Writing in the 1640s-60s, the pioneer Czech educator John Comenius advocated graded reading, learner-centred pedagogy. One of his core pedagogical principles was omnia gradatim. He wrote several books on new approaches to teaching Latin. He spent last decade of his life in Holland. The British writer/biographer Lucy Aikin did versions of Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Aesop's Fables and other classics 'In Words of One Syllable' -- writing in the 1850s/60s, graded for young readers. I suppose this is bound up with the development
of children's lit. in English. Here her Swiss Family Robinson: http://tinyurl.com/n8mfjf The simultaneous McGuffey Readers in the states (from 1836) were certainly graded, esp. Books 3 and 4. Perrault's tales for kids in French appeared in 1697, the beginning of simplified fairy tales for younger readers. Maybe Comenius inspired some simplified readers in a series, I don't know. His impact was huge, much admired by Piaget, for
ex. --Bill
When I was at primary school in New Zealand in the 1960's extensive reading (L1) was something we did in class everyday. I am interested to know if anyone has...
Well, I don't exactly know the answer. But according to West (1964), the first appearance of simplified Readers for language teaching was the *New Method...
Grant, Day and Bamford's Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom (1998) has some history of the term extensive reading on pages 5-6. There it...
This is about reading for native speaking kids but think people on this list (especially North Americans who grew up reading Dr. Seuss) will find it...
I love visiting secondhand bookshops and looking for old EFL material and readers in particular. I have a delightful reader from 1920 published by "The English...
Sent to me from Clive (posted with his permission) who has had trouble posting: In my first teaching job (Tanzania 1965~67) we were using New Method readers...
Hi I once was chatting with some historical linguists who told me graded readers (of their day) were quite common several hundred years ago. No idea who...
Dear Daniel., I tried to pre-register, but all the message I got is "Page not found" at http://sites.google.com/site/jalt2009erconference/goog_1245026765697, ...
Furukawa Sensei, Sorry about that. Alison, our webpage expert, was adding some pictures to the webpage and it was down for ten minutes. I just tried it now...
   Writing in the 1640s-60s, the pioneer Czech educator John Comenius advocated graded reading, learner-centred pedagogy. One of his core pedagogical...
I agree on the impact of some of Comenius' ideas on present-day education. I would like to point out that one of the pivotal EU lifelong learning programmes is...
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