What is Graded Reading?
Graded Reading refers to texts that have been adapted or 'graded' to suit the comprehension level of the intended reader. Examples include stories that have been simplified for children, or in the EFL classroom, material that has been written to enable the student of English to read material suitable for his or her level of English ability.
The material can be graded (i.e., simplified) according to the use of high frequency vocabulary rather than vocabulary a native speaker might use; simplified phrasing or sentence structure; the use of illustrations; and so on.
What's the difference between Extensive Reading and Graded Reading?
Extensive Reading is often called Graded Reading and vice versa, but there are some important distinctions between the two.
Graded Reading uses specially adapted materials while Extensive Reading can, but need not do so. A single paragraph could be considered 'Graded' if it has been adapted to teach a specific point of grammar, but it would not be considered 'Extensive'.
Extensive Reading refers primarily to the reading of longer texts for enjoyment or to acquire information. It's what native speakers do when they read a newspaper or novel, but in the EFL classroom, a key aim is to improve reading fluency.
What's Reading Fluency?
A learner beginning to read in a second language starts by looking at each letter of each word to decode the word, and keeps each word in working memory while the next word is processed. By the time the learner gets to the end of the line, the first word may have been forgotten and very little meaning of the text is retained. As the reader's ability improves, she can decode words faster and remember earlier words more easily. She moves from the word by word level of decoding to the processing of chunks of text -- short phrases or "ideas."
This is a vital stage in the learner's development because she is no longer working with words; she is working with ideas. At this level she can make more effective use of background information about the topic to fill in non-comprehended parts of the text. For example, she can begin to guess the meaning of individual words that she doesn't understand from the context of those around the new word. She also becomes familiar with linking devices and other techniques used to form whole, integrated texts.
But of course, if the text that the student is attempting to read is simply too difficult for her to understand, this shift from the word level to the idea level will not occur. And if a student is asked only to decode texts that are too difficult for her through intensive study of them, then her eye is not receiving sufficient practice at moving smoothly over the page to learn to move up to the "ideas" level. She will remain bogged down in the decoding of the linguistic puzzle that is her text, in many cases, a frustrating and demoralizing experience.
How does one tell whether students are reading intensively or extensively? It's easy. Are they using a dictionary? Is the text they are reading covered with notes and translations? If the answer is "yes," then they are trying to decode the text and are reading intensively. Too much of this kind of work does not allow readers to develop fast and fluent eye movements that bounce along the text with each idea or proposition. Unfortunately, texts well above a learner's reading level are what most of our students only ever learn to read -- the kind of passages which appear on language tests.
A better way, and the aim of extensive graded readers such as those featured on this website, is to motivate students to read a great deal of material at a level they can understand, making this shift from the ability to read individual words to the 'ideas' level. By reading enough material at one level to develop sufficient fluency and other forms of linguistic knowledge to enable them to move to a higher level, students progress gradually towards a point where they can deal with native level texts fluently.
Extensive Graded Reading would seem to be the answer!
All Oxford Graded Reading series have been designed to provide this progression, and enable students to read extensively at a level that suits them. At the lower levels, this means grading the language used to tell highly motivating, interesting and enjoyable stories. At advanced levels, as students attempt to read texts designed for native speakers, other kinds of support such as on-the-page vocabulary definitions, are still provided to maintain motivation and enable students to read without too many obstacles.
This page has been adapted from an article by Rob Waring of Seishin Notre Dame University originally published in the May 1997 edition of The Language Teacher.
|
