Textbook Review/Critique for
More Reading Power (2nd edition)
Timothy M. Nall
11/21/2004

Mikulecky, Beatrice S. & Linda Jeffries. 2004. More Reading Power, Second edition.
New York: Pearson-Longman. Pp. viii + 276. ISBN: 0130611999.
List price: $33.27 (as retrieved from amazon.con on 10/16/2004)

I: Overview

The textbook More Reading Power (hereafter referred to as MRP) is the second of two reading-skills texts written by Beatrice S. Mikulecky and Linda Jeffries and published by Pearson-Longman; the first is Reading Power. The book promotes itself on the back cover blurb as "a student-centered reading skills textbook based on a cognitive-skills approach." MRP has four main sections (designed to be used concurrently), four appendices, and includes a section functioning as a teacher’s guide. This review will deal with each of these segments of the book, including giving consideration both MRP’s level of student-centeredness and the extent to which it fosters development and use of cognitive skills.

Each of the four main sections focused exclusively on one skill or aspect of reading that the authors wished to emphasize: reading for pleasure, comprehension skills, "thinking skills", and reading faster. This conscious design strategy, which the authors presumably thought desirable, was in my mind one of the most troubling aspects of this book. There was no attempt to respiral content or vocabulary or review concepts or structures previously introduced. I suppose the two-part rationale for this is that the book is intended to teach skills, not vocabulary; and that the concurrent use each class period of each of the four sections provides sufficiently repeated exposure to the skills targeted. However, this is less than satisfying. For example, there are ten units within the "Comprehension Skills" section of the book (see section IV of this paper), each asking the students to employ a different comprehension tactic. When one unit is completed, students are never again asked to employ the skill that unit focused on. The tactic just covered drops out of sight, and quite probably out of mind.

The book uses fairly attractive and easy-to-read typeface, and there is typically plenty of white space on each page. Photos and illustrations were extremely few and far in between, and seldom helped students understand new vocabulary, structures, or other unfamiliar elements of the readings. The answers to student exercises were not included within the text of the second edition, though they had been in the previous one.

I was unable to locate any suggestion or indication within the text of the appropriate level of proficiency that students using this text should have, and no rationale was given for omitting this important information. One review of this text notes that MRP "...is aimed at ‘low-intermediate’ to ‘intermediate’ level students" (Ishida, 2002). Among several shortcomings of MRP that Ishida notes, one is that the proficiency-level suggestions are imprecise and do not correspond well to the reviewer’s own observations during classroom use.

I personally taught reading courses using More Reading Power for two consecutive years, while teaching at the Junior College level in Taiwan. The students were second-semester sophomores, and I had used Reading Power for the first semester of each year. I chose this textbook myself, and subsequently other teachers began using it. At that time I accepted more or less uncritically the authors’ claims that the textbook taught reading skills in an effective manner. While most memories of this class have faded, one thing I do recall: Students’ journal entries typically described this book as "OK" and occasionally "boring," and did not seem to offer any strong feelings that the text was interesting, emotionally engaging or intellectually stimulating, or generally helpful to them. Moreover, since Taiwanese students may be somewhat less than willing to directly criticize teachers or their materials, their lukewarm responses may have masked a somewhat greater level of displeasure.

MRP’s treatment of sociocultural issues fluctuated from "mostly harmless" to "mildly troubling." I did not note any content self-evidently offensive to Taiwanese culture or religion. Although the editors did not seem to pursue the goal of presenting a multiethnic viewpoint, they did a reasonable job overall of limiting the more overt forms of cultural bias. However, I felt that some of the exercises contained an implicit component of cultural knowledge strong enough to overshadow their original intent and/or hobble their usefulness. A typical example can be found in a paragraph discussing shopping malls on page 145 does not explain what a shopping mall is, or present a picture of one. There simply are no shopping malls in Taiwan; their rough equivalent can be found in larger cities in skyscrapers given over to multi-floored shopping. A reading on page 245 entitled "Why So Many Children" has a more profoundly Western tilt as it compares Western birth rates with those in "developing countries in Africa and Asia." Treatment of the serious topic of divorce in "The Cactus Flower" and to a lesser degree in "Til Death Do Us Part" presented a trivializing caricature that was vague and aimless at best and distinctly tasteless at worst. I wondered why the book carried so many less-than-flattering, hard-nosed factual examinations of negative sociocultural phenomena that typically occur in nations other than the U.S. (e.g., "Does International Aid Do More Harm than Good," "All the Hungry People" and "Why So Many Children"), yet when the problems hit closer to home the facts became implications (or were elided completely), and the bright lights suddenly turned all soft and hazy. Although the book as a whole did not carry objectionable overtones, I felt that some improvements could be made all of the areas discussed above.

II: Teacher’s Guide

The Teachers’ Guide is the final section of the book. It is discussed first here because of its theoretical and practical relationship to the sections which precede it. I have significant reservations about this section, at least from a conventional point of view, but I will subsequently offer at least one potential resolution to some of the objections I raise.

The Teachers’ Guide seems to me to be composed more of reassuring generalities peppered lightly with practical observations than of truly persuasive or detailed explanations, rationales or guidelines. As such, it probably was one of the things that led me years ago (as an inexperienced teacher) to pull it off the bookstore shelf and persuade my school to require students to purchase it. This "Rationale Lite" approach mirrors the relatively lightweight treatment of cognitive skills that I will discuss presently.

To my mind, including this section in the version of the text that students must purchase is a waste of valuable textbook space and of students’ hard-earned money. I would not be surprised if students mildly resent it as such. Declining to offer it as a separate book strikes me as odd. It may be explained by the fact that the function of a comprehensive Teacher’s Guide for this text seems to be performed by a completely separate text marketed by a different publisher. A "more complete explanation of the theory and methodology" presented in MRP is given in A Short Course in Reading Skills by Beatrice Mikulecky (Addison-Wesley, 1990).

Having said all that, I believe that an application of lateral thinking to this design flaw of the textbook may yield a happy result: I now believe it might be fruitful to use the Teacher’s Guide as reading material for the class. [Note that I am referring to undergraduate English majors, and not MATESL students.] There are several reasons to hope this practice may be worth pursuing, perhaps on an exploratory basis.

Firstly, this practice allows the students to place themselves metacognitively outside and above the main body of the textbook, examining it (perhaps to some degree critically). Some vestiges of the rationales and the "practical tips" offered as asides in the Teacher’s Guide could help the students to plan and structure their learning. This may result in students to feeling more ownership of their learning process. The rationales for the various exercise types are presented at somewhat greater length in the Teacher’s Guide than in the introductions to the various sections. To the degree that its prescriptions and their rationales are sound, it may help students "buy into" some useful practices.

A second point is that the tone, style and vocabulary of this section is far more akin to that of academic discourse which students might encounter in a school in the U.S. than are the non-academic readings offered within the main body of the textbook. By extension (and very importantly), it is also a far superior example of the type of academic writing that mainstream teachers in the U.S. would regard favorably. Its text could be analyzed and mined for its grammatical and (more importantly) discourse features and flaws.

Related to the second point is the fact that the content of the Teacher’s Guide is far more susceptible to analysis (see the discussion of Bloom’s Taxonomy in section VIII, below) than is any other part of the book: Are the rationales offered for the various sections convincing? Are there any unsupported claims? Have any important details or alternate strategies been omitted? Inviting students to problematize their own textbooks is an approach that might encounter some resistance, and might also require teaching some additional concepts or theories from the field of education. I suspect, however, that there may be inherent value in doing so. This would introduce the students to the practice of analyzing a text (that is, the Teacher’s Guide) to summarize its argument(s), exploration of the text by questioning, and formation of one or more well-ordered written responses. The sophistication of these responses would be a factor of the students’ ability to express themselves in the target language, as well as their overall academic development. They could therefore be expected to be somewhat modest. However, the end-result could potentially be a significant boost in learner autonomy and acquisition of some useful learning strategies. The downside would be the potential for making an already unexciting book even drier and thornier.

III: Reading for Pleasure

The first section, "Reading for Pleasure," is thirteen pages long. It includes a rationale of the importance of reading for pleasure, one brief reading with a few questions, two pages that offer helpful hints, a list of suggested readings.

The list of book suggestions, six pages long, could be excised from the textbook no damage done to the usefulness of the book as a whole. I feel that the entire suggested reading list would best be presented within a separate Teacher’s Guide version of the book, and also duplicated on an Internet resource page. The two-sentence descriptions are of course insufficient for the task of helping students decide how to spend their money. Moreover, the authors did not seem to consider the fact that the books they suggest might be prohibitively difficult or expensive for learners in an EFL context to obtain in a timely manner. With this in mind, it might be worthwhile for the authors to spend some time reviewing the texts available online through Project Gutenberg (accessible online at http://promo.net/pg/ or ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ ) in hopes of finding several which meet their requirements.

I am not at all suggesting that there is no value in reading for pleasure. Quite the contrary, I believe that in the long run the most efficacious way to learn to read – and to some degree, to write – is simply to read significant amounts of high-quality fiction and nonfiction of manageable difficulty, paying attention to matters of form. I am obliged to emphasize though that "the long run" is certainly longer than a sixteen-week semester, and probably longer than two or three years. Artifice in the form of classroom instruction can certainly significantly hasten the rate of learning.

The Reading for Pleasure section also includes a page containing a bulleted list of nine "Hints for Success in Reading for Pleasure." The suggestions, which seem largely harmless and perhaps modestly helpful, include such points as "Choose a paperback book, and carry it with you wherever you go" and "Talk to friends about your book." The following page includes some "Guidelines for choosing a Book" in a similar vein. Examples of these include "Choose a book that interests you" and "Avoid reading a book if you have already seen the movie [version]." These suggestions do seem faintly trite, however, when held alongside the relative sophistication and level of difficulty of many of the readings included in More Reading Power.

IV: Comprehension Skills

The second broad section of the book, Comprehension Skills, corresponds precisely to one of the skills in Bloom’s taxonomy. The section is divided into ten units intended to hone such skills as using vocabulary knowledge, making inferences, and identifying patterns of organization. For a complete listing of the skills covered, see the Table of Contents appended to this paper.

I had two general impressions while examining the exercises in this section: first, that MRP spends a great deal of time asking students to perform tasks even though the means for doing so is not explained in deep detail. The explanations typically consisted of simply running through one example, which may or may not be sufficient preparation. I do not recall the degree to which my students had difficulty performing these tasks seven years ago. Ishida (2002:85) makes reference to the fact that " [s]ome exercises from [Reading Power] were too easy for ... intermediate level students, but some from MRP were too difficult. Likewise, some from MRP were too easy for the advanced level students."

Secondly, the overwhelming majority of the exercises focus on top-down strategies. These skills are of course important and necessary. Even units that appear promising at first blush only disappoint on closer inspection. For example, the Using Vocabulary Knowledge for Effective Reading section focuses on guessing unknown vocabulary and guessing word meaning in context. Of course that is all well and good, but my comfort level would have risen significantly if I had seen exercises that foster bottom-up linguistic skills such as examining word roots, stems, or affixes. The Identifying Patterns and Sequences unit seemed to offer hope for some useful exploration of the discourse features of "Five Patterns of Organization in English": lists, sequences, comparison/contrast, cause/effect and problem/solution. However, the explanations and examples seem to be woefully sketchy, in my opinion.

The second unit, Scanning, has a brief presentation of some nonprose reading materials such as newspaper advertisements, a TV listing and two tables, one of which is embedded within an expository text. This does bring a welcome reflection of the kind of texts that students might encounter daily in an English-speaking environment. However, their treatment is brief and rather cursory.

I have serious reservations about the exercises in other units, as for example in the Finding Topics and Summarizing units. In the former, students are directed to find the "topic" of lists of six nouns without using a dictionary, and in the latter are asked summarize a list of words or statements with a word of phrase, as in these examples:

Part 2 (Comprehension Skills), Unit 6 (Finding Topics), exercise 3,

page 81, questions 3 and 7:

3) Topic: ________________________
sedan convertible station wagon minivan coupe sport-utility vehicle

7) Topic: ________________________

McKinley Aconsagua Everest Elbrus Kilimanjaro Monte Bianco

Part 2 (Comprehension Skills), Unit 10 (Summarizing),exercise 1,

page 142, question 7:

7) [Write a summary word or phrase]: _______________________

Every body continues in a state of rest or of motion at a constant speed
in a straight line unless it is disturbed by a force acting on it.

A force is required to accelerate a body. The strength of the force is
directly proportional to the mass of the body.

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The action is on
one body, the reaction is on another.

I am not at all confident that Taiwanese students would comprehend the majority of these words or sentences. For example, I am certain that I never saw a station wagon during my four years in Taiwan, and I distinctly remember struggling to explain the term to my students. Without using dictionaries, students would be forced to resort to uninformed guessing, or simply stare in frustration at an unanswered and unanswerable question. Even with dictionaries, the usefulness of these exercises seems highly suspect to me. I find it difficult to believe that students’ cognitive development in their L1 is not sufficiently advanced at the college level to spot the theme or similarity within a group of six nouns. I also believe that spotting the "topic" within a list of six nouns is of limited use if the ultimate goal is spotting the topic of a typical paragraph. Perhaps the only (extremely modest) virtues of an exercise of this nature is that it would keep students quietly occupied with a task, consume class time (which would not rightly be considered a virtue in a learner-centered approach), and perhaps result in some incidental vocabulary acquisition. Even the latter is contingent upon the teacher permitting the use of dictionaries, and the usefulness of these particular words is open to question.

V: Thinking Skills

The rationale for Part 3, Thinking Skills, on page 265 is that "learning to read well in English means learning to think in English... students will need to [understand] English syntactic, semantic and/or logical connections." I am not sure that I see any logical connection between the act of processing and comprehending such connections (which could easily happen while thinking in L1 and translating somewhat rapidly into L2) with "thinking in English." Having said that, I do not find this disconnect between rationale and implementation troubling. In my opinion, these exercises seems to offer an amplified focus on using logic as an analytical skill, even while claiming to be pursuing a different goal. Barring some reservations about the difficulty of the vocabulary in later exercises, this section is the only one in the book that I feel completely comfortable with.

VI: Reading Faster

Ishida (2003:83) opines that "[i]t is Part Four that makes [MRP] unique and different from other reading textbooks, as it provides exercises for increasing reading rates." The rationale presented on page 266 of the Teacher’s Guide section is two-fold. Firstly, students in more advanced-level ESL/EFL classes are faced with a daunting amount of reading in English. Slow reading speeds can be a significant handicap. Secondly, faster reading leads to better comprehension via top-down strategies. I find both of these assertions easy to agree with. However, I have reservations about the implementation of the in-class exercises intended to enhance reading speed, improve reading performance, and thus address these issues.

While I was an EFL teacher in Taiwan, I observed that at least half of the students complete at least one chapter of the textbook ahead of the classroom instruction schedule at all times. This also held true for the questions after each "reading for speed" reading selection. Because of the competitiveness of the students seeking high grades, I do not believe that this practice can be prevented. Collecting the texts after every class or examining the students’ pages to see if they have not yet been completed both add unwanted administrative effort and a faintly police-like mentality to the classroom. I also have moderate doubts about the efficacy of the option leaving these exercises ungraded, while persuading students that it is in their own best interest to complete the exercises and self-monitor their progress in the manner indicated by the instructions. Finally the post-reading (and only post-reading) questions are typically 7 or so comprehension questions and 1 inference question. These questions do little to help improve comprehension skills, in my opinion, and serve primarily as waypoints of a sort after completing each reading. To my mind, therefore, utilization of these exercises as a learning resource presents troubling challenges.

VII. Appendices and Sample Syllabus

The three appendices seem to be of different degrees of usefulness. A "Record of Books Read" (Appendix 1) could easily have been written by students in their notebooks. Since it occupies only one page, though, its presence is innocuous. Appendix 2, "Book Response Sheet," is slightly more helpful, though the questions students are asked to address are unoriginal and unchallenging. Appendices 3 and 4 are a "Pleasure Reading Rate Finder" and a "Pleasure Reading Progress Chart" respectively. If the Reading Faster exercises proceed as planned and if they are beneficial, then these charts seem directly applicable and useful. Finally, including a very detailed schedule of activities in a "Sample Syllabus" seems like an excellent and extremely useful ancillary on the face of it, but the implementation is less than impressive. The vast majority of the dates are taken up by "Do exercise X, page Y" instructions which any reasonably diligent MATESL student could produce for him- or herself.

VIII. Instructional Goals – Cognitive Skills Development

Since the book is intended to foster the development of cognitive skills, an informal comparison of its exercises to Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive goals in education should be instructive. This taxonomy, well-known to educators since its introduction in 1956, provides a useful structure for categorizing the level of abstraction of tasks that commonly occur in educational settings. The six cognitive goals of Bloom’s taxonomy are given and defined below, as a springboard for discussion:

Adapted from: Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York; Toronto: Longmans, Green.

• Knowledge: "Recalling appropriate, previously learned information."

• Comprehension: "Understanding the meaning of informational materials."

• Application: "The use of previously learned information in new and concrete situations to solve problems that have single or best answers."

• Analysis: "The breaking down of informational materials into their component parts, examining (and trying to understand the organizational structure of) such information to develop divergent conclusions by identifying motives or causes, making inferences, and/or finding evidence to support generalizations."

• Synthesis: "Creatively or divergently applying prior knowledge and skills to produce a new or original whole."

• Evaluation: "Compare and discriminate between ideas, recognizing their evidence and degree of subjectivity and judging their value, without real right or wrong answers."

A comparison of the textbook’s focus and goals to Bloom’s taxonomy reveals many omissions. Only two of these skills, comprehension and analysis, seem to receive any pedagogical focus in MRP. This omission may be due to the author’s assessment of the relative importance of those goals or of their appropriateness for the proficiency level of its intended audience, or even limitations of instructional time and textbook space. Certainly much space in the book is taken up with the goal of increasing reading speed, which does not seem to fit neatly into any niche of Bloom’s skill set. My principal objection, however, is that I fear that too many of the exercises in the text intended to foster comprehension and analytical skills are not well-suited to the task.

IX: Conclusions

No instructional material can be all things for all people. However, after reading through much of More Reading Power and examining its exercises, I would have a number of reservations about recommending it to colleagues. I must emphasize that in my opinion the underlying assumption that educators should bifurcate the receptive and productive skills of reading and writing seems distinctly unproductive. Even taking that in stride, its shortcomings are abundant. In addition to ones noted above, others I noticed: all of its exercises appear to be post-reading. There are no pre-reading exercises for schema activation via devices such as thematically related pictures or discussion questions. There are no concurrent-with-reading exercises. There are no discussion questions intended to get students to express their point of view, or to relate the theme of any reading to an evaluative classroom activity. Attempts to interpreting the viewpoint of an author and analyze the way that viewpoint is presented and/or supported are few and largely token. Productive attempts to respond to the material are also notably absent. The degree to which the readings are interesting is also a matter of opinion, but they certainly do not seem explicitly designed to engage the students’ emotions or curiosity. Finally, I will withhold judgment on the question of how much the nature of the readings reflects authentic content, since I am not completely certain how to make judgments on this issue.

On the surface, the preponderance of its exercises seem to involve such actions as extracting summative and supportive information, guessing meaning from context, understanding the structure and organization of a reading, and making inferences. Regardless of this fact, in no way do I feel satisfied that the bulk of the exercises in MRP are well-suited for fostering this important suite of cognitive skills. Moreover, as mentioned previously, bottom-up skills are given no attention.

The fact that MRP is in many aspects "mostly harmless" and its exercises generally inoffensive from the standpoint of second language acquisition theory may render it suitable to some teaching/learning contexts. Moreover, simple exposure to English prose and the act of working through the various exercises does afford access to a modicum of learning opportunities with respect to linguistic knowledge about English as a written language and its distinctive conventions. In all, though, I am fairly certain that experienced and reflective teachers who use this book would probably feel obliged to approach it creatively, supplementing it liberally with other materials and/or exercises. In my opinion, the value of More Reading Power as a stand-alone resource for the ESL/EFL reading classroom is at best debatable. Its organization and activities do at best a mediocre job of modeling the use of many L2 reading and learning strategies that are supported by current reading pedagogy literature and research.

 

References

Ishida, Saori. 2002. Reviewed works: Reading Power and More Reading Power. Reading
in a Foreign Language.14,1:82-86. As retrieved on 10/22/2004 from
http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/April2002/reviews/ishida.html.