Abstract:
It is widely accepted in the ESOL field that Extensive Reading is good for ESOL
learners and there are many studies purporting to show that this is true. As a result,
the publication of Graded Readers in English today is a major commercial concern,
although David Hill (2008, p. 189), former director of the Edinburgh Project on
Extensive Reading, in his most recent study of Graded Readers, comments that they are being produced 'in a hostile climate where extensive reading is little valued, practised or tested.'
However, anecdotal evidence from teachers and researchers claims that learners do not read anywhere near the recommended one Graded
Reader a week prescribed by Nation and Wang (1999, p. 355) to provide the
necessary amount of comprehensible input for increasing vocabulary. If these claims and Hill's comments are true, there may be a mismatch between the kind of reading material produced for learners of English and the nature and teaching of the texts
currently recommended by teachers and librarians. Such a situation would not only
be a huge waste in terms of resources; it could also lead to the alienation of
generations of English learners from a potentially valuable means of improving and
enjoying language learning.
My study investigates this discrepancy by looking at the perceptions of the main
stakeholders in Graded Readers, namely the publishers, the judges and academics,
the teachers and the learners, to see how they differ and why. As each population is
different, the methodologies used in the study are various, making for an approach described as 'bricolage' (Lincoln & Guba, 2000a, p. 164). At the heart of
the study are five case studies of learners, set against the backdrop of data gathered
from all the stakeholders. As the results indicate that the purpose of the reading
appears to govern the perceptions of the individual learner, I found Louise Rosenblatt's (Rosenblatt, 1978) Transactional Theory of Reading Response was an
appropriate framework within which to interpret the data.
