Not exactly an original thought, but--

[owlectomy]

We really, really need more reading material written for non-fluent readers of English who are not six years old -- both ESL/EFL students and low-literacy native speakers of English. The Bluford series is new, and clearly targeted at this audience--the urban American portion of it, anyway. I would not give it to Japanese EFL students who might already suspect that America is armed to the teeth. It's definitely one good step. And from what I can tell about their edited classics, those seem to be a good thing too--though instinctively I prefer books that are written to be readable than classics that have to be edited to make them that way.

The ALA's lists for reluctant readers have some good ones, but sprinkled with titles that strike me as lame, and they don't adequately address what makes someone a reluctant reader--obviously lack of reading ability and lack of interest in reading can feed into each other and get to be a vicious circle, but was I a reluctant reader in 11th grade when I read almost nothing for pleasure except manga and (if I remember rightly) a little nonfiction? I think I was just having a hard time transitioning from liking pretty much everything I read to ... not. And I was old enough that I could no longer be impressed with myself for reading hard things. I mean, we market things like Goosebumps at reluctant readers, but sooner or later they'll discover that they're...horrible. And what do you read then?

And, if you don't have the reading skills, it's really hard to find something that's interesting and doesn't insult your intelligence.

Comments

[branchandroot]

It may sound a little odd, but what about late 18th and early 19th century novels? American ones, in particular. It seems to me the feel of the language in them would be... well, not entirely unfamiliar to a Japanese reader; and they tend to be verbose precisely because they spell everything out in detail. The ones that started life as magazine installments or pop-moral stories are generally short, lively and not too high-flown or deliberately over-erudite. *wry* Pretty lurid and fast-paced, too, most of them. Hannah Webster Foster, William Hill Brown and Susanna Rowson all come to mind.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

YES.
This is driving me NUTS right now.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

The verbosity of this kind of thing is just too much for most students to plow through, in my experience. They can't parse the sentences enough to keep up with it.