Eric has written a tour de force comment-turned-article on reading this morning. It is because he is both a classroom teacher and a scholar/research based person. That is a powerful combination and so we ought to read what Eric has written here with special attention. He has shined flashlights on what has been over the years in my own opinion a somewhat murky and confusing reading road that we have all been traveling on over recent years, trying to find the right balance between reading and stories in our CI classes.
Specifically, what is the relationship between those little novels that are all over the shelves of most of our classrooms and Step 3 Reading as per the Three Steps of TPRS? This topic is way too big, and Eric addresses far too many points, unlike me who am always succinct and to the point in my own thoughts about this work, hee hee, for any of us, especially those in service today or who begin next week or who are already back teaching our young charges, to adequately respond to and digest, but it represents the start of a long overdue discussion about those novels.
I am publishing the entirety of Eric’s comment for our general digestion today, if only those of us who are sitting in boring inservices this a.m. have the time to read and reflect on it properly. Yes, the article is long, and yes it will take a long time to hash out some of the points, and some points won’t get addressed, but that doesn’t mean I can’t publish it here just to get some of the ideas out there. I will respond to what I can while doing a million other things today – retirement is not at all what I expected!
We’re discussing how to optimize our CI, to choose the most efficient CI strategies, in which case SSR/FVR may not be favorable to a more shared reading + storytelling/storyasking CI approach when teaching beginner FL students in the US.
There are plenty of studies showing that just listening to stories leads to higher reading comprehension scores. You don’t have to practice reading to get better at reading.
Listening -> reading. Maybe this quote went unnoticed, but here it is again: “I do not start FVR with my college students who can not even read 200 word level [headwords] Penguin graded readers. I tell stories until they are ready to read.” – Beniko Mason
200 words is like a story of 1000+ words.
It is so true that we need many more LOWER level TPRS readers than we currently have. I’d like to see TPRS readers even easier than all those already written. I consider our 3 lowest options to be Berto, Isabella’s Adventures, and Brandon Brown’s Dog. Isabella’s Adventures has 200 headwords and is a 2,200 word story, but included in that headword count are cognates. I would NOT consider cognates as unique words. So, I’d consider Isabella’s Adventures to have many fewer headwords.
Building student confidence and enjoyment of the FL is really our first goal, before developing fluency. So how about some super simple readers that have minimal to no unfamiliar language! How about reading and knowing 100% of the words on the page! I’m not sure that can even be done for beginners and still manage to tell a story. You’d end up with something more like a picture dictionary or structure-driven story and some glossed words. Still, we can do better than those readers we have. We could then start FVR earlier and build independent reading confidence and enjoyment earlier.
As I wrote before, it’s hard to conclude that FVR isn’t enough when you don’t satisfy the important tenet: sufficient number of comprehensible, interesting stories. Until we do have more true beginner readers, we can DEFINITELY conclude that FVR won’t be as efficient.
Books are not better than a CI-trained teacher, until they are . . . (upper levels). Sheltering vocabulary by means of targeting input, shared reading, and read-alouds are all about preparing a student to be ABLE to read independently and to WANT to read independently. If there is a capacity and an interest in reading, then books may be superior to a teacher, because we can read faster than we can listen (more CI!), we can self-select books that differentiate level and interest, and we get tons of non-targeted input (more i+1).
Read about Warwick B. Elley and Francis Mangubhai’s book floods in Fiji (1981 and 1983). I remember hearing Krashen say in a lecture that these studies alone should have ended any debate about the power of reading.
**Does anyone have access to these 2 articles and could send to me? Pretty please 🙂
My info below comes from Mangubhai, 2001, “Book Floods”; Elley & Mangubhai, 1981, “Long-term effects”:
12 schools. 3 groups: control, shared reading, silent reading. 250 books per year. Study was with 4th and 5th graders. The experimental groups replaced 20-30 minutes of the daily ESL class with reading. English class starts in first grade and becomes a bilingual program in the fourth grade.
After 1 year, the experimental groups had no statistically significant differences, but both were superior to the control group in reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and grammatical structures. It took 2 years to see significant differences between control and experimental groups on writing. But then they were really significant.
Also amazing was that experimental students did better than the national averages on tests of other academic subjects (including L1). The suggested explanation: due to literacy transfer from L2 to L1 or a better positive attitude to school. On that national exam, the shared reading group was superior and there is mention that if it weren’t for the non-Fijan students, then the shared reading group would have also been superior on the studies’ measures of English. I didn’t completely understand that. There is also this:
“While the two book-based methods showed parallel gains in many cases, a class-by-class analysis revealed that those teachers who used the Shared Book method as we suggested, gained spectacular results, well ahead of the Silent Reading group averages. And the one control group, whose teacher read regularly to her children, showed impressive gains also.” (Elley, 1996).
Shared Book Approach (from Holdaway): “Children are introduced to the new book, in blown up format, in a shared setting, the teacher reading it aloud and discussing its pictures and story line with the class. Following several repetitions on subsequent days, the children gradually join in the reading, and after discussion of difficult words and phrases – at the point of interest – and after suitable follow up activities, they soon master the language of that story, with minimal effort or tension” (Elley, 1996).
Still, the authors suggest a conclusion only partially Krashenesque. It’s CI -> acquisition. But it’s also attention and noticing (cognitive psychology theory), namely that extensive reading gave them more fluency in focusing on the message, which freed up attentional resources to focus on form, that form which they were being taught in the rest of their normal ESL program. It is suggested that the ease and interest of the books are better for allowing extra attention to be drawn to form, an argument used to explain why immersion programs in Canada (which may consume more of students’ attention for focus on message) are less effective in developing grammatical accuracy. Krashen would not agree with this interpretation, but VanPatten would.
Remember: subjects had A LOT of input (some comprehensible) coming from their immersion school program starting in 4th grade. So, once again, the issue of “time” makes our FL situation different.
Also different may be the motivation factor. The students of these studies may be more motivated to know English than our students are motivated to know a FL. Although, I have spoken with students and the high school teacher here in Honduras who say the high school age students are not motivated to know English. One reason for lack of motivation mentioned to me, coming from the teacher: “students think it’s difficult.” (This teacher has 750 students by the way!!!).
So, shared reading and silent reading clearly rocks the house, but what we are saying is that for beginners it may be different and we may have CI strategies that throw an even better party 🙂
I agree that auditory CI is of primary importance. But what about combined auditory and visual CI? What if, from the very beginning of FL classes, students acquired with books-on-tape? Or the teacher self-subtitled? (I’ve done the latter, typing everything I and the students say, challenging classes to get higher word counts in “x” number of minutes than other classes). If you think about the difference in listening to a recording vs. listening to a live telling of the story, you’d prefer the latter every time. That’s why Beniko told me to tell my students the story when I tested them, rather than play a recording. The eye contact and facial expressions that you can make when you tell a live story make all the difference.
Still, I am not in favor of FVR for beginners when it means ONLY reading (based on my experiences). But the verdict for me is still out on the results of FV Reading AND Listening (reading and simultaneously listening to an mp3 player). Listening in this way, besides giving you 2 forms of CI, better ensures that you are reading/listening, not decoding/translating. The recordings are slow, but not slow enough to have time to let too much conscious mind impedance. It would promote fluent reading/listening. In my own classroom in the US, I would not do FVRL until middle school and only after at least 1 semester and only because I have a lot of my MovieTalks turned into Screenshot books.
The Lightbown (1989) study was of elementary-age students doing FVRandL. We’ve discussed that study on the forum. After 2-3 years, the FVRandL group out or equally performed on every measure those students in an audiolingual program. After 6 years, the audiolingual program was now demonstrating greater writing skill (although I would argue both groups sucked at writing – average lengths of 81 and 46 words from 2 control groups 50 and 45 words from experimental groups after 20 minute writing session).
Oh, another thing: When we say we need to speak SLOWER than imaginable, we need to probably include an important corollary: short sentences. If you went too slowly, then by the time you got to the end of a sentence too long (6+ words? for beginners), you may not remember the beginning of the sentence. Isn’t that one of the reasons that decoders have trouble with reading comprehension? This became clearer to me when I considered Readability formulas. You get a higher readability score for fewer syllables and shorter sentences.
Another reason some of us use FVR is to give the teacher a break. I’ll admit that I wasn’t always able to keep the TPRS train running on days when I had 6 different classes. Isn’t mental health another 2014-15 goal? So, in that respect, I don’t think we should feel guilty for doing some SSR/FVR.
I LOVE this conversation. Very relevant and timely to my current project. Briefly:
Purpose: Test FVRL program for true beginners. I’m not aware of any studies (Lightbown 2002 maybe?) that used FVR exclusively from day 1 for true beginner, elementary-age students.
Subjects: 40+ 4th-8th grade students in 1 rural private school.
Teaching method: Shared class reading/listening for completion of level 1 (8 total levels), which consists of about 140 pages of short English stories. Each student has a copy of all level 1 texts to take home.
Steps for each shared reading story: 1. Listen & Read, 2. Read only, 3. Listen only
There’s more to it than that, but I’m trying to be brief. I made a 2.5 hour training video for native Spanish teachers of EFL that I’ll upload to YouTube when I’m back in the States.
After level 1, there is a better balance between shared and independent reading, but that will also be at the teacher and class discretion. I imagine younger grades doing more shared R/L and classes with sufficient motivation doing more independent reading.
Challenges:
1. Teachers with Novice – No English proficiency.
2. Teachers with no training in teaching reading, nor any means to provide students additional help, nor do they identify students with learning disabilities.
3. Extreme poverty -> students have no access to print in L1 -> L1 literacy is very poor.
You may say: Why the heck would you try to teach a FL under those situations? Agreed. But the developing (and non/un-developing bottom billion) have “English Fever.” It can improve job opportunities. And it is mandated by government.
If I can demonstrate that FVR works and under these challenges, then I think that’s one strong win for FVR. The bar hasn’t been set very high – I did my test-retest reliability study with 11th graders from the traditional program (Cloze test had very high reliability), and the average score was 9% on what I’d consider a level 1-2 test. A good average on this Cloze Test would be 50%. Does it mean that FVR would be better than a TPRS/TCI teacher? Probably not. But it is the ONLY practical solution to providing CI given these conditions, so fingers crossed. . .
One thing I found inevitable was programming a light use of intentional vocabulary instruction. I didn’t know how else, or I didn’t trust acquisition alone, for true beginners without English competent teachers to just start reading and listening.
So, ROA of personalized class stories may be better for many reasons, one being that it is more compelling. My current thoughts on “compelling”:
I agree that compelling is an essential ingredient, since we get better engagement/attention/discipline. But I’m not sure I agree in a strong version of this hypothesis, that it is only compelling CI that is useful for acquisition. The idea is that compelling input allows us to enter “flow/the zone.” When we are in such a state we are most definitely focused on the message, not the form. I think this is what people mean when they say they have to be “forced to use only the target language,” i.e. they need to force themselves to focus on the message. It is the basis of the communicative approach as it was originally conceived (not PPP): focus on the message. What the layperson and the communicative approach confuses is being pressured to talk vs. pressured to listen.
So, it is true that compelling input guarantees acquisition, but I think we can still focus on the message when CI is only interesting, and we’d still acquire. This is probably especially true if the individual is motivated. Truly compelling input, that stuff capable of leading us to experience flow, would make acquisition motivation-independent. But I bet this high quality CI is probably rare, especially for beginners in a FL. Isn’t it the masters/experts of sports and music that express themselves in terms of being in the zone? Don’t we need to have some level of mastery before we can experience this state?
So, personalized class stories may be better because they are more compelling, but the key word is “better.” The other reading would still be good for acquisition and certainly better than a traditional method.
It is my nature to continue to explore and experiment. I will continue to try to realize, better approximate, Krashen’s theories (especially that of non-targeted CI as essential to the net hypothesis) in my classroom. Testing FVR and non-targeted CI are my 2 current interests.