When graphic organizers are used effectively, both the teacher and the students expand their roles in the
basal reader lesson.
The
basal reader has its supporters as well as its opponents.
The teacher should always have access to an anthology of children's literature on his/her desk so that suitable poems may be read and discussed with learners, along with those poems contained in the
basal reader. Holiday poems generally are very much liked by pupils, such as Halloween poetry.
The paper also discusses a more open-ended method, Robert Gagne's eight steps of sequential learning, and it advances as a flexible form of teaching and learning the use by teachers of the
basal reader in the reading curriculum.
It also includes
basal reader use in that category.
Finally, "structural analysis" depends mainly on the ability of the reader to recognize prefixes and suffixes.Word-attack skills vs comprehension skillsIn "The
Basal Reader Approach to Reading," Robert Aukerman, a dean at an American teachers college, wrote, "Learning word-attack skills alone is not enough, since reading involves more than just identifying the words that the graphic symbols represent.
The teacher uses a
basal reader that is contrived to teach, among other things, knowledge about letter sound relationships (Figure 3).
One group of students read the first chapter of the book and another group read a modified
basal reader version that had deleted cultural information.
"WHO'S THAT tripping over my bridge?" roared the troll'--provided that an authentic version is used and not an emasculated sanitised
basal reader version.
There also are feelings of reward when a play is used directly from a
basal reader.
The result has been a tendency to base reform on changes in
basal reader programs, including anthologies, workbooks, and teacher's manuals.
The intervention studied was the
basal reader "Sam and Pat, Volume I," published by Thomson-Heinle (2006).