Limitations in Studies using Graded Readers

Many of these studies have focused on ER using Graded Readers (GRs), which are books that have been specifically ‗written for learners of English using limited lexis and syntax, the former determined by frequency and usefulness and the latter by simplicity… with each stage presenting a more demanding reading task, not only in language but also in length and format‘ (Hill, 2008:185). These are often ‗simplified‘ versions of novels, but the process of adapting original works involves more than just simplification, and sometimes requires a complete rewrite (West, 1964:146).

Broughton (1962:199-204) explained that in order to tackle the ‗linguistic immaturity‘ (i.e. poor vocabulary) of the reader, difficult words are edited out, explained with pictures or a glossary, or replaced with easier words. In order to address the reader‘s

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‗psychological immaturity‘, the story is shortened, chapter headings are made more exciting, spelling is modernized, footnotes and illustrations are used to explain old or culture-specific matters, and unsuitable ideas or their details are censored. To cater for the ‗literary immaturity‘ of the reader (who may have little experience of reading), introductions are added to explain the quality of the original story. Furthermore, in the same way course books are usually staged in chapters to help students to learn gradually, these books are also graded into levels of difficulty to provide ‗a ladder up which learners can climb to unsimplified texts‘ (Hill, 1997:58), by exposing them gradually to increasingly more complex language forms, and thus providing the effective support and scaffolding for their learning that is considered important for SLA (Hammond, 2006:271), and indeed for learning any subject (Scanlon, 1942:422).

GRs have been found to have ‗an acceptable balance of accessibility and authenticity‘ (Allan, 2009:23) because they contain appropriate quantities of lexical chunks, which are considered fundamental to acquire natural and fluent language (ibid.), and which are also considered fundamental to write academic texts in EAP (Li & Schmitt, 2009:86). Hence GRs have been used to combine both teaching and enjoyment (Pearson, 1968:245), and they have been considered a primary tool for ER (Hill, 2008:186) because their controlled vocabulary ensures a high repetition of key words, which is considered important for their acquisition (Kyongho & Nation, 1989:333; Pellicer- Sanchez & Schmitt, 2010:35). In addition to GRs being recommended to promote ER (Hill, 2008:198; Williams, 1986:44), they have also been considered the best way to do so (Bamford, 1984:218), and even essential to encourage ER in all except advanced learners (Day & Bamford, 2002:137; Waring & Nation, 2004:99). As a result, GRs have been used in a number of ER studies such as Asraf & Ahmad (2003:90), Hafiz & Tudor (1989:10) and Macalister (2008:250). Similarly, GRs have been recommended for increasing vocabulary (Saragi et al., 1978:73) and for consolidating already known words (Waring & Takaki, 2003:154), and there have been a number of studies into vocabulary acquisition via reading GRs (Al-Homoud & Schmitt, 2009:388; Pellicer- Sanchez & Schmitt, 2010:34; Poulshock, 2010:304; Wanarom, 2008:43; Waring & Takaki, 2003:130; Webb & Chang, 2015:651).

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However, it should be remembered that for ER, there should be a large quantity of interesting texts (Nation, 2005b:10-11; Pellicer-Sanchez & Schmitt, 2010:32) that offer repeated exposure to vocabulary (Nation, 2005b:11; Pigada, & Schmitt, 2006:19), especially for beginners. GRs are only a means for this, and in some cases they may not be suitable. Claridge (2012:106) investigated the production rationales of some major publishers of GRs and found a lack of attention to texts that cater for the lowest level of learners, with Pellicer-Sanchez & Schmitt (2010:47) reporting that one study found that many words in GRs were not repeated more than their recommendation of 10 times. It has further been reported that vocabulary in the 3000-word levels and above, appear too infrequently in GRs ‗for reliable learning to occur‘ (ibid., p.35), and so readers who rely on GRs will encounter gaps and difficulties when moving up to unsimplified texts (Nation & Wang Ming-tzu, 1999:355; Reid-Thomas & Hill, 1993:252).

Also, GRs may not be easy or interesting to learners. It is readily noted that there can be no one methodology that applies to all times, situations and learners (Klapper, 2003:40), and this observation can be easily made for learning materials as well, because learners are diverse and they differ more in their capacity to learn a second language than their first language (Benson, 2004:20). Hence learners may not find all simplified texts interesting (Ronnqvist & Sell, 1994:126), and sometimes they may find them hard to understand (Elley & Mangubhai, 1983:55), showing that only the learner can judge what is easy and interesting. Learners are not the same and ‗even learners with similar backgrounds vary in terms of the psychological predispositions and learning experiences‘ (Benson, 2004:5) and other important dimensions of diversity such as motivation, affect, age, and strategy use (Benson, 2004:20). Teachers can‘t expect learners to conform to one approach (Littlejohn, 1985:255), and should avoiding sweeping generalizations about their cultures (Littlewood, 2001:21), and instead keep their learners‘ needs in mind when making pedagogical decisions (Rounds, 1992:790). This may well result in an observation that many learners are actually not concerned with English literature (Pearson, 1968:245), which is the basis of many western published GRs.

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It could be argued that GRs have been especially designed to appeal to most learners, but if it is readily accepted that textbooks can never be perfect for every learner (Nakatsuhara, 2004:1) even though they are usually meticulously designed to cater for students in a particular context or market, then surely GRs will also share this inability to cater for the needs of many learners. Learner choice is an essential aspect of ER (Day, 2007:20; Hafiz & Tudor, 1989:9), and it should always be respected even if that choice is not a GR (Ronnqvist & Sell, 1994:129), because in ER, learners are reading for themselves (Day & Bamford, 2002:137; Williams, 1986:42), and not for teachers, researchers or publishers. Some researchers and practitioners have found learners give positive reviews for GRs, but it should always be remembered that the ‗power relations‘ (BAAL, 2010:2.3) between teachers and students could force students to report what they assume may please their teachers, and not what they actually think, and when book reports are written in L2, the students may also not be articulate enough to express their real views clearly (Reid-Thomas & Hill, 1993:265).

In order to address some of these limitations, it has been recommended to provide a large selection of GRs during the ER programme (Hafiz & Tudor, 1989:11, Nation, 1995-6:9), and so for example, Al-Homoud & Schmitt (2009:388) provided 150 GRs for their ER group although it was not clear how many different titles there were, and Pigada & Schmitt (2006:8) provided their participant with a selection of 17 GRs. However, it should always be remembered that ‗it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve any suitably wide representation of English literatures on a language programme‘ (Paran, 2008:488), especially in the case of GRs, which have consistently to be found to be limited in genre. Earlier surveys of GRs (Hill, 1997:57-62; Hill & Reid-Thomas, 1988:47-49; Reid-Thomas & Hill, 1993:252) found that they were predominantly of the fiction thriller genre, based on classics, aimed at teenagers, and featured male protagonists. Although humour and fact-files have become more common, more recent surveys of GRs (Hill, 2008:203) and studies of their vocabulary (Allan, 2009:30-31) have found that fiction still dominates.

In addition, most GRs have also been found to have western contexts and settings (Hill, 1997:62; Hill, 2008:194; Hill & Reid-Thomas, 1988:48), which may not appeal to non-

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western learners. Stemming from a need to be learner-centred (Benson, 2004:5-9), it is important that teaching methods, and by extension their materials, are context-specific (Bax, 2003:278; McCabe, 2005:4; Schmitt, 1997:5) if learning is to be optimized, with cultural sensitivity being a key part of that (Bax, 2003:282; McCabe, 2005:6). This can be easily overlooked because, even though ‗we now accept that what may be effective in one classroom with one group of students may not be with another‘ (Freeman & Johnson, 1998:402), most teacher training courses give little attention to the different contexts graduating teachers go into (Bax, 2003:281-282; Littlewood, 2000:31). In addition, stakeholders in these contexts and their cultures are often not consulted (Holliday, 1994:3), and so we still see methods that are considered established practice in BANA settings (ibid., p.8) being unsuccessfully transferred to non-BANA settings.

Cultural sensitivity is important because language is used to construct, understand and express thoughts about the world (Bloomer et al., 2005:180-181), and all of this is based on culture. This is even more the case now, with English having emerged as a lingua franca that has in many places expanded at the expense of the local L1, potentially making learners consider their own L1 to be inferior (Nation, 2003:7), and by extension, their own culture as well (Gray, 2000:274-275). This situation also exists in specific fields such as science, for which English is the dominant language (Tardy, 2004:247), making scientists who are non-native English speakers (NNS) disadvantaged when attempting to contribute knowledge, resulting in what has been described as a form of academic imperialism (ibid., p.252). Hence BANA teaching methods, and their associated materials, that are thought to be based on sound pedagogy, could actually be based more on an ideology of ‗cultural chauvinism‘ (Holliday, 2007:360), and hence used to preach the western culture and to correct the local one (ibid., p.365), with evidence of this being found particularly in the content of course books (Gray, 2000:274-275). This is sometimes unintended because a number of native speaker (NS) professionals overlook the influence of ideology in their professional lives, even though they are acutely aware of its strong influence in other aspects of their lives, such as in advertising, the media, and politics (Holliday, 2007:364).

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The ideology of ‗native-speakerism‘, which has been accused of promoting NS teachers and their cultures over others in order to preserve their privileged status (Holliday, 2006:385), has been cited as an important reason for NS teachers to consider their methods and materials from the BANA countries to be superior to those of NNS teachers (Bax, 2003:279), because native-speakerism has led such teachers to fall into ‗culturism‘, whereby they reduce foreign people to definitions that those teachers themselves have constructed, but have no existence of their own (Holliday, 2002:45). This can lead to stereotyping and the belief that the NNS culture is lesser than the NS culture (Holliday, 2006:385-386). However native-speakerism, and by extension the belief that teaching methods and materials from the BANA countries are applicable in all contexts, weakens when the issue of the ownership of English is discussed (Holliday, 2006:386). Several decades ago, Pearson (1968:244) noted ‗that English nowadays is not our language alone‘ because of its role as an international language for education, science and trade. Now, this ‗outer circle‘ of countries (Kachru, 1995:234), where English is learned as the most important new language, has expanded so much that ‗the majority use of English is now outside the English-speaking West‘ (Holliday, 2005:8) and hence ‗speakers of English as a first language will lose influence‘ (Davies, 2005:4.1) and should no longer expect learners to follow their norms and choices.

With this background, the western context in which many GRs are set (Hill, 2008:194), may innocently seem acceptable to NS publishers and teachers, but may not be so to NNS readers, who may respond negatively to the western cultural setting, just like they could to other affective factors such as subject matter, genre, geographical setting and protagonist gender (Reid-Thomas & Hill, 1993:252). Hence, King (1978:42) noted that ‗materials accepted as adult in Anglo-Saxondom… may seem juvenile or barbarous to those of a different source culture‘, while content such as sex, violence, politics, alcohol and drugs, which is acceptable for teenage novels in the West, may be seen as insensitive, offensive and corrupt in other cultures (Hill & Reid-Thomas, 1988:49). Similarly, Hill (2008:192) noted that it is ‗unrealistic, even arrogant, to expect students from non-European cultures to know about the mores and history of western society‘, while Saville-Troike (1973:400) gave a number of examples where NNS readers misunderstand culture-specific references because of their own cultural experiences,

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noting that this kind of interference ‗frequently goes unnoted and uncorrected by either student or teacher‘.