The first thing that attracted me was the abundance of children's books, such as the I can read series for young children. My English level was only good enough to find some security in the young children's section, and I couldn't even understand the books in the Teen section, but after all, the young children's books were too boring and unattractive for adults. Later, I found out that the ESL (English As Second Language) section also has books for different levels of English proficiency, such as the Rapid Read series, which is suitable for adults. At that time, I began to realize that the English world's graded reading system is not available in China, and until now, it's not easy for our kids to find the right books.
Recently, I was looking at the Oxford Bookworm series, which is divided into entry level, seven levels from 1-6***137 books, entry level is comics with less text, level 1 needs about 500 words or so, level 6 needs about 3000 words. A large number of these works are famous rewrites. Unlike abbreviations, rewrites are often done by an experienced English teacher who rewrites the original text to fit the reading ability of the reader at the corresponding level. At community libraries, I have also seen multiple rewritten versions of a famous book for different grade levels of young readers.
The Oxford Bookworm set has made me more interested in the English leveled reading system. Thanks to the Internet, there is a wealth of information, and I spent half a day looking for some information on the Internet to get a preliminary understanding. I don't know if it's possible to do Chinese graded reading in the future.
Graded reading in English has a history of hundreds of years, dating back to the end of the 19th century, and its main purpose is to help children learn their native English, develop an interest in reading, and gradually improve their reading skills. Nowadays, graded reading has been the **** knowledge in the education world, but the graded reading system is not a big unification, but multiple systems **** exist.
The most basic is of course the age and grade, which is the school year grading system. How old a child is, or how many grades he or she reads, roughly represents how many grades he or she should reach in reading, which is the most primitive and crude grading standard, and also the current grading standard in Chinese. This is the most primitive and crude grading scale, and it is also the current grading scale in Chinese. But note that I am talking about grading scale, not grading system. The reason why I say this is explained below.
Other grading systems in North America include Basal, Lexile, GRL (Fountas & Pinell Guided Reading Levels), Reading Recovery, DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment), and Levels. Levels), Reading Recovery, DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment), AR (Accelerated Reader), Reading A-Z in the UK, Oxford Reading Tree and so on. There are some cross-referenced conversion tables between these grading systems. For example, the Lexile grading comparison table at the end of this article.
The grading system is a complex project, the participants need to have linguistics, literacy, literature, education, psychology, data analysis and other subject experts, but also reading creation, publishing industry experts, but also the relevant computer hardware and software system support, so a complete grading system is not simply a grading standard on the end of the function of its far more complex than the development of standards:
1) Determine the grading standard: In English, for example, the mastery of morphemes, the ability to recognize speech, vocabulary, sentence complexity, sentence length, comprehension, and so on, may be the grading factors to be considered. The finer and more accurate the grading, the more sophisticated the academic research. Simple and crude grading standards like age and school year are probably not even close to 50% accurate.
2) Evaluation of the reading level of the reader: With grading standards, it is not easy to accurately assess which level the reader is at, which requires not only a large amount of practical data accumulation, the accumulation of the question bank, but also a reliable assessment method.
3) Evaluation of books: Of course, the best thing is that book authors write books according to the grading standards, such as the rewriting of the masterpieces mentioned above, but after all, the reality is that a larger number of books and better books are not written according to the grading standards, and it would be too much of a waste of resources to give up on all of them, but to which level should these books be categorized? This kicked-ass civilian thinks that big data can be used here
4) Selection of books: Even if the above three aspects are mature and complete, there is still a need for a Web site or a good software to allow teachers, parents, and children to easily select their own books out of thousands of books
Therefore, some grading systems, such as AR, are an End to End Solution that includes all of the above features.
So some grading systems like AR are an End to End Solution that includes all of the above.
Graded reading was originally designed for native English-speaking children, but as the "hegemony" of the English language became established, the need to learn English as a second language grew, and it became clear that the grading criteria for second-language learners of English (often adults) could be different from those for native English learners (children) because the process of second-language learning is different from the process of acquiring a native language, as the second-language learning process is different from the process of acquiring a native language. The process of learning is different from the process of native language acquisition. In addition, the reading interests of adults are vastly different from those of children. I haven't found much on the Internet in this area, but judging from the ESL series of books I mentioned above that I've seen in community libraries, there are definitely people in North America who are working on this and have had some success. It's also said that BeiWei is working on English grading, so I don't know if it's for English as a second language or not.
Chinese graded reading can certainly learn from the overall idea of English graded reading, but the grading standards and assessment criteria are certainly very different from English, which is determined by the characteristics of different languages.
Experiencing the vastly different Eastern and Western philosophies of children's education, and getting closer to children's books in North America
The feckless North American children's book
Anti-Bullying Education in North America
How to Cultivate Children's Reading Habits
Why North American Children Read a Lot
A different kind of Canada: the library that is not quiet
The different age of children's reading characteristics and how to give them the opportunity to read. Reading Characteristics of Children of Different Ages and Advice for Parents
Grading Reference Chart (Screenshot is incomplete, you need the full content to find it yourself on the Internet):