Looking over the reading material provided on the Tar Heel Reader site, I don’t see it as a valuable resource for people who are learning to read. It works well as a repository of practice sentences, but lacks features that would motivate students. The similar structure and minimal content of the books provided on the site fail to present reading as an engaging or important experience.
Each page of a reading consists of a large stock photo above a bland 3-7 word sentence of the form subject-verb-either adjective/direct object/predicate nominative. Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” exactly how I would describe the collections of sentences offered as books from Tar Heel Reader.
It’s not only an issue of this site, but a trend in the materials created for beginning readers. Last week I wanted to pick up a Halloween themed book to read with a 6 year old child I babysit because she’s been learning to read and asked if we could practice together. The only books I could find that were suggested for her age-range had less than 40 words in them. They had 2-4 words per page and usually repeated many of these words.
When I was learning to read, I read from Winnie the Pooh, Beatrix Potter, and Dr. Seuss. These had more than 40 words on a page, and except for Green Eggs and Ham, most of them presented a large variety of words, phrases, and sentence structures. Not only did they challenge me with their structure and semantic content, I wanted to move further in the stories they held. Some of these newer readers have a unified concept, but not much of an engrossing story–This is a cat. The cat is lost. The cat is sad. The cat sees a path. The cat finds its home.
I don’t feel that the material on the Tar Heel Reader site, or a lot of the readings made to help beginning readers stimulate them enough to motivate them to learn basic literacy skills, let alone engender a life-long, positive relationship with reading. For younger students, the books are just flat, for older students, such as adults who are learning to read, the simplicity of these stories could be insulting.
Are there advantages to using materials like those provided by the Tar Heel Reader site? Why do you think there may have been a shift from using more substantial texts to teach beginning readers to more simplified books? What sort of materials did you use when learning to read?
I totally agree about the inefficiency of the Tar Heel website! My first thought was, “If this is to help people that can’t read, or read well, how are they going to be able to navigate this website?”. While obviously they could have someone do it for them, I just felt like it was a rather naive goal. Then, once I looked at some of the “books” they have, I was extremely disappointed. I knew they wouldn’t be actual online copies of The Cat In The Hat or anything, but I expected them to have some sort of complexity. I read one about lipstick. It was weird. That’s the only way I can really think to describe it. More than a book, it seemed like a test of someone’s vocabulary knowledge. The stock photos were creepy, I didn’t understand the purpose, and I couldn’t really image someone sitting down and willingly reading this and enjoying it.
Since I was also raised reading books with actual plot lines in them, and loved reading, this method of education is kind of jarring for me. I understand that some people need these resources and that they’re helpful, and I think it’s cool that technologies like laptops or iPads have sites or apps that can help literacy, but I feel like this was not a great example of one.