BBC The Reading Group Part 1

Gary (Presenter):
Hello. I don’t know if you remember the moment you first realised you could read – I can’t – but for the Argentinian writer, Alberto Manguel, it was a dramatic event.
Insert 1 – from A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
One day, from the window of a car I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight couldn’t have lasted very long, just perhaps long enough for me to see large and looming, shapes similar to those in my story book, but shapes that I had never seen before. And yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were, I heard them in my head. They metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonorous, meaningful reality. Since I could turn bare lines into living reality I was all-powerful – I could read.
Gary: From Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. This book is a wonderful account of our love affair with written words, from the first known writing – marks made in tiny clay tablets over six thousand years ago in the Middle East – to today’s electronic media.
The enjoyment of reading is the subject of this series, in particular, the enjoyment of reading books in English as a second or foreign language. We’ll also offer strategies for improving your reading, and we’ll give details of how to contact us at the end of each programme.
Gary: We begin today with a discussion about what it feels like for students to read in English and how to deal with some of the difficulties.
Annemarit van der Made is from the Netherlands where she graduated recently from the University of Technology in Delft. Hello
Annemarit: Hello. One of my earliest memories of books date back to my first school days,
coming home, having a cup of tea while my mother was reading me a book.
Gary: Adrian Sack is a journalist from Argentina. Hello.
Adrian: Hello …I’m working here in London as a freelance reporter for one of Argentina’s newspapers, La Nation. I’m also writing a history book in Spanish.
Gary: And our third guest is Jeremy Page.
Jeremy: Hello …I’m the Director of Studies at International House, a language school in London. I’ve written several English language teaching course books and I’ve also published poetry and short stories.
Gary: Adrian and Annemarit, questions for you first.
What kind of books do you enjoy reading in English?
Annemarit: I enjoy several kinds of books. I like romances, crime, fiction and short stories.
I recently read Joanna Harris books. They are novels and I think she is very good at describing scenery and personal behaviour. When something very exciting happens I really feel like telling the character, don’t do this or don’t do that. I can be swallowed by the book.
Gary: What about some of the problems of reading in a different language? Adrian.
Adrian: Well, the two main problems are the lack of vocabulary and the trend to lose the concentration when I read for long due to the extra effort I have to make when I read.
Annemarit: Well, I agree with Adrian that it’s more difficult to stay focussed on a book for example when you’re tired and I am reading an English book it’s more difficult to stay focused, and apart from that some writers use slang that I’m not familiar with, and when I read Jane Eyre – I read it recently – this book has been written 150 years ago and sometimes they put the words in a different order so that was interesting but it was confusing at times.
Gary: Let’s bring Jeremy into the conversation now. Jeremy, in your experience, do you find that what Annemarit and Adrian have described are typical problems for learners of English when reading in English?
Jeremy: Very much so, yes. The key problems that most readers experience are to do with unknown vocabulary and the length of the text. The critical issues are selection of text in the first place – I think for most readers it makes no sense to choose something that you would never dream of reading in your own language, and secondly length is a critical issue as well, that it can be difficult to maintain focus and motivation. Generally speaking, texts up to 200 pages are fine, but texts longer than that require a degree of commitment that can be quite difficult to sustain.
Gary: What advice do you have for students for dealing with unknown vocabulary?
Jeremy: It’s interesting that should be raised because at the moment I’m going through something similar with my son who is nine – who’s reading Harry Potter. He is coming across a lot of vocabulary unknown to him and what I’ve been suggesting that he do is try to make a judgement about vocabulary – words that he really needs to know, words that would be helpful for him to know and words that he doesn’t really need to worry about. For students of English, typically they will be accustomed to being told by teachers ‘You don’t need to understand every word.’ In my experience students often look a bit sceptical when they’re told “you don’t need to understand every word” in the classroom.
When you are reading a text on your own, in isolation it can be difficult to come across a large number of words completely unfamiliar to you – but I would say – if you feel constantly in need of checking words in dictionaries the selection of text has been wrong in the first place. The text is too challenging it’s too difficult. Going to the dictionary all the time, destroys the pleasure of reading.
Gary: Thank you. I’ll be asking you for some more advice later, Jeremy.
Now before this series began, we asked users of the BBC’s Learning English website to share their views on reading. And what stands out in their messages is that classic books – especially those written in the 19th Century – such as “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte and “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens – are especially difficult because of the style and complex plots!
This view is echoed by readers in Moscow, where we go now.
Reading Group reporter Dasha Pushkova has been to the planning meeting of an English language newspaper, published in the Russian capital. The editorial team are discussing an issue about reading books in English.
Insert 2 – Russian reading group package
Dasha (Reporter):
I am in the editorial building of a newspaper called “English” – it promotes the language, gives tips and helps students with difficulties they might have while learning English. I’m here to meet a group of young enthusiasts who are members of the “Y.E.S Club” – which stands for Youth English Section.
They write their own page in the newspaper. For these young people it’s a chance to improve their language, read in English and to talk about the books they’ve been reading.
Today’s planning meeting is devoted to some of the difficulties of reading in English – and how to inspire the subscribers of the newspaper to read in a foreign language.
Female: We should make our readers believe that it’s much more interesting and much more really important to read English literature in original, because in Russian it’s just a totally different thing.
Male: Last summer I read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien for my pleasure because I like this book. Many years ago I read it first and I didn’t have possibility or frankly speaking the desire to read it in English. Last summer I decided that if you like a book written by an English author you should read it in English. That’s why I made this effort, I read it and I understood the meaning and the plot of the author much better than when I read it in Russian.
Dasha: The editorial team agrees that there are many benefits to be gained frrm reading an English book in the original language but one of the major problems that readers face concerns the choice of vocabulary.
Female: Slang and some peculiarities of the country. For example, Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. It’s full of such things. Fortunately I had a kind of vocabulary in the end of the book, some names of the streets and magazines and newspapers and shops which I didn’t know.
Female2: It’s the author’s style of writing. For example Dickens’s books are very difficult for me and I prefer reading them in translation because I think that there are certain things that escape from our understanding and that is the major difficulty that we can encounter when we read books in original.
Dasha: But whatever the problems, Aliona believes that it’s important to discuss what you’ve just read with other readers. It might help you to understand the book’s themes and it certainly makes the pleasure last longer.
Female: We do discuss it and I think it’s an important thing for evaluating new ideas after reading the book you can think it over and over because for me the most important thing is to think after the book.
Gary: Some comments there about the value of reading books in the original language and also about taking the opportunity to discuss what you read with other keen readers. Jeremy.
Jeremy: I think that’s very interesting and significant. I’m sure that’s why reading groups have become so popular in Britain and a lot of other countries. Reading is a rather solitary activity and I think the pleasures of reading are better shared and I’m sure that communicating your enthusiasm for something you’ve read means that you will inevitably have a greater appreciation of what you’ve read and perhaps greater motivation to read more.
Gary: Now, for every edition of The Reading Group, we’ve asked an author of books for students and teachers of English Literature to share their thoughts on the pains and pleasures presented by reading.
Gillian Lazar joins us today – she’s a Senior Lecturer at a British University and an enthusiastic member of a book group herself! In her talk, she considers why we read, and offers some suggestions on how to share our enjoyment with each other.
Insert 3 – Gillian
Gillian: Every two months or so, in a London suburb, a group of women have a meeting. They laugh a lot, talk excitedly and sometimes disagree quite strongly with each other. Every few days a 12-year old boy goes on the internet and writes a story about the character from his favourite children’s novel. Within a few days, other children, all over the world, have read his chapter on the internet.
Both the 12-year old and the group of women have something in common – they all enjoy reading books, and they want to share this pleasure and delight with other people. The women are part of a reading group; the boy is making use of a fan fiction website that encourages people to write stories about their favourite fictional characters.
It’s often been said that reading a book is like having a conversation. And it seems that many people want to continue that conversation once they have read the book. Reading groups are one way of doing so. Typically, a reading group consists of six to twelve members who meet regularly to discuss a book they’ve all read. Reading groups take place in private homes, in libraries, in chatrooms on the internet. Reading groups read contemporary novels or the classics. And reading groups may even specialise in science fiction or romance, haiku or the crime novels of Dick Francis.
So why such enthusiasm for reading? A lot of reading we do is for information – to find out the times of a train, to discover what’s on a menu. But we also read because it satisfies our need for a good story. We try to make sense of our world by reading stories about it. In the past, reading was often a more social activity than it is today – those who could read, read aloud to those who could not, and everybody shared the stories… Stories which gave insights into the mysterious complexities of human experience.
So perhaps that’s why reading groups are so popular today. They enable people to share stories, and to see how other people’s responses to a story differ from their own. And from this sharing of stories, people form common bonds of friendship and community.
Gary: Gillian Lazar, thank you. Next time, we’ll be finding out how to be a good “book detective”!
ANNOUNCER:
And that brings us to the end of today’s programme. If you’d like to share your reading experiences, you can join our BBC Learning English group on Facebook. We’ll have topics on the Discussion board linked to the subjects covered in The Reading Group programmes. So,until next time, happy reading!