The Death of Graded Readers?

There comes a time where, for every teacher who leaves the classroom, they realize they have grown out of touch. I am one of those out-of-the classroom teachers who always tries to keep a trepid foot inside, teaching the orientation class, subbing occasionally, doing demo lessons for new teachers, and conducting fun workshops on digital literacy and library resources. But there are still aspects of teaching I am starting to drift away from, particularly that daily routine, the intuitive sensing of the room…

On one testing day, it hit me. A teaching technique that once worked, now fell flat on its face. I had brought in a classroom set of English Learner-friendly-high-interest-low-level books that students could read when they finished their standardized test. I passed them out and students were intrigued. A few asked if I was giving the books away. But when they finished the test, only one elderly man decided to crack open the book and read it. The rest of the class left the book untouched. They instead opted to log in practice their lessons for the online learning platform Burlington English, which is great and I’ve talked about before.

But the lack of curiosity in the physical book still struck me. After spending an hour on the screen taking a test, wouldn’t the physical pages that are easier on the eyes be intriguing? Would they not want to test themselves and see how well they can read a book in English? Well no, they don’t. They didn’t give these simple yet vibrant books a chance. Here is a sample of how they look like.

As a language learner myself, I have occasionally read these easy, learner-friendly books in my target language, Japanese. I have read the books from Oxford Brookes University, White Rabbit Press, and Ask Publishing . But this was all years ago, when my attention span was at its prime for reading. The books were all enjoyable, and they were able to help with language development, while also teaching Japanese history and traditional folktales.

The art of reading these books has a name: Tadoku. There are four golden rules of Tadoku:

1. Start from scratch. Choose easy books you can enjoy without translating. Look at the pictures carefully to help with understanding and make you want to read more.
2. Don’t use a dictionary.
3. Skip over difficult words, phrases, and passages. There is no need to understand every minor detail.
4. When the going gets tough, quit the book and pick up another. The book is not suitable for your level or interest.

Sadly, these rules are incompatible in this digital world of instant gratification and restless minds. English language learners of today have become used to the reflex of looking up a word in Google translate. They will either individual type words they don’t know, or often use the camera feature to transform entire passages (although I try to dissuade them from doing so) into their native language. Rule #2 asks them to put the phone down. To use context or, worse yet, as with Rule #3, to be comfortable with a bit of ambiguity.

AI mocks the idea of Rule #4 with the temptation of offering you generated “graded readers” that are 100% personalized to your language learning level and interest. You would simply throw at the AI anything you can possibly think of to get it to know your level such as your CEFR level (A1, A2, B1 etc.), a book you can already understand, your Duolingo score, and/or a sample of your speaking and writing. The AI would then determine your interests based on previous conversations or with a simple list.

These AI generated graded readers would provide comprehensible input and any other features you want from it. Want a vocabulary list? Done. A multiple choice quiz afterward? Done. Make the text 100 words shorter? Done. And all without the discomfort that comes with tadoku, with a traditional printed graded reader that demands your full attention, doesn’t offer instant translation, and that may or may not be completely in your level.

Since AI cannot currently write full books without making serious mistakes, even these readers would not be enough to keep the attention span of our current crop of English language learners. They are simply not as structured and full-featured as a language-learning program like Burlington English or Ellii. And they do not offer the dopamine hits of something like Duolingo, or simply getting distracted and scrolling videos or posts on social media.

After this realization came to be, I bought myself the book Short Stories in Japanese for Intermediate Learners. After I witnessed the beginning of the death of graded readers, I needed to know if there were still any value in them. A month later, I am only around 25 pages in. My brain feels uncomfortable every time I read the book, because, although it is at my level, in order to understand what is on the page, it needs to synthesize everything it has learned so far with no outside help.

Reading a graded reader lays bare to the fact that learning a foreign language is often about fighting your own brain, which desperately wants to remain comfortably in the native language it has already mastered.

Now that I have written this, I am sure I will eventually finish the book, at the very least to exercise the last bit of mental stamina that I have left. But in this world where there is so much out there competing with our attention… unfortunately, graded readers do not have what they take to win out. Our brains will take the easy way out and convince themselves they can learn another way, and graded readers as we know it will die.