The Language Teacher

In one sentence: think big and start small. Obviously you must start small because you have no books and no money to buy them. So why think big? One group of teachers spent a lot of time and energy building up a reading programme for their school. The first year was a great success. They managed to get suitable books for a few classes. The students were thrilled to have something to read. The teachers spent time sorting out the books, reading students' comments, and completing registers. The second year was less successful. Initial enthusiasm waned both among teachers and students. Books got lost. Books went missing from one class and turned up in another. Books fell apart. The covers came off and pages spilled out. The same classes wanted to continue with the libraries, but they had different teachers who were not so enthusiastic. New classes wanted to join the programme, but they did not have enough books. In the third year everyone quietly agreed to forget the whole thing.

In many schools throughout the world, you can find sad piles of worm-eaten books acquired by an enthusiast for extensive reading and left to gather dust when the enthusiast had moved to another school or developed other interests. That is why you must think big. You must plan a programme that can operate over a whole department and be sustained indefinitely, one that is able to survive not just your departure but the comings and goings of generations of teachers and students. Your programme must have the capacity to cope not just with the 50 books needed in your class for one term, but with the 5000 that may be needed ultimately by the whole department. You must set up systems for selecting, ordering, classifying, cataloguing, storing, lending, returning, checking, repairing, and replacing books: all the normal operations of a librarian. You must work out a methodology that teachers can employ to raise not only the quantity of books your students read but also the quality of their comprehension and appreciation. You must fix targets of attainment and establish the keeping of records that enable you to monitor and evaluate the success of the programme. Of course you can start small and stay small just as it is possible to grow a bonsai tree. Bonsai trees are good to look at but they do not provide shelter or wood. For that you need to grow an oak tree, but if you grow an oak tree in a tiny garden, its size will soon force you to transplant it, or pull down your house or cut it down. Just as you have to plan for the time when your oak tree is full size, so you have to plan for the time when your reading scheme is full size. First you draw up the framework. Then you fill in the detail, step by step. So this article falls into two parts: the grand design and the small start.

The Grand Design

Let us describe your reading programme as it will be when it is complete and fully operational. Its purpose is to raise the level of your students' general proficiency in English and their reading level in particular, and this is achieved by putting them through a rigorous course of reading. To start with, this uses mainly graded readers classified on a common grading scheme (see Hillıs Graded Reader review article in this issue) but moves towards books, magazines, and journals written for native speakers of the same age as the students. The rigour is provided by tests that determine initial starting levels and measure progress. The reading course itself has two complementary parts: library reading in which students borrow books from a class library to read on their own and class reading in which the whole class reads the same title with the help of the teacher. Your programme is a major component of your department's syllabus, in which the process of extensive reading is fully described and achievement targets are set in terms of the level and number of books to be read each term. Time is dedicated to extensive reading in both teaching and homework timetables. Skills in extensive reading are monitored through the year, and levels of attainment are assessed regularly throughout the session and as part of the end of session exams. Resources are listed, and clear systems described for the borrowing and return of books, checking stock, repairing damage, and replacing losses.

This mission statement shows students, parents, and teachers that the department takes extensive reading seriously and seeks their full cooperation in implementing the programme. The extensive reading programme is the special responsibility of the Reading Scheme Coordinator, to whom falls responsibility for drawing up the extensive reading syllabus, obtaining and maintaining the necessary resources, allocating resources to classes, training teachers in their use, maintaining records so that the success of the scheme can be evaluated, and writing an annual report for submission to Boards of Studies at institutional and regional levels.

Teachers are well versed in the benefits to language learning that can be obtained from extensive reading and are determined to do all they can to bring these benefits to their classes. They assess the level of materials needed by each class and withdraw the appropriate books for class libraries and class reading. They monitor library reading assiduously, encouraging students to read. They also keep accurate records of the number of books and levels read by each student, and the class average. They exploit the class reader using it not just as a means for enhancing the quality of comprehension and appreciation but as a stimulus for a wide variety of skills practice. Students read books out of class combining leisure and work in an enjoyable and purposeful activity which brings visible evidence of their own and their fellows' progress. Within the class time allocated to extensive reading, their teacher trains them in the necessary skills through the class reader and ensures they practise their skills though library reading.

Malaysian Experience

The reading programme I have described is very similar to the one that I developed in a secondary school in Malaysia. It was one component of a radical English syllabus developed by a special unit in the Ministry of Education that addressed every aspect of language learning: testing, listening comprehension, grammar, composition, and oral skills, but it was I think the most popular and the one which the students felt was doing most to improve their command of the language. I had the advantages of being head of department, of having the support of three successive principals, of working within a curriculum project run by the ministry, and of being allocated sufficient money. Even so it took me 4 years to build it up. What can be done without those advantages?

Application to Japan

I believe the programme described above can be operated in every country and at all levels, primary, secondary and tertiary, and would be particularly helpful in Japan where many students find it embarrassing to speak English before they feel confident of their use of lexis and syntax. Extensive reading, especially if it is accompanied in the early stages by listening to cassettes of the text, is an excellent way of practising in private. Although I have been to Japan twice, I have visited only four universities and one junior college and I have never visited a school.

I do not know how you should go about setting up such a scheme in your department. My limited knowledge of Japan suggests to me that you really should not attempt to do anything at all, even within your own classes, without having secured the approval of the head of department and colleagues and perhaps of a higher authority. There will no doubt be established procedures for obtaining formal approval, but I suspect that these should not be begun without extensive informal discussion. The following section assumes that you carry out the discussion informally and obtain formal approval all along the way.

The Small Start

The first step, however, does not need approval or permission. You can prepare yourself for the work of teaching extensive reading and coordinating a reading programme privately as part of your own professional development. This preparation would fall into three parts:

1. You read as much as you can about extensive reading and the forthcoming book by Day and Bamford will provide an excellent starting point. In the meantime the best books are by Hedge (1985) and Nuttall (1982).

2. You obtain publishers' catalogues and try to borrow and read as many graded readers as you can so that you know what they are like. You draw up a classification scheme and make lists of titles that you would like to buy.

3. You draw up a detailed design, ready for the moment when you present it to the senior English teacher, the head teacher, or the ministry adviser.

The EPER Guide to Organizing Programmes of Extensive Reading will help you with this. The second and subsequent steps require the approval of colleagues. You want to build up resources and try them out yourself with some of your students. If you get permission to try out a small scheme in one of your classes, perhaps you can obtain a small amount of money from school funds for that purpose. Perhaps it is better to think first in terms of starting a reading club outside the school timetable, which meets at lunch times and which charges a membership fee or lending fee. Perhaps you can get funds from the Parent -Teachers Association to start you off. Perhaps you offer some money yourself and ask the school or the PTA to match it. Whatever you do, your purpose is to gain experience in using graded readers and gather evidence that your students enjoy extensive reading and benefit from it. Subsequent steps develop your programme in two ways. It needs to be brought from outside to inside the official syllabus, timetable and assessment structure, otherwise it will remain an optional extra that will wither when you and other enthusiastic colleagues move on. It also needs to be extended from one to more than one of your own classes and from your classes to the classes of other teachers, until it covers the whole department. As with any curricular development, it is better to start in the first grade of your institution because that gives more time for the programme to have an effect and prove its value before students experience pressure from examinations which will not, at first anyway, specifically test the capacity to read extensively.

There are some questions that may need attention.

Is there a place for L1 materials?

The programme described above amounts to providing a reading course that takes students from easy to more difficult texts and assumes the use of graded readers. The long term target is for students to be able to read L1 material (i.e., material intended for native speakers of the same age). For primary level students, children's fiction and magazines are an appropriate target, for secondary level students, upper primary and teenage fiction and magazines, and for adult students, adult fiction and journals. Samples of these materials can be provided for other age groups but for cultural interest rather than language-learning endeavour.

Is there a place for non-fiction?

Apart from travel and biography, there are very few non-fiction titles among graded reader series and those that exist tend to be excruciatingly dull. How then can you cater for the students who say they do not like reading fiction and how do you answer teachers and parents who think that non-fiction is serious and helpful whereas fiction is frivolous and irrelevant to examinations? You can do one or all of the following: (a) You can challenge students' dislike of fiction by asking them if they never watch fiction on TV or in the cinema; (b) you can argue that reading non-fiction in a foreign language requires such familiarity with the structures and vocabulary that the learner can forget about the language and concentrate on the meaning. The only way to develop this degree of familiarity is to read extensively within familiar contexts such as family, school, romance, adventure, crime, and so on; (c) and you can include in your class libraries travel and biography which lend themselves to extensive reading because they are written in narrative about familiar contexts.

Another possible source of non-fiction are magazine format books on factual subjects like the Macmillan Dossiers, and factual books such as those published by Dorling Kindersley and Allen and Unwin which are heavily illustrated and have text divided into short paragraphs that serve as captions to the artwork.

How do you control the stock of books?

You will find practical hints in the books mentioned above. In general you want to establish a system that is the least cumbersome and bureaucratic. There are two basic requirements: (a) You have the largest possible unit of administration, for example, boxes containing sets of class readers and levels of class libraries, each with its own inventory, and (b) ;very book must be identified by level, title number, and copy number. I find that this is best written on a label on the front cover. The first avoids a muddle of unsorted books heaped on shelves in a cupboard or store and allows speedy issue and return of stock. The second enables you to identify the correct home for books that are found, and the responsible person for books that go missing.

How do you make books last longer?

The cheapest way to lengthen the lives of books is to tape the spines with non-shrinking book repair tape. It does not take long if you tape the books in batches, laying them along a table edge and cutting the tape with a sharp blade. Plastic jackets look nicer but they are tiresome to fit and need to be exactly the right size which is not easy to arrange when books are not cut exactly to any standard size.

At which level should your students read?

The quick answer is at the level at which they can read comfortably without a dictionary. They should find the first books they read really easy and finish them quickly. They should read a minimum of ten and a maximum of fifteen books before moving onto the next level. You can find this level by trial and error, or by using a placement test such as EPER has developed for use with its reading levels. This has the advantage of determining a level independently of teacher and student, and of ensuring that students really do start at an easy enough level.

How many titles does a programme need?

You need as many and as varied a collection of books as possible at your target level (unsimplified books appropriate to the age of your students). This will allow them to consolidate at this level and read widely across many genres. At each of the graded reader levels that lead up to the target, you need only as many titles as give your students the confidence to move up to the next level -- no more than fifteen. This shows the students that their objective must be to move up the levels as quickly as possible until they reach the target level where they can relax and read widely. Of course you will need more than fifteen books at each level, so you need to buy multiple copies. This has two further advantages: you need not use the less successful books, and all your students will in time have read most of the books so they can discuss the contents with each other or in groups or as a class.

Conclusion

A lot of work is involved in organizing a reading programme. That is one reason for there being so few of them, but the amount of work can be reduced if the programme is planned from the beginning. It can also be shared if students as well as teachers are involved in its management. I have spent the last fifteen years advocating and supporting reading programmes because I have seen them work, and I have seen students make huge progress because of them. The books are there waiting to be used. The students are there waiting to read them. The work of bringing them together is very worthwhile.

References

Guest Editor's note: The Edinburgh Project on Extensive Reading (EPER) has been promoting the use of Extensive Reading for nearly 20 years. EPER maintains a database and library of graded readers, advises institutions and ministries of education on reading programmes, and publishes a wide range of support materials such as a reading placement test. EPERıs contact information is as follows: EPER (Edinburgh Project on Extensive Reading), IALS (Institute for Applied Language Studies): University of Edinburgh, 21 Hill Place, Edinburgh. EH8 9DP. Scotland. UK. Tel: +44-131-650-8211/6200. Fax: +44-131-667-5927; e-mail: David.R.Hill@ed.ac.uk