Novellas - Balancing Comprehensibility and Compelling

If you want to get me talking at length about anything, mention the following to me: the Brady Bunch, Star Wars (specifically the recent season 2 of Andor [episodes 7-9 and 10-12] which is the BEST Star Wars I have ever seen) or the podcast Sold a Story. Honestly, I cannot get enough of that podcast - I have found it SO informative about the whole language/balanced literacy/three cueing system taught to beginning readers since the 1980's which essentially taught students to guess words and not to truly employ phonics/decoding when reading. If you are currently concerned about the current state of student literacy, I challenge you to learn all about this, because it will both sadden and anger you!

As I have listened (and re-listened) to this podcast, I am finding so many parallels to reading in the CI/ADI world language classroom. Allow me this excursus to detail the philosophy behind this three-cueing/balanced literacy reading methodology - I think the following video does a good job of summarizing the whole language vs. science of reading approaches to teaching reading (and I hope it does not oversimplify the bases for each):

The primary foundation of the whole language approach rests on the idea that much like learning to speak is natural, so learning to read follows the same premise, i.e., beginning learners do not need explicit instruction on how to read and to sound out words since babies do not need explicit instruction in learning to speak; because we learn to speak subconsciously from hearing/interacting with speakers, so will learners pick up reading by being read to and interacting with reading without explicit instruction. As a result, the idea is to surround students with plenty of books to read and to provide ample opportunities for them to read and to be read to. In these ways, novice readers will then develop their own reading skills. Proponents believe that teaching students to decode/sound out words is too boring and burdensome for beginning readers and will actually impede their enjoyment of what they are reading. 
 
Upon this foundation emerged the balanced literacy/three cueing system. Developed by Marie Clay in the 1960s, this methodology eschewed teaching developing readers to sound out words but rather instead to follow these "three cues" when encountering words:

1. look at the picture on the page to guess the meaning of the words/sentences.
2. look at the first letter of the words, then scan the word for other letters, and to guess a word which best fit that pattern. This is called isolated phonics, so it is incorrect to say that the whole language approach does not ever teach phonics.
3. look at the context of the sentence to guess the meaning of the words.

From this developed the "leveled readers". Replacing the decodable books, which focused on students sounding out words and had sentences which followed predictable sound patterns, leveled readers allowed for the plot to dictate which words these readers encountered, regardless of whether these words were level-appropriate. These leveled readers had plenty of pictures to aid readers in determining meaning of the sentences. Lower-level readers focused on predictable word patterns, instead of sound patterns, and had plenty of pictures from which readers could deduce meaning. The concept posited that these leveled readers were viewed as compelling for beginning learners, since they were "word-driven" instead of the boring, "sound-driven" decodable books; because these readers had compelling plots, this would cause beginning readers to want to continue reading. However, the reality was that these beginning readers were not actually reading but guessing based on pictures or context and were never truly reading the individual words - thus it gave the appearance that these students were reading. Therefore, when the readings became longer and more complex and the pictures began to disappear, many students began to flounder, because they never truly had possessed the necessary foundation needed for reading. 
 
For roughly 40 years, this is how students were taught to read. Meanwhile, scientific studies began to reveal that students actually need explicit instruction in how to read and that decoding words is an essential skill for reading development in the brain and for orthographic mapping, a key part of reading. I will end my excursus here, since I could continue. The three cueing system may be a strategy which can be implemented MUCH MUCH LATER following YEARS of reading but should not be used as the sole substitute for teaching students to read. Because of the popularity of the Sold a Story podcast and tons of parents becoming informed about this, states have begun to ban the balanced literacy/three cueing approach from schools in favor of the science of reading (which is so much more than just phonics).

 
Side note - In a communication with Martina Bex about the Sold a Story podcast, of which she is a fan, she wisely noted to me:

So interesting how it’s the SAME THING we have in world languages, with language acquisition but reversed—kids don’t need explicit instruction to acquire language but that’s the wrong idea that has been perpetuated by publishers forever.

So with all of the above in mind (I appreciate you continuing to read this), while balanced literacy and world language instruction is not a 1:1 comparison, I do see some of the same principles applied to so many novellas today: we sacrifice comprehensibility for compelling, especially at the novice-level. Because we want our students to read the target language (Krashen himself says that reading plays a key role in language acquisition), we often rush into creating plots which we think will be compelling but as a result, we overload our readings with vocabulary or structures which we think that they should know (again, we have been influenced too much by what textbooks say). It becomes an overload of language and structures for novice-level readers. These novellas should rather be marketed as intermediate level readers (notice that the terms "Spanish 1" or "German 2" are not used but rather ACTFL proficiency levels).
 
While we teachers (the experts in the room who can read the target language very quickly) may think that true novice-level readings are too boring and predictable for beginning language learners due to a focus on sheltering vocabulary, in reality we need to realize that for these students, it probably is not boring at all! Do we ever extol and laud our students by telling them that they are reading another language?! It is very possible and doable to have level-appropriate comprehensible novellas which have compelling plots, especially at the novice level. I will point to the Confidence Readers and Pablo Paloma by Adam Giedd and the Mosca series by Margarita Perez Garcia. 
 
But at the same time, I do worry that students are applying the cueing system when reading novellas:

1. if there are pictures to help guide students, do they rely solely on the pictures for meaning and not on the words in the target language?
2. if sentences are predictable in nature at the novice level, do students rely on the pattern for meaning and not ever really look at the words per se, i.e., they know the pattern in their L1 so they do not find it necessary to focus on the L2 words? Could they just be memorizing the L2 pattern of words for L1 meaning but never really knowing which specific L2 word means what in L1?

Enough of my grumpy old man tirade (I turn 55 next month!). If you have not been made aware of the balanced literacy approach taught in schools, I hope that this has enlightened you some, and I would love to hear your comments on this.