An analysis of graded readers for Compulsory Secondary Education in Spain: A mixed study

Abstract

The use of graded readers, whether compulsory or optional, is a common practicein many secondary schools in Spain. Many English departments include these readers in their annual teaching programmes because their use promotes effective learning and improves students’ language skills, both productive and receptive. The main objective of this paper was to examine the material that publishers included in their collections of graded readers for the subject of English as a foreign language in the 4th year of Compulsory Secondary Education (CSE). For this purpose, a mixed study was conducted following a concurrent design and using a 16-item questionnaire developed by the researcher and validated by several experts according to Lawshe’s content validity ratio model. The sample analysed 173 graded readers belonging to nine publishers with such material for CSE by means of a parametric analysis of variance (ANOVA). The research hypothesis was that publishers do not include the same material in their graded readers’ collections. The research results confirm that not all publishers include the same material in their collections