I just posted this a few months ago here but I am so passionate about the topic that I chose to post it again in case anyone missed it:
Going. Going. Gone.
The idea of novels is fading. We have worked too hard and for too many years to float those brick-like things. We have wanted from them more than they can provide. Do we ask young kids to read novels that are too hard for them? And the fact that nobody can seem to write a really simple novel is an indictment of the idea that it can even be done. So why in level one do we want to get kids reading so fast? And why in the upper levels do we keep pushing kids to read above their levels?
Our “advanced” kids aren’t advanced at all, if there is any truth to the idea that we need 10,000 hours (24,000 in Mandarin, Korean, etc.) to get command over a language. The whole novels thing is starting to implode under the weight of its own gnarliness.
I know that my time in New Delhi was not wasted, and not just because I was teaching in a classroom across the hallway from Linda Li, but also because right about the time the Invisibles happened, I also started initiating class with ten minutes (usually more because they were not feeling forced to do it) of free voluntary reading, now called Free Choice Reading, of the novels. What is that?
It’s where kids totally read what they want, without the straitjacket of the class process to make half of them feel stupid. It’s where high level kids can read way down to simple texts and low level kids can read way up to harder texts if they want. The key is that they get to choose the books that were laid out on the table as they walked in.
No tests. No classroom sets. No snow plow reading. No grades at all connected to the novels. Just FVR (FCR) as Krashen says to do it. Only limited amounts of four or five copies of each of the novels. No need to buy big class sets. (I only had five or so copies of each title available to me in my classroom in India, so only having four or five copies of each book turned out to be a good thing.)
We should do what Dr. Krashen actually recommends for FVR. We don’t do what Krashen says and it is costing us. In so many ways, we don’t really align with Krashen in this work with CI; we just say we do. That is due in part to our being in schools, I get that. But it’s not really an excuse.
Krashen didn’t do any research on the application of CI in secondary schools. There is none. The only research that I know of on CI in schools has been done by CI teachers doing the tough daily real kind of research in schools. We have ALWAYS pushed his ideas too far.
AGEN 2016BenikoPPT
(Note: the Reading Options I recommend have nothing to do with reading novels, just to be clear. They are all about how to read stories.]