![]() ![]() Second: The tests for each individual’s reading level are highly unreliable.First: The reading level of texts has the veneer of science but is in fact highly inaccurate.Meanwhile, psychologists and authors of “The Psychology of Reading”, Paula Schwanenflugel and Nancy Knapp wrote in Psychology Today about the problems with relying too heavily on reading level charts to make decisions about reading content for kids. Going from zero Chinese to powering through a Chinese novel in just over 2 years really proved the power of interest as a motivator!Īfter looking closely at the research on Reading Levels, Timothy Shanahan (Founding Director of The Center for Literacy, University of Illinois, Chicago), who started his teaching career as a proponent of reading level charts, discovered that the evidence that matching reading text levels to kids’ reading abilities produces better results just doesn’t hold water. She was so taken with the story that she wanted to see how the series diverged from the original text. This happened especially with Zijin Chen’s 2014 novel, Bad Kid ( 坏小孩), after she was enthralled by its TV adaptation. This usually prompted her to seek either my or her tutor’s help to figure out the story. The Chinese equivalents of the books she was reading in English (her favourite book then was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North) were way beyond her abilities.īut if the premise or plot elements of the Chinese books intrigued her, we would stoke her interest. YB had to join a 3rd grade Taiwanese classroom, where her reading and writing level in Chinese was absolutely zero. We witnessed the efficacy of interest when we moved from New York to Taiwan. In fact, in the 2nd grade, her English teacher let YB get books from the baskets in 3rd and 4th grade classrooms because she had well surpassed the reading levels in her own class. Shouldn’t we be celebrating the fact that a child is willing to grapple with challenging texts out of interest?īy this time, YB was already reading series like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials-books that were definitely not in the various reading levels baskets in her class. Telling a child they can only read according to a Reading Levels Chart is unnecessarily restrictive. Linguistic levels are also ultimately an arbitrary construct they have some limited uses, but to elevate their importance seems like putting the cart before the horse. Then there are books, like The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, that YB would return to even though she was well past its “reading level”, because she liked the rhythm, rhyme, witty structure and illustrations. We thought of books like The Snowman by Raymond Briggs which doesn’t have any words, but which is really quite wonderful and beautiful, with a sophisticated narrative that belies its complete absence of text. Picking books at the “appropriate reading level” seems to make some kind of logical sense, because we want to push kids, but don’t want them to get frustrated.īUT if leveled readers are the ONLY source of reading, it will put kids off reading because it prevents them from being surprised by language, learning new vocabulary, and finding words that actually express what they are thinking. YB and I were both dumbfounded, because it seemed like “the appropriate reading level” was prioritized over “the appropriate interest level”. YB told me that the books in their classroom were all classified into baskets marked with different “levels”, but she found most of them really boring because they were written specifically to fall within their “levels”. P replied that it was because he did not know the reading level for the graphic novel, and thus wouldn’t be able to effectively evaluate YB’s reading level if he allowed her to read it and write a report on it. YB’s teacher, Mister P, emailed me later to say she was not allowed to bring the graphic novel to school for reading time. The kids were told they could pick their own books for reading time, and had to write a short report on what they were reading. ![]() In 1st grade, my daughter, YB (short for “Yakuza Baby”, the nickname we gave her because she was born while Colin and I were watching a Japanese gangster movie), had fallen in love with reading and was fast becoming a “bookworm”.Īnd then she got into graphic novels and brought one to school for her reading time. ![]()
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