Extensive reading and vocabulary
Reflective task 15
| Consider how you learned the words you know in your principal target language (or English, if it is not your L1). How did you learn them? What role did reading play in this? And what does 'learn' mean in this context? (for receptive or productive purposes?) What proportion of these words would you say you learned by looking them up in a dictionary? |
Language teachers need to remind their students that they did not acquire the meanings of all their L1 vocabulary through checking the words in a dictionary or being taught them formally. The vast majority of our L1 words are learnt gradually through repeated encounters in context, with each encounter adding a shade to the meaning. L2 learners cannot hope to assimilate vocabulary as naturally as this, but extensive reading can go a long way towards improving the amount of exposure to L2 words a learner receives.
Students must be made aware, however, that not all words need to become part of their active vocabulary and that the key is to build up a sight vocabulary (see 7.1.3) for receptive purposes. If the word is important and is therefore encountered frequently enough in context, it will gradually become more readily available to use actively. Similarly, as already discussed (see 7.5.1), students need to learn that some words can be ignored as they are not crucial to understanding the overall meaning of a sentence.
Although graded readers are no longer as popular as they once were, it has been demonstrated statistically (Wodinsky and Nation, 1988) that they are particularly good at re-using a clearly delineated body of lexis; indeed the very requirement of 'simplifying' or composing a simple version of a text using a limited vocabulary forces writers to repeat words in a way which other, authentic texts do not.
It is in this sense that Day and Bamford (1998) use the term 'i minus 1'. With its conscious reformulation of Krashen's (1981) well-known definition of second language comprehensible input, this term denotes texts at an (idealized) level of difficulty just below learners' current linguistic competence. The idea is to develop a large sight vocabulary from context and thus to improve automatic word recognition. To promote learning of vocabulary from context, L2 reading materials must have a low proportion of unknown to known words and of difficult to accessible syntactic structures. Similarly, reading of such texts must be extensive so that learners can gradually become familiar with the full semantic implications of a word by meeting it repeatedly in different contexts.
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