As Ben's recent obsession with graded readers for language teaching has indirectly shown, the day of the graded reader and the pedagogical approach implied by this outdated beast is over. Over, that is, except in the world of dead language instruction, in which an approach ridiculed today by SLA people as the "grammar-translation" method is still the only game in town. People like Ben and I, who like syntax and think telling time is boring, are left in the lurch if we want to learn any languages still spoken by a significant number of people, though.
So Ben is absolutely right about the difference in approach to dead and living languages. What I find interesting is that this difference in approach is driven largely by assumptions about the needs of the typical student.
But is it appropriate that living languages are taught uniformly with the assumption that students will need, any day now, to ask questions about chairs or buy groceries? I don't think so. Any college level language class is at least theoretically aimed at developing heavy reading skills. While a German major certainly might spend a summer in Berlin and ought to learn to communicate practically in a reasonable time, there is no reason to grind through all the mundane stuff (telling time, buying things) right away as there would be if your students were, say, new arrivals who need to get jobs and navigate the train system as soon as possible. And all this goes for learning explicit syntax and such like as well, of course.
I think the reason practically every beginning college language course starts with yellow chairs is because of the research community which ultimately shapes the textbooks and pedagogical norms that are available. And this community, commendably and understandably, are more interested in solving pressing problems for people who are in dire situations, such as refugees etc. From my limited exposure to SLA research and the sorts of conversations going on in professional literature (and again, note I said it's limited), I do not think the plight of the syntax-loving college student gets a lot of play. Hence the sorts of materials available and the sorts of methods promulgated.
So, interestingly, the fact that I have to order away for a book written in the sixties if I want a graded Chinese reader to work through might have everything to do with the population SLA researchers and practitioners are focused on serving -- at least as much as real, substantive theoretical changes.
The problem, though, is that this change in emphasis, which is essentially contingent on a change of audience, if you will, eventually becomes a dogma, a bias, against any bookish or technical approach to language study.
I would like to see that change, but it might be inevitable, especially if you also consider that current pedagogical techniques largely rely on and cater to people who are talkative and social rather than bookish and -- let's face it -- geeky. Recently I was only one of two linguistics students in a graduate course in a highly respected SLA department. This course was designed for people headed for careers as ESL teachers (today the ackronym is TESOL, for some reason), and no one there had any time at all for anything remotely technical. They were really nice, friendly, sociable people who wanted to work with people and help them learn how to interact with other people, and that was that. The bias against anything technical was enormous.
And then again, even the college-going population has changed dramatically since the heyday of the graded reader. There is no longer as much of an ideological emphasis on the superiority of the written word, or really of literature in general. Academics seem increasingly to see themselves as solving non-academic problems (sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results). And the demographics of the student population has changed enormously in terms of class since the GI bill and, later, the collapse of the US secondary education system which forced huge numbers of people into college who once would have been fine venturing out into the job market with a high school diploma.
Again, the problem, if it can be called that, does not in the end come down to theoretical changes so much as demographics.
I don't think graded readers are coming back any time soon.
Posted by Alan Hogue at July 6, 2006 09:51 PMGreat observation, Alan.
I see two additional 'demographic' changes that have emphasized the communicative approach over the reader approach: cheap air travel and the post-WW2 hegemony of English.
The air travel angle is pretty obvious — I've pointed out something similar in a previous post.
Why would you need to learn reading German? I mean really need to? Certainly not because (as is mentioned in the foreward to one of my Chemical German readers from the 1930s) "more chemistry articles are published in the German language than in all others combined." That situation is long past.
I've stumbled across books or articles in historical linguistics, biblical studies, and ancient near eastern studies that were in German and had no English translations or equivalents. But each of those are fields that haven't developed much since the Second World War. I can't think of a similar case in French, except for maybe a few books on sociolinguistics in Francophone Africa.
As air travel has increased the importance of oral communication to the average student, the victory of English as the language of written communication has reduced the importance of reading. It seems to me like a shift to This is a yellow chair pedagogy was inescapable.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at July 7, 2006 06:53 AM