

Sheltering the material is another and generally preferable option to simplification. Here we add lots of things like pictures and do activities designed to help the student to better understand the text prior, during and after reading. These break down into basically two different ways; teachers supported and solitary. In the teacher supported view the teacher actually makes different types of guiding questions as well as other types of guiding activities for pre, during and post reading activities. Again the big deal here is that the teacher actually has to develop the different kinds of sheltering mechanisms herself. The solitary option is again what we already talked about, namely methods like SQ3R, which are designed to allow students to build their own guide for interacting more efficiently with the text. Which you chooses a teacher will depend to a large extent on the age and level of the students in addition to the types of material which are having them read through. Bear in mind, however, that with all these things different methods we are trying to help our students read as efficiently as possible, because it is efficiency which will make people want to read more and will lead to further success.

4. How can we promote the reading habit in school?

The simplest way of promoting the reading habit in school is to make sure there are books for the students to read, and not lousy books that no one wants to read but obviously books which they are interested in. The word books is often over employed in sustained reading programs. For us in Korea it is important bear in mind that maybe your students won't be reading for the most part books. For most students reading a whole book might be to large a leap at first. We will, therefore, need to use materials with the understanding that the term `materials` includes everything from short little cards to books of all kinds. So we need to have materials and materials that they like in a place where they can choose them and get to them easily. Following this would seem than that the choice of materials which we are either assigning or making available to the students is paramount. In Korea we have the potential intervening problem of parents who are not going to understand the idea of trying to give kids easier materials to read. If you are somehow relying on the parents to procure the materials for their child then there might be a problem simply because the parents may choose materials that the kids don't like and ones which will in all likelihood be too difficult. One way of trying to deal with this would be to send a letter to the parents explaining what you are trying to do and why it is important in addition to being theoretically sound.

Nuttall really pushed the idea of getting students at first to work with simple materials. This is a very important point to bear in mind because although the students and parents might be reluctant to first, it is really the only way to reverse the cycle. Figure it this way, if somebody is jumping from one subject or skill area to another they are not going to be about enter the new skill at the same level as they used to control. It is pretty straightforward and simple and I wish that parents would understand this better. So remember simple, simple, simple materials. Computers!!

5. What are some of the major concerns we need to worry about in constructing a library?

In constructing a library there are several things we need to be concerned about. The first issue that needs to be fixed is whether you are able to use the main school library or whether you need to construct your own classroom library. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but, as long as you have your own classroom which you can decorate yourself and fix yourself, which is sadly actually rarely the case, it is probably better to try to develop a classroom library of your own. The advantage of the classroom library to the school library is that the reading becomes more personal, the students have more access to books and materials of their own making. What we really need is frequency and more access being more frequent access which is a very important variable. Another advantage of a classroom library as opposed to a school library is that you yourself can have a heavier hand in choosing the material. You can also organize the material in ways which is much more user-friendly for your students. The idea here is that we want the students to be able to get the material they want and which is useful for them quickly and easily. The advantages of using the school library in general is that obviously the school library will have more books in English that you can have in your classroom. The books of the library are also monitored so that hopefully they don't disappear the way the materials in your classroom might very well walk away and never come back. Also, another advantage is that the reading becomes less associated with you do and your particular class if the reading is done more in a library or at least the materials are taken from the library. As a teacher you'll really need to make a great neutral assessment about how well your school library is run and how well you think you can actually run your classroom library.

6. What are some of the main elements we need to be concerned about in constructing an extensive reading program?

In constructing an extensive reading program our main concerns is going to be management over a longer period of time and also the fact that probably don't want to monitor and assess students in the same way in this extensive reading program that we do in the intensive reading programs we are more used to. In extensive reading programs we're probably also going to need help from other English teachers, maybe the school librarian as well as other teachers from other subjects. The first thing we need to do is to try to make reading more interactive by hopefully changing the environment in the classroom. We need to get the students interested in their reading in this means defining what their interests are and maybe letting them choose their own texts to read. The question of whether to give incentives is a complicated issue. The only piece of advice I can give here is that incentives should be as meaningful as possible and should be tied to the reading itself and not become a huge reward or a huge punishment.

One of the big questions in relation to running an extensive reading program is how the teacher is going to monitor the supposed reading which the students are doing. One of the realities we need to face here in Korea is that students are extremely competitive and generally vacuously so. This means that they are competitive simply to get points and they have no idea why they are doing so. There's a great potential danger in this so we need to try to make the extensive reading more personal. This means that we shouldn't over monitor the students. As a teacher you'll have to find a very different way of assessing this type of program. Following this idea it seems logical that extensive reading would make a lot more sense in the current system related to elementary schools, but this does not mean the middle school in high school teacher should not try because it is possible and the potential benefits are great.

7. How can teacher get their students to use class readers?

In response to some of the problems which we posed in the questions above about implementing an intensive reading program using a class reader is possibly a good idea at least initially. The class reader that Nuttall and Pilgreen mention is generally a book. For us we are probably not at all that interested in having our students read tons of books (The exception here would be elementary school where the materials students would be expected to read would be rather short and very simple and could actually be a whole series of many different highly simplified books). In the middle schools and high schools we would probably be better served in constructing some sort of reading anthology for our students. We can make the anthology ourselves by picking and choosing all different kinds of reading material (authentic of course) from a variety of different sources. It must however be born in mind that at least some of the material should be longer or on the longish side. The advantage of a classroom reader is that all the students are working through the same thing at the same time. This means that we can actually construct interactive, more communicative, activities which allow us to develop reading skills and strategies with the students along with our all important linguistic goals.

One criticism I have with both Nuttall and Pilgreen is that they both seem to have forgotten that one of the chief ways of increasing reading speed and therefore efficiency and prowess and joy of reading is by overtly teaching certain skills and strategies. One thing we need to bear in mind is that in an extensive reading program there is always a high risk of failure particularly for some kids. If the students are left entirely to their own devices with little teacher intervention, then the students who need some extra help might not be able to get it. A more efficient way of getting our students to develop strategies is to help them develop them. Basically, we cannot really run extensive reading programs as really being a kind of teaching were we are operating without any kind of safety net. This is a disadvantage of such programs and is something which we really must think about. My suggestion is that we do use class readers for a lot of these reasons but we also integrate more extensive reading or sustain silent reading into our curriculum by having the students do what we can call personal reading which would involve more extensive materials which they would read basically on their own with a large amount of moral support from the teacher.

Pilgreen (2000), Chapters 1 and 2 - Answers

8. What is SSR and why might we want to try to do it?

The whole idea behind SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) is exactly what we have already discussed with all the different kinds of extensive reading. The entire purpose of SSR is to reverse the negative reading cycle for students and get the forces of motivation to swirl in a positive way rather than a negative way. Interesting to note is that SSR was developed for native speaker readers and not for non-native speakers. This might cause a few slight differences in how such programs will be applied here in Korea but again they can simply be tweaked. In order to understand why we want to do SSR we need to think not only about the purpose of SSR which is quite clear but also about the great advantages of reading and literacy in general.

Pilgreen says that SSR is useful in getting disassociated readers to read better. Following the terminology introduced by Nuttall, we need to use something akin to SSR to get students to change their attitudes toward reading. The other reason we need to try to initiate an approach to reading that is extensive is due to the development of reading as a skill for efficient reading of written material. Written material being the best all-around way of giving large amounts of potentially meaningful input to students in Korea. We can see that there are many good reasons for doing so and all of them hinge on the tremendous importance of reading as the primary or potentially most important skill area in second language development.

9. What are some of the ways we can try to ensure success in an SSR program?

Pilgreen gives us eight factors which she deems important for the successful implementation of an SSR program. Of these eight we have either already addressed the first five sufficiently well in answers to questions posed above. The first five are:

 Access

Appeal

Conducive Environment

Encouragement

Staff Training

It is the last three that are more interesting and new to us and which we should form clearer ideas about even though they might have been addressed already. These last three are:

Non-Accountability

The idea here is that the students need to feel that they are doing this reading for them and that it is not just a part of their school work. This is important because we want reading to develop as a habit for life and not just because it is something they are forced to do in school. This means that the students should be able to read with as little accountability as possible. In this way lower level students will not feel shown up by higher level students. Lack of direct or controlling involvement by the teacher will, in theory, allow the students to develop their own approach to reading and turn it into more personal and self-regulated type of activity. This does not mean that the teacher is not involved at all. It simply means that the teacher does not try to access this type of SSR program in the same way that they would assess an intensive reading program. As indicated in the next major concern, students should have to do things with the texts they read but even these types of follow-up activities should lay the accountability square on the shoulders of the students for the students.

Follow-up Activities

The purpose of these is to try to get the students to interact more with each other as they read, even if they are reading different materials. Such activities are designed to makes the reading more meaningful and important. They can serve as a kind of comprehension but a rather generic one because the teacher will not be able to address special questions to all the students (unless of course she follows the suggestion I made in class about sapling a set of questions to each of the texts.

Distributed Time to Read

This is one of the simplest and probably most effective tools in helping us to simply guide our student and ensure us of their success in reading. The basic idea is that we need to try to get the students to read over many frequently distributed short time periods. More frequent reading needs to be fostered in the classroom by giving them even just a few minutes in each class period and at least two times per week. Of course the golden assumption is that if we give the students the opportunity to read frequently in class, and especially things they like and want to read, they will also read more frequently outside of class.

10. What are some of the implications of SSR and how do they relate to us in Korea?

We have dealt with this both above and in class but the implications of SSR and other extensive type reading programs are both wide and far-reaching. By doing SSR we are laying credence to the belief that language is not necessarily learned as a set of particular bundles of information which pile neatly on top of each other. The more we as teachers try to control language learning the less progress our students will be able to make. This follows from the all-important distinction between knowing about a language (bits of unrelated information stacked neatly onto each other) and knowing a language. The latter implies a skill building approach which is reliant on a deep level of interaction between the knowledge of the language and the ability to use that knowledge. Both sides of this approach need to born in and out of usage. Information learned without real usage is vacuous.

There are few facts in language, so accumulating erroneous facts is not a good way to learn a language. Pushing on the part of the teacher or parent does not work with all students because the processes of language need time to be deciphered. The students need to do it themselves by learning how and when to focus attention in the new language they are learning. These are the kinds of things students learn by developing efficiency in literacy.