What do you look for in a foreign language reader? If you're a solitary reader looking for an occasional refresher, your needs are different from those of a student in a classroom led by an able teacher. My memory is a bit too hazy to speak to the classroom situation, but as I find myself in the position of the former, here's what I value:
Progressivity: Readers which introduce texts in order of ease, or edit a single text so that the difficulty of the text increases (as measured by the introduction of new vocabulary words or more tenses) were often titled with the adjectives "progressive", "graduated", or "graded". The benefit of progressivity is that by only introducing a few new words at a time, the reader can concentrate on them and figure out their meaning from a context that they largely understand. This is far better — dare I say more "natural"? — than sending the reader to the glossary several times a paragraph. It has the advantage of encouraging the reader with a successful experience in the earlier passages.
Some chrestomathies introduce texts in a different systematic order: Burrow and Turville-Petre's A Book of Middle English (1992), Albert Henry's 1953 Chrestomathie de la littérature en ancien français, and Studer and Waters' Historical French Reader (1924) all present their selections in chronological order, for example. I've found myself reading the grammatical apparatus for these books alone, then reading the texts from back to front, all the while grumbling at their editors. Perhaps this would not be the case for someone familiar with Latin and Anglo-Saxon while ignorant of Modern French and English. Such people must represent a very small market indeed, however, especially since they'd have to wait to the end of the book before they could read the notes.
Random Access: It's hard to pull this off without violating progressivity, but in subject-matter specific readers, it's important to try. The student may have no interest in German medical terminology or Vulgar Latin texts, so they shouldn't be forced to work through those subjects to get to the material they're after.
Accessible Texts: Perhaps it's a lack of character on my part, but if I have to hit the glossary several times a sentence for an entire paragraph, I won't get through the first page. A graduated reader is constantly encouraging the reader by throwing them a sentence or clause that is as easily comprehensible as if it were English. Maybe the ancient Spartans had enough self-discipline to plow through Old Persian texts with their noses in a dictionary, but I certainly don't.
Interesting Subject Matter: This might contradict accessibility. For example, Arnold Werner-Spanhoofd's Erstes Lesebuch begins with the sort of thing you'd expect from a 101 instructor as they move around the class: This is a chair. This is a table. What is this? This is a chair. What is this? This is a table. I think that that only applies to beginner readers, however. Detailed discussion of interesting subjects can be accomplished without alienating the reader with glossary references. It just takes skill and effort on the part of the author.
Notes and Glossary: There's almost infinite variation here. Do grammatical difficulties get explained in footnotes or endnotes? Does each selection begin with first-language text? Is vocabulary integrated into the notes themselves, or should it be separate? What's appropriate to put into a glossary for intermediate readers? Do variant forms and compounds get separate entries, or are they located beside each other?
Teaching by Context: I've already talked about the role progressivity can play in this, but there are other tools at hand. Any additional clues given to the reader present a context for deduction. Illustrations — especially diagrams — can repeat the story through pictures, giving the reader additional information about a strange word on the same page. Any redundancy that does not give the prose an artificial character helps. Helmut Ziefele's Theological German: A Reader (1986) accomplishes this by selecting its introductory texts from well-known parts of the Bible: I may not know what a Nadelohr is, but when it occurs after the words for "rich man", "heaven", and "camel", I can make a pretty good guess.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at June 30, 2006 04:29 AMEven at beginner levels I don't think "This is a chair. Is this a chair?" is necessary in a reader. I've seen several Latin textbooks, for instance, which manage to start from chapter 1 with short, modified but otherwise authentic Latin. Of course these were not specifically readers.
The real problem is the kind of vocabulary you introduce and in what order, and hence the sorts of topics you can cover. And that in turn leads to the objectives of the student. Someone about to go live in Japan for a year with no Japanese needs the mind-numbing chair stuff, and lots of it. Too bad for them: they need to learn the usual list of boring things like body parts, colors, telling time, etc. But, of course, such a student would be silly to spend any time or money on a reader.
If you have the time, and especially if you are interested mainly in reading, it is much more fun and less of a grind to learn interesting vocabulary, not mundane stuff. Once the student gets going the super boring topics like telling time can be added in bit by bit. The idea that beginners need to start off grinding away with "this is a yellow chair" seems to be a current pedagogical bias. The approach obviously has its place depending on the particular needs of particular students, but should not be generalilzed to language instruction generally.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at July 5, 2006 02:36 PMWould you believe that the "This is a chair" is from a reader that's over a century old? It gears up into nursery rhymes after a while — which are sort of interesting in that "The begger is poor, the fox is sly, the ox eats fodder" is vocabulary you never lear nowadays — but I've never managed to get more than a few pages in.
Back when I was taking a bunch of introductory language courses, all the time-telling stuff was infuriating. I want syntax, and I want it now!
I didn't realize it at the time, but probably the best thing about studying dead languages was that no time whatsoever was spent on such thing. You declined nouns or conjugated verbs on the first day, and might spend a happy several weeks making sentences out of battlefield or kingship before you even got to the pronouns.
If you've studied Latin (which I've only played around with), maybe you'll have insight on a question I've been pondering. Is it more important to introduce noun declensions or verb inflections first? Eventually you get to them both, but every textbook I've seen either pushes the student through the third declension while keeping them in the present tense, or only introduces first and second declensions, then ploughs through laudo, laudabam, laudabo.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 6, 2006 07:10 PMI can't remember how I learned it. It's been a long time since I've taken Latin and my old textbook isn't handy. But in general I guess I'd say that whichever route allows you to work on interesting and minimally modified texts the soonest is probably best.
Why? What do you think the difference would be?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at July 7, 2006 08:20 PM