D O THE READING INSTRUCTIONS PREPARE THE PUPILS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION ?

As we saw above all of the informants think that reading is suitable as a basic skill for English and the most common reason why is that being a skilled reader is important in order to succeed at higher education. This makes me wonder: Does the reading instruction in upper secondary school that I have found actually prepare the pupils for higher education?

The reason why this is such an important question for Norwegian pupils is that quite a lot of the literature that they will be required to read in higher education is written in English. In order to further investigate whether or not the reading instructions do in fact prepare the pupils for higher education I am going to present the results from a different survey, “The Acid Test; Does Upper Secondary EFL Instruction Effectively Prepare Norwegian Students for the Reading of English Textbooks at colleges and Universities?” After that I will

compare the results of this survey to the results from my own survey.

7.4.1 A short presentation of “The Acid Test”

In order to find out whether or not the reading instructions in upper secondary school

prepare the pupils for higher education Hellekjær (2005) conducted five surveys. For reasons of space I will only present the results from one of these surveys; the “English Reading Proficiency in Upper-Secondary School: a seven School Sample”. My reason for choosing this particular survey is that it is the main survey done in upper secondary school, and the one I find to be the most comparable to my own survey. When conducting this survey Hellekjær used both a self assessment questionnaire and the IELTS Academic Reading Module to check the pupils reading abilities. The IELTS test is a placement test that foreign students have to take in order to be accepted into colleges and universities in the UK, and is therefore also a suitable test to see whether or not the pupils have developed reading skills that are good enough to be able to handle the reading required of them at Norwegian

colleges and universities. The results from the IELTS test are the ones that will be presented here.

There were a total of 217 respondents for this survey. Of these 178 had received ordinary EFL instruction only, whereas the remaining 39 had received sheltered single subject CLIL instruction in addition to the ordinary EFL instruction. Here, I will concentrate on the 178 EFL respondents. When going through the pupils’ answers Hellekjær found that two thirds of these respondents scored too low to pass the IELTS Academic Reading Module

(Hellekjær, 2005, p. 214). Upon closer examination Hellekjær found that the main reason for this was that many of the respondents ran out of time. This indicates that the respondents had not developed effective enough processing skills to be able to complete this task. In other words, the respondents were not skilled enough at adapting the way of reading to the reading purpose (Hellekjær, 2005, p. 214). Instead they might have opted for the slow and laborious careful way of reading, presented in chapter 2.

The most interesting result, with regards to my own survey, was that the main reason for the poor results among the EFL respondents was due to inefficient processing skills. It seems like the pupils were not proficient in adapting the way of reading to the purpose for reading,

and that they, because of this, ran out of time. My next step will be to look at whether the data about reading instruction provided by my informants can help explain these results, or, even better, give an indication that the situation might be improving.

7.4.2 A comparison between my survey and “The Acid Test”

Because the results from “The Acid Test” show that the EFL student scored poorly because they ran out of time, I will now proceed to investigate to what extent my informants work on different ways of reading a text depending on the purpose for their reading.

Looking at the results from my interviews I find that five of the informants report that they do work on this. However, four of these informants do so only occasionally. In addition to the sporadic manner of the teaching, these informants are not aware of whether the pupils find this work helpful or whether or not they continue using these different ways of reading when they are not specifically told to. The last informant who reports to working on this does so frequently and with a conscious plan behind the work. His focus is to prepare his pupils for higher education and he sees helping them develop efficient processing skills as crucial to this. When asked why he simply answers “How are they going to make it at university if they can’t read?” He is also the only informant that has evaluated the pupils’

progress and found that they do in fact continue using these techniques when reading on their own as well.

Looking back to chapter 5, we find that one of the learning objectives I specifically asked my informants how they worked with in class was “The pupils shall be able to read formal and informal texts in various genres and with different purposes”. This is clearly linked to adapting the way of reading to the purpose of reading different texts. This is also the learning objective the informants had the most trouble answering. They all got caught up in the term “formal and informal texts” and none of them mention that they teach different ways of reading a text in connection with this learning objective even though as mentioned above five of them actually do work on this to some degree.

My findings, with regards to how the informants work on reading in class, clearly do not indicate that there has been an improvement since 2005. Instead, I would say that they offer an explanation as to why the results from “The Acid Test” were as bad as they were. It is my opinion that the teaching of reading and reading strategies done by most of my informants will not produce proficient readers. I would even go so far as to say that in most of these classes it is up to the pupils themselves to train to become good readers. However, many of my informants report that their pupils read very little outside of school, as was repeated by Hellekjær (2008), so how the pupils are going to manage is a question I will have to leave unanswered. One thing is for certain, many of my informants’ pupils are going to struggle more than would have been necessary when starting higher education.