Formula for failure

Reading levels and readability formulas do not create lifelong readers
Reading is both a skill and a behaviour. It is a combination of knowing how to read and the desire to do so. It's crucial, of course, that we teach children the skills that will allow them to read and, in fact, for the last several years schoolchildren have shown steady growth in reading acuity. But what I call reading behaviour - the practice of lifelong readers - extends beyond the ability to pronounce words or select the main idea from a passage. Rather, the desire to read grows from the knowledge that print offers something wonderful and meaningful in a person's life - and only to the extent that one senses this kind of wonder will one continue to read.

Many of today's teachers point with pride to the numerous trade books [for example, text books, reading scheme materials] now found in classroom libraries and used for instruction, but just because children are reading trade books doesn't mean they're laying the groundwork for becoming lifetime readers. Children who become lifelong readers not only have access to books but make their own choices about what to read. Classroom teachers, however, frequently limit this kind of reader choice. They often require children to read a number of preselected novels, books from prescribed genres and lists, and texts about predetermined subjects. And well they should: these materials are used to meet specific curriculum objectives, but they do not necessarily promote reading for pleasure.

Encouraging lifelong reading
School librarians are different. Their purpose is to encourage children to select their own reading material. School library collections not only complement the curriculum but are also designed to support most schools' wider mission: to encourage lifelong learning and reading.

The books that help achieve this goal are those that allow youngsters to think about and read about the things they want to think about and read about. They are the books that let students discover issues and topics they may have never imagined. They are books that provide children diversion and escape, frequently by encouraging them to return to familiar authors, genres, series, and topics. Such materials help turn novice readers into experienced ones: deciding independently when they want to read, what they want to read, and how much of a given text they want to read. That is the behaviour of a lifetime reader.

Student reading level or student preference?
Such behaviour can't develop if we put limits on it, and currently I see a practice creeping into school libraries that may do just that. I'm referring to the increasing use of formulas that measure the reading levels of books, and tests that assign reading levels to students. Two popular programs that use numerical measures are the Lexile Framework and Advantage Learning's STAR Reading program. Both systems take the words and sentences in a book, figure the length and complexity of each, and assign a reading level to it. Then, based on students' performance on a test, they come up with numerical scores for student reading levels, which in turn are used to match students with books. Though Lexile and STAR differ in their particulars, the idea behind them and similar systems is the same; armed with two sets of numbers - the reading levels of books and the reading levels of students - adults can confidently recommend material that students can handle on their own. Then, the thinking goes, once children are able to negotiate those texts comfortably, they'll move to increasingly difficult levels, repeating the process until they eventually become skilful readers.

Don't get me wrong. In certain circumstances it makes sense to assign reading levels to texts. Educators, for example, may want to use such measures when deciding on the purchase of textbooks for a large population. For instance, if you're considering a third-grade textbook, and all the readability measures put the book at an eighth-grade reading level, there's a good chance you have a problem. But whatever their limited value, readability formulas and reading levels don't belong in the library. Selecting books for direct instruction in the classroom and selecting books for voluntary reading or study in the library are two different processes. The former examines materials that will be required for group use. The latter considers materials available to individual readers, assuming children will choose what is most appealing to them at a given moment. Any attempt to match student reading levels, rather than student preferences, with leisure reading materials is fraught with problems.

Problems with assigning reading levels
Assigning level on a single test
First, there's the problem of assigning levels. All too often, a student's performance on a single test determines his or her reading level. While many tests are powerful indicators of student progress, they do not translate into effective measures of reading behaviour. For instance, many tests establish students' reading levels by presenting them with a variety of fiction and non-fiction passages, or sentences highlighting particular vocabulary words. But these sorts of samples don't reflect how students actually behave with books, magazines, and other reading material in the real world.

As most librarians know, a child's background knowledge about a particular subject, author, characters, or genre changes the reading task, making one book easier for that child but another one more difficult. In a recent television program, the actor Rupert Everett read exquisitely from Shakespeare. Yet, in a follow-up interview, he noted that he was unable to read the directions for programming a VCR. Now I don't suspect he was actually unable to read the VCR manual. Anyone who can read and interpret Shakespeare flawlessly can certainly read a manual. More than likely he was either unfamiliar with that kind of directional reading, or he had no desire to engage in it.

Real reading behaviours
We all know students whose test scores paint dismal pictures of their reading ability. Yet, over and over, these youngsters find, read, understand, and enjoy books that, based on their reading levels, they should not be able to handle. These are the young adults who form connections with SE Hinton's The Outsiders, Chris Crutcher's Stotan!, or Rob Thomas's Rats Saw God. They're the space savants who read technical material far beyond the scope of books in the children's room. And they're the young people who appear remedial because they dislike fiction but who nonetheless devour non-fiction books about football or history or animals. When library administrators and librarians push children to read solely at designated levels, they take away a child's freedom to read the aforementioned materials.

We also know the other side of reading - the cases in which someone may dip well below his or her level in order to begin comprehending a new subject. Librarians, for example, frequently suggest that grown-ups take a particular book from the children's section because it offers basic information not necessarily found in adult works. And children will, on their own, select simple texts as their introductions to unfamiliar material. If a goal of education is to introduce youngsters to that which they don't already know, then this kind of choice must be permitted.

Simply put, real readers don't always read at their optimum levels. I think of what I've read over the past couple of weeks. Discounting Cow Moo Me, Mouse Mess, Oonga Boonga, and Z-Z-Zoink (which I've read to my grandchildren an untold number of times), I've read some journal articles, masters' papers, student portfolios, administrative memos, and professional books - all directly connected to my job. For various reasons I've also read Jules Feiffer's Bark George, Ken Wells's Meely LaBauve, a Spenser mystery whose title has escaped my memory, Adeline Yen Mah's Chinese Cinderella, and Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly. Few are written on my reading level; most brought pleasure and reaffirmed my desire to continue reading a variety of texts. This part of my reading behaviour is no different than what we see among youngsters who like to read. Real readers don't automatically progress to more and more difficult texts. Instead, they move up some levels for some things and move down some levels for others. To discourage that movement denies children the very behaviours lifelong readers embrace.

Quality of writing
There's another, related problem with using reading levels to guide children's reading. Underlying the use of these schemes is the concept that once a reader is given a book or magazine with a particular rating, he or she will then be able to read and comprehend it. Not necessarily. Some magazine articles, no matter what their levels, are written so poorly that they are incomprehensible. Other materials have such exquisite illustrations or are written so clearly that they allow less facile readers to understand and enjoy their content. Still others - and I'm thinking here of books like EL Konigsburg's Father's Arcane Daughter, SL Engdahl's Enchantress from the Stars, Paul Fleischman's Whirligig, or Walter Dean Myers's Monster - may not seem very challenging based on vocabulary or sentence length, but have unconventional structures that call for sophisticated reading skills.

Failure to differentiate
Finally, there’s the whole question of how much emphasis we should put on students’ scores on reading tests. In Texas, where I work, I’ve heard educators note that students perform differently on the expository and narrative sections of standardised reading tests. Still, these same students receive a single score, and it is that number that’s used to match them with all kinds of reading. In other words, the facility with which one reads a novel may be different than that for reading an informational book, but the reading levels given to students fail to differentiate between the two.

Moreover, a number of educators caution against putting too much weight on one assessment instrument. Again in Texas, teachers, school administrators, librarians, and parents frequently bemoan the emphasis the state legislature places on its assessment. They say a year’s worth of teaching boils down to a week’s worth of testing. Yet these are often the same folks who take a student’s reading level, determined from a single test, and use it to select books for an entire year. Even at the library school where I teach, when students apply for admission, they often ask about the importance of their scores on the Graduate Record Exam. ‘Will you take into account my letters of recommendation and my past grades?’ some ask. The point is, as adults we don’t want our potential measured on a single scale. Why should it be different for kids?

‘Readers’ advisory’
In order to become lifelong readers, children must have access to books – and lots of them. They must also have some help in selecting them. Librarians call that help ‘readers’ advisory’, and it is an art. Adults who note that a child likes fantasy and then give him or her a random volume of imaginative fiction aren’t providing readers’ advisory. Neither are those who discover that an individual wants books about basketball and point that person to the 700s. And neither are those who rely on numerical levels to recommend books.

Readers’ advisory involves knowing books and knowing children. It requires that librarians help youngsters find materials that speak to them rather than those that might improve them. Readers’ advisors balance a myriad of balls in the air each time they recommend a book. They consider what children liked previously and what they want at this particular moment. The same individual may want to read Buffy the Vampire Slayer one day, Garth Nix’s Sabriel the next, Seventeen magazine the next, and Russell Freedman’s Martha Graham the next. The ability to respond to these varied requests is complicated and abstract. It requires knowledge and skill. And it’s why librarians who do so are called professionals.

Betty Carter
Betty Carter is a professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman’s University.

This article is reprinted with permission from Reed Business Information, 7 January 2000.
© 2000 Reed Business Information.

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