This is a a reposting of a comment on reading made by Jody a year ago. I repost it here because I think it is important. I edited it a little to keep the focus on the really important parts of what she says. It addresses both reading novels and FVR in level 1 and 2 classes. The reason this is an important post is that it makes sense against what has been for years the party line, which says to read a lot of novels early and to do FVR every day – Jody makes good arguments to not do those things.
1. I like reading in Level 1. When the content of the reading is personalized and comprehensible, I believe they acquire language. I noticed that my students’ language acquisition improved when I added reading to my program. Thinking about it, though, I likely need to trim down the readings for the first semester and concentrate more on the aural aspects of language.
2. I like reading one novel, as a class, in the latter 1/2 of the year. At that point, they are ready to read a Level 1 novel without pain. A few very high students choose to read Level 1 novels on their own afterwards. Good idea. I noticed that my students’ language acquisition took a tremendous leap (but only for those who were ready) when I added the class reading of novels to the program.
3. What I don’t like is FVR at Level 1 – Free Voluntary Reading. There is almost nothing they can read with good comprehension because they still have so little language. Boring cannot begin to describe the experience for most. Outside of being able to choose the book, I don’t see how this activity fulfills any other requirements for “reading for acquisition”. I have tried it and seen no improvement in students’ language acquisition. I do see loss of time of CI activities when we do FVR. Very few kids are ready to do this in my opinion….I’m sure it’s a bit more effective at Level 2 and, likely, quite effective at Level 3 and beyond.
5. Krashen’s study of language acquisition reasearch has been almost exclusively with ELL students. Intermediate ELL students make great language gains from reading from the research I’ve seen. An intermediate ELL is already superficially fluent, but not academically. That student may have very poor reading skills, but reasonably high fluency. FLL students cannot be studied in the same way and really haven’t been studied. The situations are vastly distinct. Our Level 1/2/3 kids are not fluent even though they may have adequate reading skills in English.
The FVR research he knows about has been done mostly with English dominant kids over the last 40 years and some with intermediate/adv ELLs. I have seen no research about the efficacy of FVR with beginning foreign language students–and yes, Level 3 is still “beginning” when you compare it to true fluency.
My response: I have pretty much gone nuts over the past twelve years trying to keep up with the party line on reading and FVR. I never get more than one novel done in level 1 (in the spring), and I never get enough FVR in. I always favor more auditory input at level 1.
Now, with what Jody wrote on the two topics of reading novels and FVR, I feel like I can grow up and really hear what Jody says about Krashen. It is true that his research is based heavily on ELL research, so that our students, with so much less aural fluency than those Krashen studied, don’t really align with that statistical pool.
So, based on what Jody said above and my own insights from the classroom this year, I am thinking of this, and I am not trying to make any suggestions for others:
FIR – 10 min. of Forced Involuntary Reading. The kids have to read the same novel for ten minutes, but at their own pace. At some point many of the kids have finished the chapter and at that point we do a class on it, discussing it in L2 (no movie reading as per Jody, well, maybe some to clear things up), some Readers Theatre if the scene deserves it, lots of read and discuss in the TL, maybe a spinoff parallel novel, but probably not) and so in this way I can start class with the silent reading and classical music which is so calming to all of us and so important to me to get class started in peace.
So I am really just combining the reading of a novel and FRV, just slotting the novel into the ten minutes of FVR, now FIR. In that way, I get to do more stories and the readings from them. Doing this gives the kids plenty of auditory CI and plenty of reading, to make sure the kids get plenty of bread and butter, and yet they get that time in on novels as well. Works for me.