Anne sent this question in today:
Hey Ben –
This discussion has probably been had on your blog and on the facebook page 100 times, but I’ve missed it, and I really want to know:
When assessing reading comprehension, how is it fair to give an A to someone who is able to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words and a B to someone who is not? How can I justify assessing something I haven’t taught? Does this not favor the readers, the more literate students (and you can read that as the more advantaged students)? FYI – I am referencing a rubric on a TPRS teacher’s site but I believe that most standard 3 (comprehension) rubrics have some element of that.
I responded:
We think the same on assessment, as we do on everything else, it seems. I don’t use the novels in general (see link below) or anything else that could trip up the slowest reader in my class. Where’s the fire to produce great readers when the only thing that can do that – according to the research – is time and not intellectual prowess.
In order to keep the playing field level in my reading classroom, I only assess on stories that they have written in class together. That is what we do in level one anyway – we can branch out to really simple readers at the upper levels as per my idea of always “reading down” as expressed in points 7, 13 and 33 of this article:
https://benslavic.com/blog/why-i-prefer-ntci/
I don’t believe in “challenging them” (the term is riddled with hubris). Aren’t they challenged enough in life? Like all we need to do to realize how hard reading can be is to try to read some Russian or Muskogee and we will realize instantly how incredibly hard it is to read in a foreign language UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THEY HAVE HAD THE REQUISITE HOURS OF AUDITORY AND SIMPLE READING INPUT AND NOT BEFORE.
What most of those rubrics and assessment charts do is, in my view, morally wrong. They have taken rubrics from English classrooms related to reading and applied it to foreign languages. But when English is their first language and they have heard so many years of it, have built up such a rich foundation of unconscious knowledge/vocabulary, none of which can even be measured, reading is a lot easier for them and it is justifiable to rank kids on ability to infer, etc.
But what applies to reading in a first language doesn’t apply to reading in a second language. When we ask them to do things like make inferences in a foreign language where they have no such rich store of auditory knowledge, only a few can do it and we “lose” our classes and wonder why and there we go again favoring the privileged.
The thing is that the more robotic teachers who went into our field because they themselves as students were “challenged” and were the ones who were able to do it (probably for the same reasons you identify in your question that they were advantaged) should be taken out back by the woodshed and taught a lesson that you don’t take vulnerable readers and rate them and judge them and parse out what they can do on a rubric.
Just let the kids read. That is why I changed my approach when I was doing TPRS more towards pure Krashen with the Free Choice Reading (FCR) to start class, the difference with FVR/SSR being that in FCR the kids choose whatever they want to read and in no way are made accountable for it.
Of course I could be wrong on that, we each have our own opinion, and maybe the teachers who judge the slower readers who lag behind with lower grades are right. But I don’t think so. My position exactly reflects Krashen’s research, theirs not so much.
As long as language teachers set themselves up as judge and jury of defenseless children, it will still suck for them.
And we thought the rubrics were our friends, come to replace the 100 point scale, and now we see that they also, as well as the dinosaur 100 point scale, are misused.
Of course, few in our profession wish to hear this point of view. It is one of love and compassion and gentleness and patience and honoring the space the kids occupies that day in their already-so-difficult lives. Like everything else in languages, reading skills EMERGE instead of being branded.
This discussion makes me think of the song below because we think they are right handed and they are left handed with reading and we make them in their left-handedness do right hand things, which is just mean:
In reading and in the auditory work as discussed in ANATS I make sure that it is so simple that everyone can read it with no tricks or requirements to infer, and the rubrics are that simple as well. I can’t infer anything in Muskogee. Again, we only test on things that we have created together. You are so right about this.
Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/the-pedagogy-of-poverty/