
Mark Bartholomew has worked in education as a teacher, manager, and consultant for thirty years, in secondary, tertiary and vocational education, and in many parts of the world. He is currently in Istanbul. Mark is also the co-founder of the free website to encourage (young or not so young) adult students to enjoy reading in English. It's www.readlistenlearn.net.

Now, let's look at each of these in turn.
Teachers often encourage - and sometimes even force - students to read specific works by great authors. I sympathise with these teachers as I, personally, enjoy Dickens and Flaubert, for example, and can't imagine ever picking up a book about zombies. But the fact is that that's me. I cannot dictate to others what they should enjoy reading. If we want our students to read outside the curriculum, we need to let them choose their own reading preferences, whether these are science fantasy or romance or sport, to name but a few. So, away with making them read literature with a capital L! Besides, it's the quantity of what's read, rather than the quality, which determines the effectiveness of reading as an aide to learning a second language.

Next, there is a time and place to analyse grammar and use texts for the exploration of difficult terms. But using books (whether Internet-based or the printed page) that we want students to appreciate as tools for teaching grammar and vocab is wrong. Using a fovourite book as a means of refining their use of relative clauses (to paraphrase Stephen Krashen) is unlikely to motivate them to approach reading with joy or excitement. How often do we as teachers ask our classes to answer questions, like "What does 'those' in line 19 refer to?"

Hopefully, all teachers see reading as good. Books can become our companions in difficult times. They can help us escape into new and strange worlds. They can uplift our spirits and show us the best in others and in ourselves. Nevertheless, for all this to happen, we must change the ways we approach reading and treat it as a goal - not as a means to an end, like good exam results or a way to teach grammar.
In my next post, I will look at ways in which teachers can get students to start reading for pleasure. In the meantime, please do check out my website www.readlistenlearn.net, which offers reading texts on everything from meat-eating plants to voodoo, the history of science to adapted stories by Tolstoy.
The ideas in this post are not mine alone but have been garnered primarily from:
Stephen Krashen's 'The Power of Reading' (2nd ed. 2006)
Julian Bamford and Richard Day: 'Extensive Reading in the 2nd Language Classroom' (1998)
For evidence for some of my ideas, please refer to these seminal works.
Hi Everyone!
ReplyDeleteFirst, thanks to Mahmoud for the effusive introduction.
If anyone wants more information on the website features - such as monitoring student reading at home - please let me know. My email is bartholomew.mark@gmail.com
Hope you like the article. I will post next week again.
Best,
Mark
Thanks Mark for your valuable contribution to the blog.
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