© 1987 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Adapted literary texts and the EFL reading programme
Nancy Campbell is currently teaching English at the Universities of Klagenfurt and Graz in Austria and is involved in teacher-training programmes. She is also engaged in research into reading and second-language learning. After graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1977, she attended Moray House College of Education. She then taught English in Scottish and Austrian secondary schools. In 1984 she completed a post-graduate course in linguistics at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.
When compiling a reading programme for less advanced learners of English, teachers often express concern about the effect of linguistic difficulty both on students' enjoyment of texts and on the development of fluent reading skills in the target language. One solution is to introduce readers to adapted literary texts which, it is hoped, offer reading ease as well as narrative interest. This article examines two adaptations to explore the claim that ‘simplification’ always creates a text which is easier to read, and also to see if any loss in narrative interest is incurred through simplification. The discussion will concentrate on lexical simplification, since lexis is the aspect of reading texts most regularly identified by readers as difficult.