Teaching Reading for Pleasure in the 1990s

 Today I was looking for my old OHP transparencies in a box of teaching resources from the 1990s at the back of a cupboard. I didn't find them. But I did find Ann Swarbrick's 1998 CILT Pathfinder on More Reading for Pleasure in a Foreign Language. In it, Ann mentions some resources I made for reading sets of cards that came with French magazines. And in same box, as well as the book, I found the cards, the resources, and some examples of pupils' work. The pupils now will be in their late 30s.

We need to think back to the 1990s. For resources we were still dependent on textbooks, sets of graded readers, or resources brought back from holidays in France. We didn't have the internet as a resource, and photocopying was black and white only and limited.

Reading for Pleasure or Reading for Information was encouraged. With schools investing in things like Bibliobus for pupils to work their way through graded readers. I was not sure that the time was always well spent, beyond the value of an encounter with a book in a foreign language as an interesting artefact. I think that many of the pupils were not reading at all.

With one authentic text, it is possible to create a resource that guides pupils through, helping them read and extract information and then starting to unlock sentence structure and learn new words. I've written here about how I still do this today with online newspaper articles. With a set of reading books, all different, there were no resources to guide the pupils through.

What I wanted to do was to take a set of cards that came with a magazine, and make a resource that was specific to that set of cards, but generic in that the resource helped you read any of the cards in the set. A step away from dependence on specific guidance for the text you were reading, towards strategies that could be deployed for any of the cards in the set. Trying to develop reading strategies that pupils could use more and more independently.

Here is the generic reading guide to go with a set of football cards from a French sports magazine. It gave pupils a series of tasks to go through with whichever card they picked. And which they could then use to work through a series of cards on different players. The more cards they tackled, the more independent they could be of the resource, and the more confident that they could pick up a card and find information for themselves. And along the way meet and deal with unknown language.

One of the ideas was that existing cultural knowledge was important for being able to engage with the text. So as well as football, I had cards on cooking, music, engineering projects and a guide to attractions in the East of England.

You can click on the resource to see it properly or zoom in if you are on a phone or tablet.

Here are some of the others, with examples of the notes pupils took as they read some of the cards.

The fashion at the moment is not to believe in Reading Skills. Ofsted have said in their recent research review on languages that reading is done by decoding word by word based on known words and grammar.

I am certainly not in favour of pupils pretending to read, or not being able to access what something means. But it is possible to teach and practise the skills of reading where the interplay between understanding meaning and understanding the words is a more complex process of positive feedback between the two. In the work I am now doing with a class novel in French for Year 8, we are trying to operate in that zone where we return to a passage we have worked on previously, so pupils remember enough to make it comprehensible, but still have to process the reading to access the meaning. The unconscious processes of language acquisition come from interaction with language and with meaning as well as through deliberate memorisation of words and concepts.