The idea of writing up principles of novel selection is something I've been throwing around in my head for the past year or so. I've been teaching ESL for about ten years now, but only in the past five years have I started using novels in my reading classroom (mostly because they weren't required in my previous programs that I've worked in, but they are a required part of the reading curriculum in my current program). However, when it comes to choosing a whole-class novel for the ESL reading class, there are absolutely zero resources on how to do this. So, after about five years of teaching whole-class novels, I've developed this system of principles that I use to assess whether a novel is appropriate or not for my class, and I'd like to share these principles with a larger audience.
I've started with Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive Reading by Bamford & Day (2002) as the foundation for my own ten principles. In case you are not familiar with Bamford & Day's principles, take a minute to read through their quick paper here. Bamford & Day's principles are related to the use of reading materials for extensive reading in the classroom. The principles are as follows:
While I actively use these principles in my own classroom when it comes to extensive reading, these principles do not necessarily relate to reading whole-class novels. Bamford & Day's principles are mostly appropriate for when students are able to self-select reading materials (not necessarily novels, but any type of reading materials) for in-class silent sustained reading. I use this approach with lower level reading classes where we have a variety of readers that students can choose from during a period of SSR. However, many ESL programs require reading classes to also have a whole-class novel component. When I began searching out materials for reading and choosing whole-class novels in my reading classes, I found no materials to help instructors choose appropriate novels for their entire class. Luckily, I enjoy reading as a hobby, so it's fairly easy for me to choose a novel that I might want to read with my class, but I worried about teachers and instructors who may not read for fun, or have time to spend exploring current novels. What help could these instructors find when they needed guidance on choosing whole-class novels? In addition to Bamford & Day's 2002 article, I did some other research on the use of novels in the classroom. I did find quite a lot of research supporting the use of novels and literature in the ESL classroom, and the general consensus seems to be that ESL students benefit from reading novels, but again, none of the research advised instructors on choosing appropriate materials. In addition, I was disappointed to find that most research around using novels and literature had been written in the 1980s, and this research has not been revisited since then. When I realized that there was a huge gap in the literature on finding appropriate whole-class novels, I decided that I would write out the guiding principles I use within my own classroom. The gaps in the literature are as follows:
I hope that my Ten Principles of Novel Selection will be helpful to ESL reading teachers in addressing these gaps, and that they will find choosing a whole-class novel to be an easy and enjoyable task. In the upcoming weeks, look for individual posts about each of the ten principles. In the meantime, you can find a basic summary of the ten principles here.
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AuthorWritings from an ESL instructor at a Big Ten university in the Midwest. Archives
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