Clay Burell's Library tagged reading →  View Popular

One of the reform movement's founding documents is Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools, by Lou Gerstner, chairman of IBM. Gerstner describes schoolchildren as human capital, teachers as sellers in a marketplace and the public school system as a monopoly. Predictably, CEOs bring to education reform CEO rhetoric: stringent, intolerant of failure, even punitive--hence the word "sanction," as if some schools had been turning away weapons inspectors.

Nowhere has this orientation been more frank than in George W. Bush's policies, first as Texas governor and now as President. When he invited a group of "education leaders" to join him for his first day in the White House, the guest list was dominated by Fortune 500 CEOs. One, Harold McGraw, the publishing scion and current chairman of McGraw-Hill, summed up: "It's a great day for education, because we now have substantial alignment among all the key constituents--the public, the education community, business and political leaders--that results matter."

The phrase "results matter," like the popular buzzwords "accountability" and "standards," means one thing: more standardized testing. The Business Roundtable, an organization of powerful CEOs (including Gerstner) intensely focused on education issues, admits in one position paper that "voices of opposition to these policies...emanate from parents and teachers." No matter: Testing is a "bedrock principle" for the Roundtable, and the "leadership and credibility of the business community is needed" to make sure standardized testing becomes a reality.

Is the pattern repeating itself at the national level? On the day he assumed the White House--the day he invited Harold McGraw III into his office--Bush called on Congress to help him eliminate the nation's "reading deficit" by implementing the "findings of years of scientific research on reading." Bush would loosen the purse strings on one condition: Instructional practices must be "scientifically based."

To the literacy cognoscenti, the meaning was clear: Classrooms must follow the conclusions of the National Reading Panel, a blue-ribbon panel assembled by Congress in the late 1990s to determine the "status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read." Thanks to the NRP report, the phrase "scientifically based reading instruction" appears dozens of times in the new federal reading legislation. Education Secretary Paige recently explained in a speech before reading educators, "The National Reading Panel screened more than 100,000 studies of reading and...found that the most effective course of reading instruction includes explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, [and] phonics."

Several critics have emerged with key questions about the NRP report. To begin with, the 100,000 figure is wildly misleading. The central findings--those most likely to guide school practices, and thus their purchase of textbooks--involved only thirty-eight studies. Coles argues that those studies are often themselves of questionable relevance. On the decisive question of whether phonics instruction has an impact on reading comprehension, for example, the panel cited just three studies supporting a significant boost: one conducted in Spain, one in Finland and one comparing phonics to placing words and pictures into categories--as Coles puts it, in effect comparing phonics to "no instruction at all." Coles found the NRP report to be consistently slanted in favor of the skills-based, phonics approach. Another researcher, Stephen Krashen of the University of Southern California, complains that the report misrepresents his research and is rife with errors.

Nonetheless, the NRP report was sold to the public as a conclusive end to the so-called Reading Wars. It was presented to educators across the country, and reported by the media, as the triumph of disinterested science, largely by means of a thirty-page media-friendly summary and viewer-friendly video. Both are in lieu of a forbidding "Reports of the Subgroups," which weighs in at a media-repellent 600 pages.

Elaine Garan, an education professor at California State University, Fresno, has parsed through all three. She believes there are wide discrepancies between what was reported to the public and what the panel actually found. Most blatantly, the summary proclaimed that "systematic phonics instruction produces significant benefits for students in kindergarten through sixth grade," while the report itself said, "There were insufficient data to draw any conclusions about the effects of phonics instruction with normally developing readers above first grade."

According to one panel member, there is a simple explanation for the discrepancy: Widmeyer Communications, the powerful Washington, DC, public relations firm hired by the government to promote the panel's work. Widmeyer had represented McGraw-Hill's flagship literacy product Open Court during the Texas literacy drive, and now it counts McGraw-Hill and the Business Roundtable among its most prominent clients. "They wrote the introduction to the final report," says NRP member Joanne Yatvin. "And they wrote the summary, and prepared the video, and did the press releases."

Introduction

A widely recognized problem faced by learners throughout
the ESL/EFL world is that of slow reading (Hamp-Lyons 1983; Cooper 1984).
This has often been linked with classroom methodology in reading lessons,
particularly where such lessons focus on language development rather
than reading per se. A number of specialists have commented on a common
practice in intensive reading lessons, where texts are often treated
as vehicles for the presentation, practice, manipulation, and consolidation
of language points, rather than the encouragement of reading itself
(Nuttall 1982:20; Alderson & Urquhart 1984:246-247; Bartram &
Parry 1989:7; Hyland 1990:14; Susser & Robb 1990:161-162).

Using the library

Students can check out of the library up to two books at any one time at the start
of the term; this is subsequently increased to three books later in the term after
their reading speed has picked up. To check out a book, students write the title,
code and date checked out on an individual A4 reading record sheet, as well as indicate
the number of pages in the book.

Book reports

Students can be asked to write summaries and reports about the books that they read.
This can be done as a regular activity, or left to the end of term. There are many
possibilities here for integrating the skills further: see Greenwood 1992 and Hedge
1984 for further suggestions. On the one hand, such reports provide one assessment
tool for the teacher; on the other hand, they indirectly enable the students to
review and recycle key ideas and vocabulary from what they read.

Mid-term reports

It is important to be able to determine how students are coping, and which students
may be in need of extra guidance. This can be done through collecting in mid-term
reading reports. Students who are below a cumulative total of 250 pages by the end
of May will probably have difficulty in reaching the term goal. With these students, I
usually arrange group tutorials, where we review together what each person has been
doing; discuss ways to improve reading speed and time management; plan how many pages
a week each student is going to try and read from then until the end of term. Part of
an example mid-term reading report is reproduced below:

Show in the graph the total number of pages that you have read each week:

Figure 1 Example mid-term reading report rubric

End-of-term self-assessments

This is a one-page report written by the students in response to the following questions:

1. What is the total number of pages that you have read this term?

2. What was the most interesting book that you read? Why?

3. How do you think your reading has changed this term?

4. What are your personal goals from now on?

5. What are your reading goals from now on?