Why FVR Fails at Times

(This blog post is a continuation of a series on literacy in the language classroom)

I have a confession to make: I have never been a big fan of Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) in my classroom. However, I do not oppose the concept at all, because I see SO MANY benefits of it. Krashen is a huge advocate of reading as a necessary part of the language acquisition process: 

• "Our reading ability, our ability to write in an acceptable writing style, our spelling ability, vocabulary knowledge, and our ability to handle complex syntax is the result of reading."
• "The ability to speak is the result of listening [and] the result of reading." 

Krashen also advocates the need for pleasure reading in the target language (known as FVR) and defines it as “reading because you want to, no book report, no questions at the end of the chapter. FVR means putting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead.”

So if there are definite language acquisition benefits to FVR, then why am I not a big fan of it? Because I see my own students struggle with it. Further, I do not see my students as the problem but rather the FVR novellas/materials which I have provided for them to read.

What is wrong then with the FVR novellas/materials which I have provided for them?

1. Much of the FVR materials is beyond students' current L2 literacy levels. When reading for pleasure, most people tend not to gravitate towards readings which are above their literacy levels - instead it is the opposite! When reading for pleasure, people will drift towards materials which are below their level of reading. This is why I do not read scholarly articles for pleasure! For example, People magazine is written at an 8th grade reading level, and most journalists will write articles at a 10th grade reading level. We need to remember that our own students still possess a novice level L2 literacy rate even after a few years of our language classrooms.
2. The amount of unknown vocabulary is way too much for my students. If the name of the game is reading for pleasure, well then there is nothing pleasurable at all about reading something where you do not know the meaning of the majority of the words. While we 4%ers may possess the resolve and be meta enough to refer back constantly to the glossary at the end of the novella to establish meaning of unknown words, most students are not. This is by no means the fault of our students - we 4%ers are the weirdos! Whatever we want our students to read, they need to know 95% of the words so that students are spending their time actually reading and not decoding.
3. The material is not compelling enough to hold their interest. In addition for novellas/readings to be comprehensible, they also need to be compelling enough for students to want to persevere in reading them - remember in FVR, because students can choose what they want to read; they are not bound to continue reading if the topic is not of interest to them. In a research study, Cho and Krashen found that a group of Korean English language learners who had read Sweet Valley High books for pleasure made more progress in their language acquisition than those who had not read for pleasure. 

So then is my not being a big fan of FVR the fault of the authors who have written Latin novellas/readings? No, rather it is my choice of materials which I have offered students. HOWEVER, while there is emerging a large number of Latin novellas being published, I will also say that I have found very few Latin novellas out there truly written for novice readers. 

My next post will cover what I would like to see in novice-level Latin novellas.