From Reader to Reading Teacher by Jo Ann Aebersold and Mary Lee Field

Subtitle: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classrooms

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          When I first started teaching in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program at my school, a copy of this book was given to all the EAP teachers by the school director.  “Now that you’re teaching EAP, this book will tell you about the leap I expect you to make,” she told us.

            I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that this book lingered unread on my bookshelf for quite some time after that, but I did eventually get around to reading it, and so here is my review.

The Review

          If it’s not already obvious from the title and the cover, the first point to be made about this book is that it’s not designed to be pleasure reading.  (One of my co-workers complained that this book kept putting him to sleep, but the technical reading for any profession can usually be a bit dry, and TESOL is no exception.)  The criteria for evaluating a book like this is:

            1) Did it contain useful ideas?

            and 2) Were those ideas presented in a straight forward, easy to understand manner?

            And the answers are: yes, and yes.  So I judge the book a success.  Pleasure reading it is not, but I picked up a number of good ideas from this book for planning reading lessons, and I’m glad I read it.

            The book is designed to be used as a text book in a teacher training classroom, and there are a number of exercises and group discussion questions scattered throughout.  In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I just read the book straight through, and didn’t complete, most of the exercises and activities.  (If you want to say that I didn’t fully complete this book the way the author’s intended, I won’t argue.)

            As I read, a few things caught my attention, which I’ll detail more below:

1997 versus 2013

          This book was published back in 1997, so admittedly it’s not the most recent book on the subject.

            Given how quickly theories change in the field of Second Language Acquisition, I suspect some of the book is already out of date, although I’m not knowledgeable enough in the literature to pinpoint exactly what.

            One of the things that is easily noticeable, however, is how much technology has changed.

            For example: “All of the examples given here of extensive and intensive reading courses assume a very high level of L2/FL proficiency. It is easier to use an extensive approach when the students have easy access to L2/FL texts in the culture at large.  It is, however, possible to design an extensive reading course for students at intermediate or high intermediate levels of L2/FL proficiency; it requires a specialized library in the students’ classroom, or the school, or the community, and some adjustments in the follow-up tasks that students do. Students need to have access to texts that are within their language proficiency range…” (p. 46)

           

            This was obviously written in the pre-Internet days.  (Or at least, when the Internet was still in its infancy).  At my school, the students do almost all of their reading off of the Internet.  The teacher still needs to be involved in helping to guide the students to readings that are appropriate for their level, but there is certainly no need to create a specialized library in the classroom.

            Another way in which technology has changed things is on-line learning tools like Moodle (W).  Instead of keeping reading journals in an old-fashioned notebook (as the authors of this book recommend), my EAP students now do all their reading journals on the Moodle.  This is very useful because it allows me to check it at any time, and it also allows their classmates to see and comment on each other’s reading journals.

Pre-Reading Strategies

          Just out of curiosity, how many of you consciously do pre-reading strategies before you read something in your native language? 

            In my case, I’d say almost never.  I usually just plunge right into an article or book and read each sentence as it comes.

            The authors of this book, however, assert that superior readers always employ pre-reading strategies even in their native language, such as skimming over the headings of each chapter and making predictions before they begin reading.

            Do people actually do this in real life, or is this just pure TESOL theory?  Am I the odd one out for not doing this?  Let me know in the comments section what you think.

            Perhaps because of my personal bias, I am somewhat resistant to the idea of teaching students pre-reading strategies like skimming and scanning.  To me, it spoils the idea of reading.  Obviously this is more of an issue with novels, when you don’t want to spoil the ending.  But even for newspaper or magazine articles, editorials or essays, there is a certain pleasure in just following the ideas at the pace the author chooses to develop them.  Skimming the article beforehand seems to rob the reader of this pleasure.

            I can understand teaching skimming and scanning in test situations when the student is under time pressure, but I’m more resistant to teaching it as a general lifelong reading skill, which is what the authors advocate in this book.

           

            The way I reconciled myself somewhat to the idea was by remembering my own experience reading in a foreign language—Japanese.  Whenever I was reading something in Japanese, I was always very nervous because my comprehension was tenuous.  Even if I was understanding everything so far, I never knew what lay ahead in the next sentence.  And often all it took was one confusing sentence, or one unknown word, to completely de-rail me and cause me to lose the entire meaning of everything that followed.

            Remembering this experience, I began to see how useful it might be in a foreign language to skim and scan over an unfamiliar text before reading it.  That way even if one sentence completely throws you off, you still have a general idea of where the article is supposed to be heading, and you can get back on track a lot easier.

            So, especially for more difficult texts, I can see where it might be useful for the students to skim it first before they do a detailed reading.

           

            …Assuming, that is, that the students need to be doing difficult readings.

            In recent years, many people have been arguing that the best way to get students to learn English is to get them into the habit of reading for pleasure, and this means steering students away from more difficult texts and towards reading that they can do easily without a lot of pre-reading skimming and predictions strategy. 

            One of the senior teacher’s at my school is a big advocate of this approach.  “We really ruin the fun of reading with all these pre-reading strategies and comprehension questions,” he told me.  “Instead we should just try to get students to enjoy reading simple texts that they can easily understand.”

            [I believe this movement (and a lot of the literature associated with it) has become more popular in the last 10 years, after the publication of this book.  Although to be fair to the authors, in their section on extensive reading, they do strongly advocate keeping the reading materials within the students’ range to avoid frustration.]

            At any rate, sometimes the curriculum dictates the students have to work through advanced texts whether the teacher likes it or not.  In my EAP classes, the students have to read advanced texts which is often beyond their level, and the pre-reading strategies out-lined in this book have been useful to me in helping to set up those readings.

Other Notes

* From page 135: “Comprehending a text is different from recalling it.  Memory in an L2 can be significantly shorter than in the L1.”

            This is a good reminder to me that just because students don’t remember the text perfectly, it doesn’t necessarily mean they couldn’t understand it.

* In talking about the criteria for selecting texts, the authors write: “When the teacher has some autonomy in the selection of literary texts for the L2/FL classroom, two criteria that will shape the selection are (1) the culture content of the works and (2) the relevance of the works to the lives of the students in the class. Cultural content that is too implicit, as in the novels A Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn, may so complicate the students’ access to comprehension that the reading becomes a chore rather than a pleasure.”

            Interestingly, I think they’re right on the main idea here, but possibly wrong on the example.

            A Catcher in the Rye was translated into Japanese by Haruki Murakami in 2006 and became a big hit in Japan, proving that the book may have more universal cross-cultural appeal than we give it credit for (of course this was also after the publication date of this book).

            I’m nitpicking, I know, but it’s worth pointing out that sometimes you just never know what might or might not appeal across cultural lines.

Link of the Day
How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces that Threaten Our Existence
And also--More Japanese music on youtube!
I think I like this Japanese cover of Waist Deep in the Big Muddy better than the original.  It seems to have more energy.  (For those who don't understand Japanese, it's a pretty direct translation of the original lyrics.)