We really need graded readers

Some of you will recall the old, widely used Bibliobus collection of French readers for use from Y7 to Y9. If you don’t, these were box sets of colour-coded readers, graded by level, richly illustrated, on a wide range of topics. each box contained, from memory, around 50 stories or non-fiction texts. My friend Steve Glover of dolanguages.com reminded me the other day that he had a hand in the writing a few of them. Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell did illustrations for some.

It was no doubt the cost of printing such a colourful and rich resource which led to their demise. In the hands of young readers they became scruffy within a few years and were costly to replace at nearly £100 a box. In addition, departments must feel they don’t have the time to allocate to quiet reading. Not to mention the fact that teachers want to feel busy! I recall one charming young Y7 girl saying to me on one occasion: “Do you get bored as we just read on our own?”

I used the readers withY7 and Y8 classes, once a week for a period of several weeks each year. The cleverly written, well illustrated material meant that the content was easy enough to understand, and students could move through the different levels at their own pace. Each box contained sets of different colour-coded booklets and pupils could move up from easier to harder as they wished. Vocabulary glosses were provided.

We were lucky to have four timetabled slots a week, so I felt it was worth allocating a lesson a week over about eight weeks to free reading. (It was also a welcome rest for me - don’t knock it!)

So called free voluntary reading or “sustained silent reading” is recommended for language acquisition, notably by Stephen Krashen, who in recent years has made it a major focus. The reading material can reinforce previously learned language and create the conditions for implicit learning to occur (“picking up” the language). In addition, many of the booklets contained interesting cultural content.

To my knowledge, there has never been a real successor to Bibliobus - and I’m talking about the 1990s here. Please comment below if I am in error! Story books for young French readers don’t cut the mustard since the vocabulary can be too obscure and the past historic tense is not a neat fit with the needs if our learners. Other collections I have seen aren't carefully graded for difficulty enough or as rich in content. The cost of writing and printing similar books may, stress may, be prohibitive. But I wonder if there is scope for an online equivalent. You would still need a good deal of writing skill and knowledge of the UK syllabuses, as well as high quality illustrations. But going online would take printing cost and degradation out of the equation.

We just need someone to do it!

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought. ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g

Anonymous6 February 2021 at 09:32
I totally agree with you. I remember Bibliobus with great fondness, and would love to see a digital equivalent. The idea that teachers need to be in performance mode at all times is, as you say, more about the pressure felt by them to be seen to be doing and gathering evidence than what is needful for the students. Prior to this lockdown I began to implement timed periods of silence for my classes that I stressed to students was for them, not for me, to allow them time and headspace to process our lively language acquisition activities. It was beginning to work a treat! So yes to reading, yes to structured quiet and yes to a new generation of Bibliobus!
Unknown14 February 2021 at 07:23
I have looked hard too and only found a few sporadic attempts by various people at creating a new comprehensive set, and I am seriously considering doing it myself in the very near future. I am trying to get hold of the Bibliobus series but no luck so far! Any tips?
Unknown17 January 2022 at 01:24
I'm not sure if this will fit the criteria, but I've been using Duolinguo with my daughter at home and there are stories available on there. They're very short (we're only on the first level so far) but there are some nice comprehension checkpoints and I would imagine that, knowing how Duolinguo works, the level with become more challenging.

Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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