When I was admitted to Form One at the then Marsabit Secondary School in 1966, something happened that changed my life forever. I was appointed the school librarian. The school only had Form 1 and 2 streams with one lockable cupboard with just a handful of old second-hand books.
They were all the same and I began reading them in a way that a starving child would gobble down food hungrily. I read anything and everything that was in print, including calendars, old newspapers, almanacs, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. You may as well bet I understood pretty little of what I was reading, but that’s beside the point. Suffice it to say I was reading quite a lot actually and I enjoyed it very much.
That is how I took the first step on the lifelong journey of extensive reading, often compared to intensive reading, which now is back in schools through the competency based curriculum.
I was the custodian and steward of the books under my care, their small number notwithstanding. I had opportunity and the power to read, to open or lock my cupboard, to lend books and charge a penalty for those who returned them late.
Starting a sustainable extensive reading programme in schools requires asking pertinent questions to guide planning. What are the principles that underlie extensive reading as opposed to intensive reading? What are its benefits? How do you acquire the books? Who will issue and collect back the books? How is the programme monitored and evaluated? How do you ensure access? How do learners select the books to read? For how long should they read them? Why should they read? Is it for knowledge, comprehension or enjoyment? How do they deal with unfamiliar words? What if a book is too difficult to read? What is the teacher’s role? This article will attempt to answer some of these questions.
The benefits of ER cannot be gainsaid. It increases reading and writing proficiency and reading speed, and widens the reader’s horizons and deepens experiences. It enhances oral fluency, improves general knowledge, strengthens vocabulary skills and is an overall booster of language competence in the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
If early to bed and early to rise makes you healthy, wealthy and wise, ER makes you mentally healthier, wealthier and wiser by arming you with the tools of general knowledge acquisition and language competence.
ER is best served by establishing a class library, as a subset of the school library. This brings the books closer to the readers. A class of 30 learners, for example, may start with 30 books, each learner bringing a book to the class library.
The teacher ensures the books are grade level, usually simplified readers and recommended to parents and guardians for purchase so that different titles are brought to class. The teacher or a class library prefect takes charge of custody, issuance and return of the books.
At Grade 6, for example, an average of a book a week for each reader translates into 10 to 13 extensive reading books per term, or 30 to 40 books per year. So these number of books per class per year are just about right. More books, however, give more choice. So donations from parents, former students, well-wishers, teachers are always welcome.
Two main considerations for ER are selection and enjoyment. Readers select what they want to read from a collection of a variety of books — fiction, non-fiction, short stories, whole books, detective stories, fables, myths, legends, magic, fantasy, adventure, plays, poems, articles, comic strips, fun books, reference materials, newspapers, magazines. The drive is towards giving them choice and get them reading what they enjoy reading.
Materials should be age and grade appropriate and pitched at the right readership level. There are three levels of readership. Very difficult books are at the frustrational level and of course not recommended. This is followed by the instructional level, usually used in IR, which requires a teacher’s guidance and the independent level for which the reader is comfortable reading without assistance. For ER the independent level is most recommended.
Another yardstick for gauging the level of difficulty is if there are more than five unfamiliar words on a page then it's probably time to dump the book and pick another.
Think of ways of overcoming the challenge in finding ER materials readers enjoy. The teacher provides a role model in reading and will choose books that are interesting from own reading. Peers recommend and share books that they find enjoyable. Reading records of former students and their comments on books may be helpful. Just fingering through a book and looking at the title, illustrations, size of print, and summary of story lines in the contents or as contained on the blurbs will suffice to determine whether a book will be interesting.
Two other skills are crucial to be success of a SERP- skimming, scanning. A reader skims through a text to get the gist or the general idea of its contents, a feel of how the text is organised, its sequence; identifies topics for reading, gets an idea of the opinions expressed, explores the entire book and zeroes down on a section or two of interest, and saves time by reading rapidly. The reader scans for specific information- key words, figures, questions and answers. In scanning, the reader looks for answers to questions such as how many? How much? When? How old? Where?
The use of contextual clues, to find the meaning of unfamiliar words, is another critical ER skill. For example in the sentence, ‘John is an eloquent speaker but his brother David stammers badly and can hardly express himself,’ eloquent means fluent, because it's opposite is stammering and hardly expressing oneself.
Sometimes a synonym gives the reader a contextual clue to the meaning of a word: Sora met his two cousins, Boru who is his uncle’s son and Bokayo, his aunt’s daughter. From this context, cousin is a child of one’s uncle or aunt.
Contextual clues are used when a reader splits a word into its component parts such as prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Take the word autobiography. Split it into three parts- auto=self, as in an automatic watch; bio= life, as in biology, the study of living things; graphics = writing. Put them together- autobiography is a book about one’s life written by oneself. So a book you write telling the story of your life is your autobiography. If it's written by someone else perhaps after your death, then it's a biography.
What is the role of the dictionary in ER? The use of the dictionary during extensive reading is discouraged. Reaching out to the dictionary at this stage distracts the reader and interferes with the flow of the story and the reader’s enjoyment. The reader is encouraged to use contextual clues or ignore unfamiliar words for the time being. You may jot them down quickly and look them up in a dictionary as a last resort if the use of contextual clues yields no results.
In summary, SERP is absolutely necessary in schools to boost language proficiency, fluency and competence. It is built on the principles of free selection from a variety and wide choice of age and grade level reading materials. Quantity, quality, speed, general knowledge and enjoyment are the operative words in ER. Skimming, scanning and the use of contextual clues are essential skills in nurturing a lifelong reading culture.
Hukka Wario is a member of Moran Publishers English Writers Team, Creative Writers Association of Kenya and chair Egerton University Council.
He is former senior lecturer in Linguistics Moi University
