Children in elementary (full or partial) immersion programs learn to read in the target language, but teachers usually draw from the reading instruction pedagogy of the country in which they work. This situation creates challenges for the selection of appropriate books when, as in the case of German, reading instruction pedagogy in Germany still relies heavily on the reading primer (Fibel), whereas North American reading instruction is supported by a variety of books for choice, interest, and scaffolding of difficulty. Those familiar with the context of English point to readily-available open source websites, corpora and book catalogues of easy readers that do not exist to the same extent in other languages. Until now, immersion teachers have had to resort to creating or adapting their own materials, networking, or spending hours online or in bookstores. We argue that this deficit can be remedied using an interdisciplinary approach drawing from corpus and computational linguistics and educational research. To conceptualize this research, we conducted a literature review in English and German following Jesson et al.'s (2011) key phases of a systematic review: map the field through a scoping review, do a comprehensive search, do quality assessment, extract data, and synthesise data before the write up. Through this review, we have conceptualized a framework for understanding the role of text complexity, context, and literary features. Using this conceptual framework and using German as the specific case, we propose a research program for investigating readability of books for immersion schools. We recognize the implications of this design for bringing together previous disparate efforts to determine appropriate books for immersion schools thereby facilitating the selection of such books for students, parents, teachers and librarians.
Jesson, J., Matheson, L., & Lacey, F. M. (2011). Doing your literature review: Traditional and systematic techniques. Sage.
