What attracted me at first was the rich children's books here, such as I can read children's series. My English level is just in the children's area, and I can find a little sense of security. I can't even understand the books in the youth section, but after all, young children's books are too boring to attract adults. Later, it was found that ESL (English as a second language) also has reading materials for different English levels, such as speed reading series, which is suitable for adults. At that time, we began to find that the graded reading system in the English world was not available in China. Until now, it is not easy for our children to find suitable books.
I have been reading the Oxford Bookworm series recently, which is divided into seven levels: entry level, 1-6 * * 137 books. The entry level is comics with fewer words, with about 500 words for 1 level and about 3000 words for level 6. Many of these works are famous adaptations. Different from abbreviations, rewriting is often done by experienced English teachers to rewrite the original text into words suitable for readers at the corresponding level. In the community library, I have also seen several rewritten versions of a famous book, which are suitable for young readers of different grades.
This set of books by Oxford Bookworm makes me more interested in the English graded reading system. Thanks to the internet, which is rich in information, I spent half a day looking for some information on the internet and got a preliminary understanding. I wonder if it is possible to do Chinese graded reading in the future.
English reading at different levels has a history of hundreds of years, probably dating back to the end of19th century. Its main purpose is to help children learn English as their mother tongue, cultivate their reading interest and gradually improve their reading ability. Now graded reading has become the knowledge of education, but the graded reading system is not unified, but exists in multiple systems.
Of course, the most basic thing is age and grade, that is, school year grading. How old a child is or how many grades he has attended, which roughly represents how many grades reading should reach. This is the most primitive and rough grading standard, and it is also the grading standard of China people at present. But notice, I'm talking about the scoring standard here, not the scoring system. The reasons are explained as follows.
In addition, there are basire, Lesile, GRL (Fountas &; Pinel guides reading level), reading recovery, DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment Level), AR (Accelerated Reading), British Reading A-Z, Oxford Reading Tree and so on. There are some cross-referenced conversion tables between these grading systems. For example, the Lexile score comparison table at the end of the article.
Scoring system is a complex project, participants need experts in linguistics, philology, literature, education, psychology, data analysis and other disciplines, as well as experts in reading creation and publishing industry, as well as related computer software and hardware systems. Therefore, a complete grading system can not be completed simply by formulating a grading standard, and its function is far more complicated than formulating a standard:
1) Determine the scoring criteria: Take English as an example, the mastery of morphemes, speech recognition ability, vocabulary, sentence complexity, sentence length, comprehension ability and so on may be the scoring factors to be considered. The finer and more accurate the classification, the more detailed the academic research. Simple and rude grading standards like age and school year, 50% accuracy is probably difficult to achieve.
2) Evaluation of readers' reading level: With the scoring standard, it is not easy to accurately evaluate readers' level, which requires not only a lot of actual data accumulation and question bank accumulation, but also reliable evaluation methods.
3) Book evaluation: Of course, the best thing is that the author writes books according to the grading standards, such as the rewriting of the famous books mentioned above, but after all, more and better books in reality are not written according to the grading standards. It would be a waste of resources if all of them were discarded, but to which level should these books belong? Kicked migrant workers think big data can be used here.
4) Book selection: Even if the above three aspects are mature and complete, you need a website or a good software so that teachers, parents and children can easily choose the right book from thousands of books.
Therefore, some grading systems, such as AR, are an end-to-end solution that includes all the above functions.
Graded reading was originally designed for children whose mother tongue is English. With the establishment of English hegemony, the demand for learning English as a second language is getting higher and higher. The grading standards of English second language learners (often adults) can be obviously different from those of English native language learners (children), because the process of learning a second language is different from that of acquiring a mother tongue. In addition, adults' reading interests are quite different from those of children. I didn't find much content in this respect on the Internet, but judging from the ESL series of books I read in the above-mentioned community library, it is certain that some people in North America are already engaged in this research and have achieved certain results. It is said that Beijing Foreign Studies University is also engaged in English grading. I don't know if it is aimed at the grading of English as a second language.
Chinese graded reading can certainly draw lessons from the overall thinking of English graded reading, but the grading standards and evaluation standards are definitely very different from English, which is determined by the characteristics of different languages.
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Grading reference table (the screenshot is incomplete, and the complete content needs to be searched online):