Southeast Asian Basal Readers

A basal reader is a text designed to have a particular level of reading difficulty.  The use of 'hard' or uncommon words is not the only issue; difficulty may be the result of a variety of factors, including some of particular relevance to mainland Southeast Asia:

-   incidence of complex orthography; i.e. irregular or uncommon spelling;

-   use of socially specialized words; e.g. formal terms for common actions;

-   the semantic, conceptual, and/or cultural content of a text;

-   a text's use of particular syntactic and grammatical constructions;

-   the presence or absence of spacing between words. Research Questions Basal readers are fascinating documents from a variety of sociological, political, and educational perspectives.  But from the point of view of second-language instructors who fall back on these texts for lack of alternative materials, one question looms above all others:

How appropriate are native-speaker basal readers for L2 learners who are generally foreign, adult, non-fluent, and inexperienced with complex scripts?

Although each may be equally unskilled at reading per se, the foreign adult is no match for any child who has a native speaker's lexicon, grasp of grammar, and grounding in cultural references.  Nor is it clear that basal reader content, which is usually focused on a child's social life and relations, meets the adult learner's needs.  Research questions raised by these texts include:

-   how broad is the lexical content at each grade?

-   is the introduction of syntactic or grammatical features consistent with the L2 learner's needs?

-   how relevant - or irrelevant - are the texts' cultural and social aspects to to adults?

-   do these books provide the equivalent of instruction in phonics, look-say, or some other methodology?

-   on the whole, what aspects of native-speaker basal readers should be adopted or adapted for adult learners? Sample Texts We are not aware of any critical analysis of the social role or pedagogic value of basal readers for mainland Southeast Asia.  In the hope of encouraging such research, we have reproduced sets of basal readers for Thai, Khmer, Burmese, and Lao.

Thai     1a   /   1b   |   2a   /   2b   |   3a   /   3b   |   4a   /   4b   |   5a   /   5b   |   6a   /   6b

Khmer       1     |     2     |     3     |     4     |     5     |     6

Burmese       1     |     2     |     3     |     4     |     5     |     6

Lao       1     |     2     |     3     |     4     |     5     |