‘We were never born to read’
The title of this entry is the first sentence in Chapter 1 of Maryanne Wolf’s book Proust and the Squid (2007). This is a very punchy line and I remember first hearing it in Philip Prowse’s presentation at IATEFL in 2009.
Ironically enough my first encounter with the sentence was not through reading, but through listening.
Wolf’s traces back the development of reading throughout human evolution and analyses how our brains learnt how to read, identifying some of the factors that transformed us into reading animals. However, being able to read does not necessarily transforms an indivudual into a reader. The question that has really been at the back of my mind for quite a long time is ‘What makes us readers?’ What mysterious force drives a person to spend hours and hours over the pages of a book without any apparent reward and most of the time without any clear objective? What makes a person derive enjoyment from such a quite lonely and sedentary activity? What is perhaps even more interesting, why some people seem apparently immune to the ‘reading bug’ that infects some of us, compulsive readers? It’s a mystery!
Last term I asked my PhD EAP students how many non-academic books they had read in the last 12 months. Two of them answered 1 or 2 – the other 16 had read none. Some of them had watched one or two of the Harry Potter films and had watched the Lord of the Rings but none had got near a printed version of either. When I ask my ELT trainee teachers the same question, the results are usually not very different and the reason for that is usually ‘lack of time” because, you know, teachers are always ‘very busy people’. Point taken. However, if you really enjoy something you usually find a couple of minutes in your busy schedule to do it, whatever it is, don’t you? I strongly suspect that the reason for not having time to read for pleasure is that, for some people, reading is not exactly a pleasant activity.
My own research involves the impact reading and discussing literature may have on English language teachers’ professional development. I’m on a quest. I have far more questions than answers! That is why I have decided to use my blog space here at TE to reflect on such questions and share with others some of the things I may find in my readings on the field. I also hope that some of you who are interested in the same issues would engage in a dialogue about them.
Wolf, M. (2007) Proust and The Squid. Cambridge: Icon
Extensive reading
I have just received an email from Ana Laura Gonzalez Gonzalez in Mexico asking this question:
I am curious about what you think towards Extensive Reading.It is correct to use Extensive Reading in TBL classes?If you answer is positive, how would you link the Extensive Reading practice to the TBL?
This was my reply:
If you want to finds out more about extensive reading I suggest you take a look atteachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/extensive-readingYou could then search the site for more on ‘extensive reading’.Provided the reading is well chosen it is very much in line with the aims and principler of TBL. You need to identify reading which is at an appropriate level for your learners and which treats topics of interest or provides stories which appeal to them. If you can do this learners will be processing language for meaning and there is a definite outcome in the form of the information they have acquired or the enjoyment they have experienced.Another important feature of extensive reading is that it exposes learners to a lot of varied language. This again is in common with TBL which exphasises the importance of exposure and variety of language rather than controlled input.
There are a number of techniques which rest on the same assumptions as TBT. One of them is process writing. You can find an introduction to process writing in Graham Henry article at:
teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/approaches-process-writing
Graham shows how:
Process writing is a move away from students writing to test their language towards the communication of ideas, feelings and experiences.
In other words it makes meaning a priority in the same way as TBL. He also demonstrates the cooperative nature of process writing, showing how it involves learners working together to develop ideas and put them into texts. And of course this coperation involves genuine communication.
So Ana Laura’s question was really useful for me. It started a train of thought which led me to process writing and made me think about how TBL relates to other techniques and approaches.
