Málfríður - 15.03.2008, Blaðsíða 13

MÁLFRÍÐUR 13
What exactly is Free Voluntary Reading?
What it means, quite simply is:
• Reading for pleasure
• Reading at or just below your own level of
English (with no more than a couple of words
per page you don’t recognise). This is also
called ‘comprehensible input’.
• Reading at your own pace and in your own
time.
What are the advantages of FVR?
These are innumerable. Here are the most impor­
tant:
• It improves reading comprehension
• It improves fluency
• It improves grammar
• It improves writing and spelling
• It improves self­confidence
• It improves vocabulary
• Learners learn other things while reading
So why is it that teachers of English here and abroad,
do not seem to have understood the importance of
FVR? On my numerous courses around Denmark, I
have met teachers who truly invest time and money
in readers and reading for pleasure in the classroom
– and they say it works. Unfortunately, they are still
by far the minority. There are many explanations for
this – here are a few:
Lise Kragh is a trained pri­
mary school teacher from
England who has lived in
Denmark for over 30 years.
She has been a teacher train­
er for more than a decade,
and has held many courses
all over Denmark on just about every kind of
ELT topic.
Lisa Kragh
Lisa Kragh
Free Voluntary Reading and Readers
• ‘Our English department simply can’t afford
them’. It seems that many schools spend most of
their limited budgets on course books and then
say they cannot afford readers. Course books
often contain or are based on intensive reading
texts which cannot possibly match the level of
all the learners in the classroom, so due to the
mixed­ability present in most schools, they are
often doomed to fail. Perhaps it would be better to
invest in a library of good graded readers, teach­
er’s handbooks and other good supplementary
materials than to invest in course books which
cannot possibly cater for the mixed­ability classes
of today.
• ‘We can’t waste time reading – we have a full
curriculum to get through’. I fully sympathise
with this – and with SATS tests etc up ahead, it
could become more and more difficult to teach
creatively – or will it? Surely if learners are not
motivated to learn, they won’t learn. You can lead
a horse to water – but you can’t make it drink.
So perhaps if we can motivate learners to read,
as I outlined above, this will not only improve
reading skills, but also many other skills such as
fluency, grammar, writing and not least self­confi­
dence which is exactly what they need for exams
and tests.
• ‘Reading for pleasure is a personal thing. It has
no place in the classroom’. Research carried out
over the past 20 years has proven that learners
who read for pleasure get better grades than those
who don’t. Here I would like refer to Krashen
who has been promoting and researching FVR
for over 2 decades, and argues that it should be a
natural and essential part of learning English.
At a conference in Vladivostok, Russia in 2004, he
stated the following:
‘Recreational reading or reading for pleasure is
the major source of our reading competence, our
vocabulary, and our ability to handle complex gram­
matical constructions. The evidence for FVR comes
from correlational studies, showing that those who
read more show superior literacy development, case
histories of those whose growth in literacy and