(This blog post is a continuation of a series on literacy in the language classroom)
For someone learning a new language, reading their first book in that language is a huge milestone — one that inspires immense confidence. That confidence is like rocket fuel propelling towards fluency...Traditionally, students had to wait months until they could independently read most “level 1” graded readers for language learners. Confidence Readers change that. Now, learners can start reading on day one.
Since I am novice-low level reader of Spanish, I immediately thought, "I need to check these out myself!"
I bought all five and immediately started reading them. Wow, these are SO good! As soon as I finished one, I began reading the next one. What I loved about these readers:
- TONS of repetition of high frequency words.
- Short sentences, with each primarily focusing on one main idea.
- Lots of usage of cognates which allows for readers to focus then on the meaning of the high frequency Spanish vocabulary.
- The text is not written as paragraphs but individual sentences, with only maybe 3-4 sentences at most per page.
- Even though the readers are not very long, the plots are VERY compelling. This indeed proves that one can actually create a very interesting, entertaining story with a limited total word count.
- Lots of humor interjected in the plots - I can tell that these were written with middle school students in mind!
- Predictable, repetitive sentence structures - as a novice reader, I am realizing just how important that is for beginner readers.
- Every page has color illustrations - that definitely leads to the compelling nature of the readers. While allowing for double input, it also makes the readers feel like true books.
But most importantly: I cannot tell you how incredibly successful and confident I felt in reading them as a novice-low level reader of Spanish! The length of each reader was exactly what I needed in terms of input. I think too often we rush into novellas for our novice-low readers and thus overwhelm them with too much input which they cannot handle due to length or not level-appropriate (and then we blame students when the blame actually should be on us as teachers!). As a result, we have to wait months until they are ready. These readers definitely do inspire confidence in reading! These Spanish readers are great material for FVR, since they are incredibly easy to read and do not take long. Check them out!
I wish we had these in Latin and that more Latin novella authors would create readers like these Confidence Readers!
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