Why Extensive Reading should be an indispensable part of all language programs

Forthcoming in The Language Teacher, June 2006

Rob Waring

Notre Dame Seishin University

Okayama, Japan

‘A teacher’s goal is to make herself unemployed.’ - Anonymous

This paper puts forward the idea that graded reading, or extensive reading, is a completely indispensable part of any language program, if not all language programs.  In order to demonstrate the case for a graded reading component within any language program, it is useful to separate two kinds of learning. The first is learning about language. The second is learning to use language.

Learning about language involves finding out about how the sound systems, the grammar, vocabulary, and so on, work. An analogy would be taking a car engine to pieces to see how it works. This is what our course books are designed to do. Course books introduce a piece of language in say, a reading or listening passage (for example a tense, or some vocabulary, or a strategy), and then ask the learners to analyze it and find out how it works. For example, they may learn the difference between make and do, or between the past perfect tense and the present perfect tense, about when we say much or many, when to have rising or falling intonation, what to say at a restaurant, and so on. Typically, this introduction phase is followed by a stage to check that the feature is understood and can be manipulated and controlled by giving some kind of drill, a gap-fill or sentence completion activity, or a test, to see if the learners have learnt the item correctly.

The important point here is that the language being learned and manipulated when learning about the language is not in its original context. Our course books and teaching in general necessarily remove the item being studied from its context so the learners can examine it. The aim, of course, is to learn about how the item works, for example how we make passive sentences active; how we form questions in the present continuous tense, and so forth. Note that the aim is not about being able to work with meanings, but about being able to understand and get control over language features in an abstract sense. To do this, the learning is discrete and separated from language use. Once we have satisfied ourselves that the feature has been learnt and can be controlled and can be practiced in controlled ways, we move on to the next grammar point, the next unit, and so forth. The basic theory underlying this is that if we learn the language brick by brick eventually we’ll have a house to live in. All this learning about language is fine, but how much language do they learners need to learn?

Let us first look at the vocabulary. We know from vocabulary research that English is made up of a very few extremely common words that make up the bulk of the language we meet. In written text, we know that about 2000 word families (inflections e.g. helped, helping, and common derivations e.g. helpless unhelpful) cover about 85-90% of general texts (Nation, 2001). However, vocabulary learning is more than just learning words. There are the shades of meaning, the nuances, the pronunciation, its inflections and derivatives to learn as well. Moreover, in order to learn words well, the learner must also learn the word’s collocations (the semantic relationships between words, for example why we say a beautiful woman but not a *beautiful man, or why we say here and there not *there and here, and blonde hair, not *yellow hair). In addition, many words especially verbs, have grammatical relationships between each other which are called colligations. For example, we say depend on someone not *depend of someone, and we say be obsessed with something not *do obsessed by something.

To illustrate the task at hand, here is a sample of some of the main collocations and colligations for the very common word idea (taken from Hill, and Lewis, 1997).

Verb uses of Idea.   “Abandon an idea.”

    abandon, absorb, accept, adjust to, advocate, amplify, advance, back, be against, be committed/dedicated/drawn to, be obsessed with, be struck by, borrow, cherish, clarify, cling to, come out/up with, confirm, conjure up, consider, contemplate, convey, debate, debunk, defend, demonstrate, develop, deny, dismiss, dispel, disprove, distort, drop …………………….

These are just a small part of the verb collocations and colligations of one word – idea. And most of them were not given. I only gave those up to the letter d and there are about 100 more! I’ll save space and not even attempt the noun or adjective collocations, of which there are dozens. Clearly, nobody has class time to teach all these collocations and colligations and no course book can hope to teach them for even the core 2000 words of English either.  In addition, the learners need to pick up the tens of thousands of useful phrases, and chunks of language that characterize much of native language such as I’d rather not;    If it were up to me, I’d …   ; So, what do you think?  ; We got a quick bite to eat;     What’s the matter?;    The best thing to do is … and so on and so on almost ad infinitum.   No learner has the time to methodically go through and learn each one, and no course book, or course, can possibly hope to teach even a tiny fraction of them. There is too much to do.

If we now turn to the grammar, we can see a similarly daunting task ahead of our learners. Let’s look at some examples of the present perfect tense.

          A government committee has been created to …

He hasn’t seen her for a while.

Why haven’t you been doing your homework?

There’s been a big accident in Market Street.

          Have you ever seen a ghost?

The present perfect tense, in its various guises, is masked by various forms. It comes with differing uses, differing subjects and objects, as questions, negatives or declaratives; in active or passive, in continuous or simple, with irregular and regular past participles, and so on. To be able to induce the rules underlying the forms, let alone the different uses and nuances of the present perfect tense, must take thousands and thousands of meetings. It is no wonder that typically it is several years after learners have been introduced to language features that they finally feel comfortable enough with them to start to use them correctly.

But our course books were not designed to do all of this. Our course books concentrate on new language items, new chapters, new topics all the time. They are not concerned with deepening knowledge of a given form, only introducing it or giving minimal practice in it. They do not concentrate on the revisiting and revising necessary for acquisition. The assumption underlying most courses and course books is that our learners have ‘met’ or ‘done that now’ and we don’t need to go back to it, so we can move on. Adopting this view of language teaching (that ‘teaching equals learning’ implicit in these materials) is a massive mistake if that is all we do. Half a moment’s thought tells us that our learners will not have mastered it, that they are likely to forget it by tomorrow, and that we need to re-teach it later. How are the learners going to pick them up if they do not have time to learn these things consciously, and our course books do not re-visit the features they teach? Where is the recycling of language we need for acquisition? The answer is graded reading, or extensive reading.

Graded reading and extensive reading and listening are focused on several things. Most importantly, graded and extensive reading (and listening) are primarily about meaning. The aim is to read, or listen to,  massive amounts of comprehensible language within one’s comfort zone with the aim being to build fluency.  The second most important principle is that in order to build fluency, the reading should be easy and achievable, and preferably enjoyable. If the text is processed fluently and smoothly it leaves more brain space in working memory to pay attention to the language as it is processed. If the language is too difficult and the learner has to stop every few seconds to work on a new word, or work out a grammatical or vocabulary item, then the learner goes back to a ‘study about language’ mode.

Thirdly, the learners should read massive amounts of material on a wide variety of topics. How much reading is necessary? To answer this question (from only a vocabulary perspective), we have to consider the rate at which learners can pick up vocabulary from fluent reading and how many times a word needs to be met in order for it to be learnt. Considerable evidence (e.g. Nation, 2001; Waring and Takaki, 2003) suggests that it takes between 10-30 meetings of a word receptively for the form (spelling or sound) of an average word to be connected to an approximate meaning. This does not mean that the word is available for productive use, but that it is understood when it is met. Not all words need 30 meetings but many words need many more meetings. A far greater number of meetings will be needed to deepen the knowledge of the word (e.g. to learn a word’s collocations and colligations, the limits on its use, the register it is typically used in, whether it is typically spoken or written, whether it is polite or pejorative and so on). This may take thousands of meetings – consider the word idea above. Course books typically do not recycle words that are taught in later chapters and therefore do not meet these requirements for depth of acquisition. Course books deal with initial meetings with language.

We also know from research that the word must be met in the right conditions in order for it to be picked up from reading or listening. Laufer (1989) and Nation (2001), and many others have shown that unless we have about 98-99% coverage of the vocabulary of the other words in the text the chance that an unknown word will be learnt is minimal. This means that at minimum there should be one new word in 40, or 1 in 50 for the right conditions for learning unknown language from context. The figures for learning from listening appear to be even higher due to the transitory nature of listening.

The fourth and probably most important benefit of being exposed to massive amounts of text, is the opportunity it gives the learner to consolidate the language that was learnt discretely in the ‘learning about’ phases. In the ‘learning about phase’ the learners learn things out of context, in a dry, analytical and often mechanical way separate from the language as a whole. This is fine, and a good thing to do, but this knowledge is itself separated and removed from context. It is knowledge about that feature which is not connected to other features and therefore unavailable for production in anything but a limited way. Therefore, the learners also must meet these items in real contexts to see how they work together, to see how they fit together. In other words learners must get a ‘sense’ or ‘feeling’ for how the language works. This can only be done by meeting the language items very often and by seeing them work together in actual language use.

Bluntly stated, language programs that do not have an extensive reading or graded reading component of massive comprehensible sustained silent individualized language practice will hold back their learners. This is because the learners will not be able to meet the conditions necessary to enable them to get out of the classroom. Most language programs I know of have a library of books or video materials, but the library is oftentimes not used, or not well-used, or full of inappropriate easy to get native materials that do not meet the required conditions language learners need to meet massive amounts of text within their comfort zone. Moreover, most language programs do not require their learners to read much. Instead, they consider the reading as some how supportive, or supplemental and rarely set fluent reading for homework.

I have argued that it is fundamental mistake to consider sustained silent reading as supplemental or optional. Extensive reading (or listening) is the only way in which learners can get access to language at their own comfort level, read something they want to read, at the pace they feel comfortable with, which will allow them to meet the language enough times to pick up a sense of how the language fits together. As I have mentioned, it is impossible for us to teach a ‘sense’ of language. We do not have time, and it is not our job. It is the learners’ job to get that sense for themselves. This depth of knowledge of language must, and can only, be acquired through constant massive exposure. Course books will never state the difference between blonde and yellow hair, or why we say here and there not there and here. Learners have to pick these up as they meet the language, as well as tens of thousands of other collocations and colligations and useful phrases. It is a massive task that requires massive amounts of reading and listening.

Getting a sense for how the language works is vital if the learners want to use the language well. Until learners have met enough language enough times, and under the right conditions, they will not be able to pull together the language features that have learnt discretely in the learning about language phase. The knowledge will stay the way it was learnt – separate, discrete and unconnected to other aspects of the language systems. Thus, they will not be able to read fluently, or speak or write fluently as they do not know how the language fits together. Learners may be able to demonstrate control over a given feature, say in a test, but often can’t meld items together for actual communicative use.  If all learners do is plough through course books, and endless intensive reading books, they will not be able to pick up their own sense of how the language works until very late in their careers. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons people complain that even after several years of English education, Japanese learners cannot make even simple sentences. Simply put, they did not meet enough language to make sense of what they were been taught in school. The endless drudgery emphasizing only abstract knowledge for tests, at the expense of language use, compounds this problem.

Teachers and learners can opt out and avoid extensive reading (or listening) if they wish, but no matter what happens, it will still take a certain amount of time to get that sense of what is right in English. Getting a ‘sense’ of a language will take time. There are no short cuts. There is no ‘instant English’ medicine. This applies just as much to general English classes as it does to special purposes classes.  Learners studying a specialist area (say nursing or engineering) also need constant exposure to massive amounts of text from their discipline to master and consolidate their knowledge of the specialist language, too. Thus the principle that extensive reading is indispensable for all language programs is maintained.

At the point of being repetitive, I wish to re-stress the need for learners to read or listen at the appropriate level so they can get the benefits to consolidate language knowledge. If the text is too hard (less than about 98% coverage of the other words), then they won’t be able to pick up new words or collocations from context thus prevented from picking up a sense of the language systems. Very often in language programs I see teachers using native materials with the intention of exposing the learner to ‘authentic’ texts. This is fine if, and this is a huge if, if the learner can deal with it. If not, then the text is noise and frustrational (for the teacher and learner) and not instructional but interfering with instruction.

So you may say, ‘what you have said is fine and makes sense, but we do not have time for this reading, we have so many other things to do, like prepare them for tests’. Fine, then the price is that until your learners meet enough comprehensible language they will not get that sense of how the language works which will prevent them approaching native-like use, or understand their tests. Where else are they going to pick up the collocations, the colligations and the tens of thousands of lexical phrases they need to sound native-like? Certainly not from their course books, or word lists. Unless they read or listen extensively, they will be tied to classes and teachers, dictionaries and course books until they have met the required volume of language. There is no way round this.

You may say, ‘but we do not have a budget, or resources to do this’. My answer is, speak to the people who make decisions, tell them why it is vital (not just a good idea) that your learners have chances to read (and are required to read if necessary) massive amounts of comprehensible texts (graded or extensive). If necessary, re-allocate budgets and re-draw curriculums to give your learners a chance to get out of your classes instead of pinning them in them. Carry on your good work with the course books but let’s add the extensive reading component, and not just as a supplement. Let’s aim to make ourselves unemployed. It is our job!

References

Hill, J. and M. Lewis, (1997). Dictionary of selected collocations. Language Teaching Publications.

Laufer, B. (1989). What percentage of text-lexis is essential for comprehension? In: C. Lauren and M. Nordmann (Eds.). Special language: from humans thinking to thinking machines. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Nation, P. (2001). Teaching vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press.

Waring, R. and M. Takaki, (2003). At what rate do learners learn and retain new vocabulary from reading a graded reader? Reading in a Foreign Language, Volume 15, Number 2, 130-163.

Bio-data

Dr. Rob Waring teaches at Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, Japan, His primary research interests are extensive reading, vocabulary acquisition and curriculum development. He has published widely in these fields. He can be contacted at waring_robert@yahoo.com. He is a founding member of the Extensive Reading Foundation and is list manager of the Extensive Reading and Extensive Listening yahoogroups discussion lists.