Fostering a Love for Reading: Structured Free Reading for Multilingual Learners of English

Krashen describes free voluntary reading as self-selected reading with no accountability in the form of assignments, such as reading logs and book reports or worksheets with questions. Free reading is just as the name indicates, time for students to read on their own from books they select. Rather than assigning chapters or a book for students to read, free reading provides students with choice and autonomy. Students are not asked to fill out an assignment or record how much they read. They just read for the sake of reading with no strings attached. Free reading is supplemental and does not take the place of reading instruction.

Structuring free reading helps multilingual learners of English (MLEs) become more successful as they read.

Both “Structured” and “Free”?

It may seem like an oxymoron to say “structured free” reading (SFR) since something free should not be structured. Structures imply less freedom. Yet, what we hope to share here are ways to give MLEs the flexibility and autonomy to read joyfully and educators a way to shape reading routines to make greater literacy and language gains. As Krashen reminds us, language development is a byproduct of reading.

Many students view reading as an assignment, a task, or a chore. We hope to create experiences that motivate MLEs to love reading, to want to pick up a book and not put it down, to read for pleasure, to read to escape, and to read for reading's sake. Because as we know, reading is not only fundamental, but it also opens the mind and increases language development.

For Young Learners 

It is important that young MLEs who are in the early stages of learning to read receive foundational reading instruction. Structured free reading is outside of the explicit and direct instruction of foundational reading. But this is a time when young learners get to practice what they are learning as readers. Low-stakes practice is important for learners of all types and ages.

Young MLEs benefit from hearing their teachers read from a variety of genres. Students at this age may not have discovered the joy of reading or found their reading identity yet. Listening to the teacher read from a wide range of books and topics helps young readers think about what types of books they enjoy. Perhaps mysteries are intriguing to them, or maybe they really find biographies interesting. 

For Secondary School Learners

Think back to a time when you were lost in a good book that transported you to a new world. Remember back to the pull the characters had on your hearts and how you rooted for the underdog and fumed at the villain's treachery. You probably read eagerly even though you didn’t have to fill in a log, do a report after each reading, or get your parent to sign a reading log.

Structured Free Reading: An Overview

The duration of SFR can vary based on the amount of time you have with your MLEs, but a respectful and reasonable reading period is 10–15 minutes. (Any amount of time less than 10 minutes does not allow for a student’s interest in the book to develop.) Though it is significantly shorter than what we would love for our MLEs to read (45–60 minutes), we are often constrained by curricular needs.  However, if you are scheduling SFR into the majority of your sessions, it does add up over the course of a month and a year. 

The first step is to create a set schedule for SFR. We make time for things we value. If we value MLEs loving reading, then we have to carve out and protect in-class reading time, not just assign reading for outside of class, where there are too many distractions that siphon their attention away from this precious time. When scheduling SFR, do it regularly and consistently. Here are some examples:

• • Over a two-week period, you have five sessions with your MLEs (three 80-minute sessions and two 40-minute sessions). You could schedule SFR into all of your 80-minute sessions.
  • You have five 50-minute sessions with your MLEs. You could schedule SFR for four of the five sessions.

The goal is to schedule SFR into the majority of your lessons. Without a consistent commitment to SFR, MLEs won’t sit with a book regularly enough to gain the joy of reading.

Book Selection

It’s essential that MLEs be given complete freedom to choose the book they want to read — and to choose when they want to abandon the book. Joyful reading is choice-based reading. Conversely, resistant reading is when MLEs are restricted from abandoning a book. Here are a few specific choices that are important to offer students for SFR:

Language: MLEs must be allowed to read a book in any language (because the love of reading can happen in any language, not just English). We’re not really focused on English development through SFR, though that is one of the eventual goals. The priority is to have our MLEs leave our class at the end of the year and turn to books as a leisure activity. The language does not matter.

Genre: The reading genre is also mostly up to students. Our only stipulation is that the book has to have characters (or real people) and chapters. With chapters and characters, we can follow the journey of the characters through their ups and downs. Reading a news article, for example, does not often produce this kind of emotional connection with readers and doesn’t allow a reader to be immersed in a story for an extended period of time.

Platform: MLEs can read a physical book from the library, select a book from a digital library (our school has a subscription to Sora), or even listen to audiobooks — as long as they have nothing else open on the device they’re using to listen.

Reading Conferences: During Structured Free Reading

We are not fans of teachers reading while MLEs are reading. We know the intention is to model love of reading as well, but it’s a highly ineffective use of your valuable time in class with them. Instead, we advocate for using this time for reading conferences: Meet with students and have them read to you.

During these meetings (just five to seven minutes, depending on the time allotted to SFR), you can gauge their interest in the book and their ability to understand it, and guide them in reading fluency and comprehension. Here's an example from Tan’s classroom, where SFR is a 15-minute activity and he conducts two seven-minute reading conferences during each SFR session:

As Reach (a 9th grader) read from his book, I realized the selected section had a lot of pronouns. After asking him to summarize the two paragraphs he’d read, I saw that he was confused about the characters involved — that was because he hadn’t paused to link the pronouns to their respective nouns. I used our seven minutes together to introduce this strategy and help him practice it before calling another student for the remaining seven minutes to engage in their reading conference.

Reading Conference Tips

• • Newcomers: When serving newcomers, try recommending graphic novels for older students and picture books for younger learners, and sit with them to help them read their book if it is in English.
  • Translation Tools: Teach older MLEs to use any translation tool to help them make sense of the English book. If they are reading a book in another language, use translation tools to talk about the book during the conference.
  • Strategies: To prevent the reading conference from being an intense reading mini-lesson, focus on just one strategy or guidance. Then release the student to return to their book. Too much conferencing takes away from the joy of reading.
  • Journals: If you have students write a brief summary after SFR, allow students who do reading conferences to skip writing so that they regain the time spent on the conference.

After Reading

In some classrooms, after reading, students share what they read with partners or in groups. Facilitation of this can include sentence stems such as, “Today I read…” or “One thing that surprised me in my reading was…” In other classrooms, the instructional day simply moves on to the next lesson or subject.

At the risk of sounding hypocritical (as we did say “with no strings attached” earlier), we do have students write very brief summaries of what they read during SFR. This is very low stakes: It takes five minutes and is never graded. We use it to assess if learners understand the book and for them to practice their English skills even if they read in another language. However, it is also perfectly appropriate to not have students do any follow-up after the SFR session. You can simply proceed with the rest of your lesson.

Conclusion

Our goal is to nurture a love for reading in our students. We believe that a love of reading is intentionally created one book and experience at a time. We can create the conditions for MLEs to foster a love of reading through SFR.