READ TEXT III AND ANSWER QUESTION.

Reading Materials: Simplified vs. Authentic?

Many foreign language students, certainly those in Japan, can already read in their first language, and may even have the habit of regular reading. The main barrier to foreign language reading for such students is exactly that: the foreign language. The students are in a Catch-22 situation. They cannot understand enough of the foreign language to make sense of most written material, and yet they must read the foreign language in order to develop reading fluency. One suggestion that has been made (e.g., by Brian Tomlinson, 1994) is to postpone reading until students have at least an intermediate-level grasp of the foreign language. Such a policy ignores the role that reading can play in foreign language acquisition, particularly in the all-important learning of new words. Students can benefit by making reading a part of their foreign language study from the beginning (see Paul Nation's "The Language Learning Benefits of Extensive Reading" in this issue). For less than advanced students, the language barrier usually reduces reading to slow, painful decoding with a dictionary - - which is, of course, not really reading at all. The obvious answer is for students to read foreign language materials designed to be appropriate to their level of language proficiency. This, however, has become heresy since the advent of communicative language teaching in the 1970s. One of the great contributions of CLT has been the "authenticizing" of language instruction. Just as the use of real language for real purposes replaced much of the stilted, step-by-step focus-on-form that characterized traditional language teaching, so was it suggested that students read authentic texts written by and for native speakers. As was demonstrated in papers such as "Simplification" by John Honeyfield (1977), artificial, simplified texts for language learners lack features of authentic texts, and so simplified texts were considered a less-than-useful preparation for students learning to read in the real world.