"The secret of reading"

In his article titled "The secret of reading", Philip Prowse treats the benefits of extensive reading, which means reading for pleasure as much as possible, and illustrates his opinion with a couple research studies that were carried out on this subject.

The first source he mentions is the review written by Stephen Krashen, where he summarizes different studies on the benefits of reading when learning a first language, a mother tongue. The results of these researches show that 93% of those who just read did better than the ones who received traditional reading comprehension lessons, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it because when students are forced to read and lack interest they tend to avoid it as much as they possibly can whereas the ones who actually enjoy reading show a great motivation towards it and they keep on reading whenever they find the time and, therefore, they also keep improving in their language skills.

Even though this specific research was focused on a first language acquisition, the situation is pretty much the same when trying to learn a foreign language.

For instance, In Fiji, some studies on Primary school pupils portray that the results of the students who read for pleasure just for 20-30 minutes a day and the ones who discussed the books with the teacher clearly outdid the results of the rest of the class in the three major categories that are typically tested at schools: reading comprehension, writing and grammar. And the same happened in a similar study carried out in Singapore, where the kids in the experimental classes who were encouraged to read also got better results at every single language skill as well as learning the language faster than the rest.

Prowse also mentions an important project that was done at the Secondary school stage: the project PASSES. For this experiment, 40 of the weakest schools in the country were taken into consideration and each of them followed the same program for 5 years: apart from using the school textbooks, the children read for 20 minutes a day, had an extensive reading lesson per week and also talked about the books they read, books that they could take home to read on their own, in their own free time and at their own pace. After these 5 years, the language level of these schools was assessed to discover that they were no longer so weak, but that their results were actually higher than the national average. Thanks to reading, pupils were able to widen their vocabulary, improve their grammar and increase their fluency in speaking.

Finally, in relation to adult learners, Prowse points out a study based on L1 vocabulary acquisition called “Clockwork Orange Study”. This experiment consisted on having some adults read a copy of the novel “A Clockwork Orange” in order to take a comprehension test and perform a literary discussion afterwards. However, instead of that, the test was actually a vocabulary test on the invented slang called “nadsat” that can be found in the book. The average grade of these tests was a 76%, which proves that these adults had learnt a great amount of new words only by context and without any effort.

It is also explained that others have tried to replicate this experiment in the context of foreign language acquisition although the results have not been as successful. Nonetheless, I think we can all agree that we have all learnt new vocabulary at some extent just by reading, which means that, even though the results are not the same as in the context of first language learning, reading is still a good way to improve our lexicon.

After explaining the success of the previous researches, Prowse presents the following dilemma: how can we, as teachers, make our students read in English especially when they don’t even do it in their own mother tongue?

It is evident that the best way of improving their level of English is having them read as many books as possible and the first think that must be taken into account for this purpose is motivation. Students need to understand the benefits of reading and we have to encourage them to take books home to read calmly.

Besides, they should be able to choose what to read in order to make sure that the experience would be pleasant and exciting. It doesn’t really matter if the level of the book is above the student’s ability because they would always enjoy reading it if they like its genre or its story. However, if kids are given a book they hate, they would find the experience tedious even if the level of the book is suitable with their linguistic skills.

To help them choose a suitable book, Prowse proposed for them to read the title and the back of the book in order to identify the kind of book and to see if the plot can be interesting for them or not. Another strategy I believe they can use is to search on the internet for different books of their favourite genre and also look at the plot to make sure they can enjoy it. Moreover, it is important to let students know that, if they don’t like the book they have chosen, they can leave it and choose another one without any repercussions.

The author of this article also puts forward the idea of a class library, which I find very interesting. Having several books at school to choose from facilitates the reading task to the students because they don’t need to waste their time at the library looking for a suitable book. Bringing some options to class saves lots of time. Moreover, they can always ask their classmates about which books they have enjoyed the most and these recommendations will always be more useful than a teacher’s suggestion because classmates are more likely to share interest for the same books. Prowse’s advice is to put a card inside the books so that children can write brief comments about each of them or to use opinion forms and have the students rate the books with grades from 1 to 5.

Both ideas are excellent to have everyone’s opinion in paper and at hand at all times but, knowing that students don’t usually like to write about the books, I believe that an activity that can be quite beneficial is a class discussion. For a while in class, the students who like the same genres can join and create discussion groups to share their opinions and recommendations with their peers. I think this would be a more dynamic and much more communicative way to collect information about the books.

And what are the things that mustn’t be done if we really want to encourage reading?

First of all, it is important not to allow the use of dictionaries. The new vocabulary that children may encounter is often repeated along the book and they need to try to deduce the meaning by the context, since it’s the best way of acquiring new vocabulary. If they interrupt the story to look for the meaning of a word, they can easily forget wat was happening and that would be counterproductive. What I would do as student to avoid the use of dictionaries is to underline the new vocabulary and try to guess its meaning through the context of the story but, if that is not enough, I would wait until I finished the whole book to look for those new words at the dictionary. 

Previously we referred to the fact that students don’t like to write summaries about the books and, in the same way, they hate being tested about them. If they know they have to do an exam or a test after finishing a book, they certainly won’t feel the urge to read again. They need to read for pleasure, and any kind of pressure (including reading aloud in front of the entice class) just stands in the way of that. Anyway, we will be able to see a quick progress in the English language from those who actually read many books.

After reading this article, we come to the conclusion that “reading is a matter of enjoyment”, as the author says. Our role as teacher is merely to offer students a wide selection of books to choose from in order to facilitate their access to reading but, after that, we must get out of their way and let them read at their own pace and with no pressures because, otherwise, we will only discourage them from keeping on reading.