Is there an app for getting language learners reading?

Apple’s iBooksExtensive reading is widely acknowledged to be an important language skill and a valuable gateway to vocabulary development and other skills. But for many students, authentic texts are just too difficult, and simplified or "graded" readers are used by teachers to help encourage their students to read for pleasure in English.

Such books have become a staple of the publishing industry, and publishers offer readers graded for each language level. They can include illustrations, glossaries and audio files on CD or online and come with ideas for teachers on how to promote reading in class, such as reading circles.

Graded readers are often adaptations of original works, with simplified sentence structure and vocabulary. They are much shorter than the originals. However skillfully done, much of the original work will be lost, particularly details of plot, characterisation and authorial voice.

But not everyone agrees that graded readers have a universal appeal. Peter Wells, a teacher trainer based in Britain, argued recently in the pages of English Teaching Professional magazine that most students are resistant to reading fiction in a foreign language in either the original or simplified version. He thinks that a successful take up of graded readers depends on the enthusiasm of the teacher and their detailed knowledge of each title. Even then, he wrote, readers will only work with "highly motivated students at a fairly advanced level".

With many teenagers now doing more reading online than with books, Wells suggests that making texts available on the mobile devices that they carry around with them could be a key to motivating reading among younger learners. This is about to be put to the test with the launch by UK publisher OUP of its Oxford Bookworms series of graded readers for the Apple iPhone and iPad.

In print there are currently 250 Bookworms titles across six levels, from CEFR A1 (lower intermediate) to CEFR C1 (advanced), and the 30 app versions span classics such as Sherlock Holmes mysteries at beginner level through to Gulliver's Travels and Pride and Prejudice.

Co-developed with Japanese company iEnglish, the Bookworms apps are attractive packages that synchronise the stories to audio, illustrations and a glossary. The design got the vote of my severely dyslexic teenage daughter, normally a very reluctant reader, who finds the text in most books "too blurry". She loved the typeface and spacing, especially on the iPad versions.

Learners can access definitions of words in context by tapping on a highlighted word or access the glossary separately, but they can only check words that the publisher has chosen to highlight. More useful would be a dictionary function for all words and, better still, one that retrieved definitions from a specialised learners' dictionary. Nor do the Bookworms apps allow for annotation or note-taking, a tool that is available with books published in Kindle or ePub formats. There is a quiz with each title, but these are disappointing multiple-choice vocabulary tests.

The selection of titles is also problematic. Most of the Bookworms app collection are stories written in the first half of the 20th century or earlier. Gill Davidson, academic director of Kaplan International Colleges in the UK, would like "more modern books and relevant topics that we can make available to our students".

ELT publishers including OUP have started to respond by adapting more recently written texts and commissioning new writing for print.

Davidson would also like to be able to integrate graded readers in digital format more fully into classroom teaching. "We want to build extracts into our curriculum and assessment system," she said.

An unresolved issue is the practice of lending graded readers to students. Language schools such as Kaplan typically own numerous copies of titles which students borrow during their course. Davidson would like to be able to "lend" graded reader apps for self study or class work in the same way.

The provision of ebook libraries by schools is controversial and until it is resolved schools are unlikely to promote app-based graded readers in the same way that they do print versions.

This is a missed opportunity. David Hill, project director of the Edinburgh Project on Extensive Reading, believes that digital readers offer "the chance to make the logistics of an extensive reading programme much simpler and the materials much cheaper, and improve ease of access to words and background notes".

The Bookworms apps cost $7.99 each, compared to around $9 for the print versions. For customers who expect and get a lot of content for free or very low cost, that's expensive. Buyers could also be put off by the lack of a "try before you buy" option. According to a recent report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre, an independent US digital educational media research group, around 90% of an estimated 20,000 apps in the Apple educational category cost less than $4. As prominent app developer Frédéric Descamps has observed: "Users spend hundreds of dollars for an iPhone and complain about the price of one-dollar apps."

OUP is also aware that Apple devices are owned by a minority of learners and it says it is about to launch graded readers in other ebook formats. These will include text and illustration and cost around $8. Learners can already buy existing audio content from the Bookworms titles for $6 each through the audio books site audible.co.uk.

OUP's tentative step into graded reader apps is welcome, but given the commercial uncertainties of publishing in this medium it is unlikely that more content is going to become available in app format soon. Only last month Apple unveiled its iBooks textbooks venture, which threatens to disrupt the educational publishing market as radically as other sectors of the creative industries.
 
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