A Word is a Window

In this post, I present the part of the paper that deals with the importance of using literature of reading level appropriate to academic level, and the benefits of this literature to the development of vocabulary and comprehension as well as to the possible solutions to life's challenges.


“A word, at its simplest, is a window.”25

In the end, it’s all about the words: the sound of words read and spoken, the meaning of each of these words as they spring up, like full-blown soldiers, from the page to the fertile soil of a child’s imagination, the visual pictures that they create, and the concepts that these words unlock. Reading and writing are language arts, and the stimuli for proficiency in these arts are not just found in poetry or in Shakespeare, but in great prose literature, much of which we have also relegated to the status of artifact.

Recently, Bruce Coville, in an address given at Rutger’s University in New Brunswick, NJ, expressed frustration over the unwritten policy of many publishers of young people’s literature not to publish books over 150 pages. Their major reason seems to stem from their belief that our students will not read longer books and therefore these longer books will not sell. This unwritten policy seems to reveal an unspoken philosophy that short chapter books with low reading levels will sell better than complex plots in longer books. Many curricula writers seem to have adopted that same philosophy. Many of these books have made their way into the curricula of a significant number of schools as literature for the upper grades and are used to teach and encourage reading in our classrooms.

There are three general levels that divide reading material in education: Independent, Instructional and Frustration. A book on an Independent level is a book that readers are able to read on their own. A book on an Instructional level is a book that requires a teacher as guide as it introduces more sophisticated structure and new vocabulary. And a book on a Frustration level is a book that is too difficult for readers even with a teacher as guide. The Outsiders, Hatchet as well as many other Newberry Award books written on a fourth grade level are great books for independent reading, but become boring when used as instructional reading, because their grade level is inappropriately low and they lack challenging vocabulary for seventh and eighth grade readers. Yet, how many middle schools are using these grade level books for their reading classes? How many high schools are using them? How many of these schools avoid teaching J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, written on a sixth to seventh grade reading level, even to their high school students? Why are we lowering our expectations of our students by selecting books that are below their grade level? How many high schools teach the unabridged versions of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities, both with ninth grade reading levels or do they use the abridged versions that have fifth to sixth grade reading levels? Abridged versions of books are easier to read because the vocabulary is simpler and so is the sentence structure. Why would we take away from our students the very elements that will increase their vocabulary and improve their writing? Are we afraid “they won’t sell?”

Anybody who has watched the Harry Potter phenomenon over the last eight years has observed children, sometimes as young as six years old, waiting on line for the latest J.K. Rawling book of the adventures of a 12 year old wizard in training. Bookstores begin six months in advance, compiling “advanced order” lists for copies of the latest installment, lest they sell out before every child who wants a copy is able to get one. So great is the excitement among children across the United States for the latest Harry Potter book that the night before these books are available for sale, these stores run what can only be described as “book fairs,” consisting of costume contests, wand making workshops, makeup workshops, and readings of the previous books with children sitting in large circles on soft carpeting, listening to the words Rawling uses to create her characters and set the scenes in a world that literally defies description. These “fairs” begin at 4:00 PM and often go until midnight, when the book officially becomes available to the public. What accounts for the success of these books? Are they all under 150 pages? The first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s (Philosopher’s) Stone was 309 pages and one of the last books released, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was 870 pages. Are they easy to read? These books are written on a sixth to seventh grade reading level and are filled with Dickensean names, Latin spells and regional expressions, like Professor Snape, Draco Malfoy, Slytherin, “Occulus Reparum”, or my personal favorite, the Boggart in the Wardrobe, that our children seem never to tire of hearing and memorizing. Are they relevant to life today? They don’t appear to be on the surface. These stories take place primarily in a fantasy world that appears more medieval than modern. Their relevance is that they fascinate children with vivid descriptions of that fantasy world, and through these descriptions, draw them into plots inhabited by children like themselves, burdened with the same doubts and fears that we all have. So children, and many times adults, rush out to get the latest Harry Potter book to continue to enjoy the language and live in the adventure. What are our children telling us? Are we listening?


What are our children telling us?

In the social turmoil of the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, a slow but pervasive transformation occurred in the curricula of American school systems across the country. The great literature, which had sustained and inspired us in the past, was slowly replaced with literature that was thought to be relevant to the children of this new era of social change. Underlying this decision was a desperate fear that if our educational system stayed the course with the literature it had always valued, that it too would become increasingly irrelevant. Education has always been defined as the passing on from generation to generation of that knowledge that society has found to be of enduring value. However, instead of integrating new literature of quality into an already impressive body of work, our education system cut adrift most of the literature that they had previously valued to keep in step with the times. It is the results of this philosophy of current relevance that we are living with now. For in throwing out the bath water, we threw out the baby as well. Gone were many of those works of literature that had inspired past generations with the beauty of their words and the relevance of their themes. The literature that took their place was, in many cases, “relevant” only because it was current. The conflicts that characters from the great literature of the past faced seemed irrelevant to many in the present because the settings, the customs, and the patterns of speech seemed antiquated in our brave new world. It seemed that we had become blind to the similarities between the world of muggles and the world of wizards. The magic that had always inhabited the worlds of our great literature seemed suddenly to disappear in a puff of smoke.

The minds of our children today are bombarded with electronic images of what passes itself off as “reality.” TV has become flooded with shows like Fear Factor, Survivor, The Apprentice and American Idol that present irrelevant challenges and proffer dubious solutions to deal with them, offering fame and money as the reward for winning, and abject failure and humiliation as the punishment for losing. Stories that once defined the difference between right and wrong, the role of real heroes, the cost of heroic effort and the rewards when right triumphs over might are many times absent in the lives of our children today. What replaces those heroic themes in “the intuitive mosaic of instantaneous communication” are muddled messages offering wealth and power as a reward rather than as a warning. Is it any wonder then that many of our children gravitate to the stories of a twelve year old boy whose keen sense of fairness and right guide him through an alien world of wizards to challenge one, in particular, who has been seduced by the “dark side” of power? For outside of these popular books, where are our children to look for heroes to model what is right and good?

In the short period of time between the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, influential educators looked at the artistry of language that these authors mastered to tell stories, stories that were truly worth reading and learning from, and made the decision that they were no longer relevant to our children. These stories were relegated to the world of artifact. Like the handle of Alfred’s pointer, the literature that carried forth the values of our culture was placed under glass and out of reach.


Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.26

In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell comments, of the strength of myth, that “The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale – as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea.”27 If such can be said of “the smallest nursery fairy tales” that we read to our youngest children, those same nursery rhymes and fairy tales that inspired Dylan Thomas to read and write poetry, what would be the impact on our children of continuous exposure to truly great literature as they grow up?

Since we no longer have the luxury of blaming parents or mass media for our declining reading and writing scores, it is time to look to what we are doing, or not doing, to improve those scores. It is time to set our feet on a path that will instill in our children a true love of language that will manifest itself in an increased love of reading and writing, a love that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

In order to accomplish this, we must change what we are doing. To instill in them a true love of language from the first day that they enter school, we must teach them to listen as well as to read using the phonemically rich poetry at our disposal. We must continue to use this poetry to reinforce their reading and listening skills throughout their school careers, beginning with nursery rhymes and continuing through the best poetry we have to offer, encouraging them through instruction not just to read it but to write it as well. Can Shakespeare be taught to young children? The FolgerFestivals Handbook has a section of materials and activities specifically for the early grades of elementary school. They suggest that children be taught rhythm and meter at a very early age, using as its first suggested activity a reading piece that is written in the same iambic meter Shakespeare used in his sonnets and his plays, Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. Later exercises include choral readings and individual speeches from Shakespeare’s plays meant to reinforce the recognition of the rhythm, rhyme and alliteration in the language.

We must expand upon that innate love of language that our youngest children have by introducing and nurturing in them a love of literature, not by using books at an Independent reading level, but by setting the bar higher through exposure to books on an Instructional level, books that are rich in vocabulary, figurative language and increasingly more sophisticated sentence structure. These books will become models for an increasing sophistication in their own writing as they are called upon to react to what they are reading by explanation, explication and writing narratives of their own on shared themes.

As they increase proficiency in reading, we must select literature that will excite their imaginations and teach them about the world and about themselves. From the adventures of Mole and Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the rich fantasy world of C.S.Lewis’ Chronicles of Narna to Richard Adams’ Watership Down, we must select high interest books that are well written and engage the reader’s attention. Whether their attentions are kidnapped by Captain Hook in James Barrie’s Peter Pan or by Captain Hoseason in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, we must set out before them the rich array of our great literature. By reading this literature, they can plumb the depths of the sea in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or circumnavigate the globe in his Around the World in Eighty Days, or leave the planet altogether in a ride From the Earth to the Moon while keeping a diary of their continued adventures. They will be able to ride with Ivanhoe in Sir Walter Scott’s novel as he encounters Robin Hood and protects the lady Rebecca, with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as they protect the weak from the strong, with Sir Galahad in his quest for the Holy Grail or join with Mark Twain as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or they can join the French Foreign Legion in the deserts of Africa in Beau Geste with Percival Christopher Wren. It is the vocabulary of these books and the worlds that they open to the imaginations of our students that is worthy competition to video games and the vast electronic media that presently distracts them. The words and the themes of these books will encourage them to read more and write with increasing sophistication.

Joseph Campbell observed that “since the beginning of civilization, the behavior of every society has been largely molded by its storytellers and myth-makers.”28 In his article “New Heroes for a New Age,” Arthur Kanegis speaks of the unfortunate choices our culture sometimes selects as its heroes today. “’Turning off’ the violence in media is not enough” Kanegis states. “We must also ‘turn on’ stories that will provide role models for children and adults.”29 Where will these role models come from? To find the answer to this question, we only have to look at the wide variety of characters that populate great literature.

As our children mature, they will be forced to face ever more challenging moral questions and will need to explore and grapple with more complex social issues and themes to make sense of their own lives. Through the novels of authors like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, Charlotte and Emily Bronte and, of course, the plays of William Shakespeare as well as the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, they will be able to develop the critical thinking skills through reading as well as through response in writing, skills that will carry them into their adult lives.

Great literature, rather than young adult fiction, contains a gold mine of themes that have always been “relevant” to life’s problems, and are just as relevant to us now as they were when they were written. Like the handle of Alfred’s pointer, the wealth of our literature is a valuable jewel, one that must be taken from under the glass, where it has been relegated to role of artifact, and placed in the hands of educators to do what it was always meant to do, to help point the way in the instruction of our language as well as our values.