Book Club, Book Leveling System, and the Application in China

One of the methods to help children grow interests in reading is to set up book clubs. As introduced by the TC Reading and Writing Project, we can match students at about the same reading levels and with similar interested genres together. Members within the same book club can “monitor” and motivate each other’s reading. Book club members meet several times a week, discuss moments in the book that make them excited, touched, and passionate, and decide how many pages they will be reading in the next a couple of days. They also talk about their findings and understandings after applying certain strategies towards the book they are reading. Book club members are selected and matched first according to their reading levels. Reading levels, according to both Fountas & Pinnell and TC standards, ranges from A to Z which is mainly aiming at students from kindergarten to the 8^th grade. 8^th grader is expected to reach adult-level reading proficiency. To my knowledge based on a previous TC course in children’s literature and experiences in a number of public school classrooms in NYC, most teachers are familiar with the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system and their classroom books are leveled by this system. While many books are published with a labeled F&P level, TC’s book leveling standards are not in conflict with the F&P. TC’s standards further complement the F&P system with specific guidance about features of each level in vocabularies, sentence patterns, punctuations, grammar, story flow, picture flow, etc.

While I love the structure and strategies given by the Reading and Writing Project, I have been thinking that how I can apply these good methods to classrooms in China, a place without a recognized leveling system in teaching English. Textbook so far is the main formal resource in K-12 schools in China. Students learn English through reciting vocabularies and practicing pronunciations and textual conversations. Students in bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai are fortunate to have more after-school resources, including after-school English drama club, CDs and software in English stories and plays, English movies, and TV and audio broadcasting devices. Given the facts that there is no leveling system so far, English/bilingual picture books in China are insufficient, and there is no custom of having a classroom library, what can I do there? Can I develop a leveling system for learners who are learning English as a second language in China? Can I promote the idea of having a national English leveling system in China and connecting it to all the English picture book in the market and to be developed in the future? Students in China now start to learn English from 1^st grade (while fifteen years ago students in my generation started to learn English from middle school), with at least one-hour instructional time per day. One possible and feasible way to apply the book-club idea in upper-grade classroom is that: first, establish a classroom library by utilizing English books at school and local university libraries; second, ask several students to manage the classroom library, collecting students’ requests for books and returning books to the libraries; third, match students with similar English reading levels (based on evaluation) and interested genres to book clubs; fourth, ask students take turns to lead their book clubs and produce weekly report to the teacher reporting their reading progresses, questions, and problems encountered; fifth, ask each book club to present what they have learned from their books to the class on a monthly basis; the last but not the least, ask parents to attend students’ monthly book-club presentations, or videotape students’ presentations and post the clips onto classroom web log on a monthly basis.

The process of teaching should be creative and differentiated. Even with limited resources, we can still make a difference. I am enthusiastic about applying and adapting the literacy teaching approaches I learned here to students in China in the near future.