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About Us
Dr. Rob Waring
acquisition. He has presented and published widely on these topics.
He is an Associate Professor at Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, Japan.
Professor Waring is an Executive Board member of the Extensive Reading Foundation.
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Extensive reading is a vital part of all language programs. Extensive reading happens when students read lots of books that are easy, fun and can be read without a dictionary. The aim is to build reading speed, fluency and confidence when reading, not to learn new language - that is the job of the textbook. Typically, extensive reading is done by using specially designed books that ensure that the words, grammar and phrases that the students are learning are repeated many times to ensure they are learned deeply. These ‘graded readers’ are written within a controlled vocabulary and grammar syllabus to ensure the students are consolidating their language. The graded readers are usually ordered into levels from beginner to advanced. The students select a book that they think is interesting and that they can read smoothly and without a dictionary. When they have read lots of books at that level, they then move up to the next level, become comfortable at that level, before moving up to the next one. In this way, students increase their reading ability in programmed and systematic ways. Sometimes a teacher will select the books for the students, or the whole class might read the same book. Many teachers like to check the students understood the book by giving them a pop-quiz, but other teachers prefer to assign tasks that indirectly show the students understood the book. This can done by asking the students to write a book report, or by telling others about the book, or discuss the book’s storyline or characters with the other students so the reading becomes writing or speaking and thus listening for other students.
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One of the main advantages is that students can learn to read faster and process English text quickly and with high comprehension. This allows them to read quickly so they can read more smoothly and naturally. When students read naturally and smoothly, they process two or three words of text in one eye movement allowing them to ‘chunk’ text into meaning units rather than just focusing on words. Because they are thinking about ideas rather than words, they will therefore remember more of what they read. This level of reading cannot be done if the text is difficult because their eye will be stopped by ’speed reading bumps’. Another advantage is that students will meet the thousands of words they need to build a deep network of knowledge in their heads, as we will see below. A lot of extensive reading research shows increased general motivation for English because students feel they are finally reading something authentic, and using English for what it was intended, rather than just studying it piece by piece.
A.
The simple answer is a lot. A massive amount. To understand why this is so, we need to know about how often students meet words and grammar, and how long it takes to learn them. A simple rule of thumb is that a typical word needs 10-20 meetings before it stays in your head. We also know that some words like ‘the’ occur very often (every 18 words, mathematically) so if a student has read 360 words they will have met ‘the’ 20 times. However, the 1,000th most frequent word, ‘despite’, occurs once every 8,100 words in reading texts and so to meet all the 1000 most frequent words in English at least 20 times, students need to meet about 160,000 words. To master 5,000 words they need to meet about 3,000,000 words. However, there is a problem with these statistics. The way these data are calculated assumes that each word only has one meaning and ignores its use in phrases, idioms, expressions, collocations and so on. To master these as well means we need to double these numbers. Learners need to know about 8-9,000 word families in order to read native level texts smoothly and without too much trouble, and to get to this level will take a very long time and huge commitment on behalf of the teachers and learners. Because of the way words are distributed in texts, learners can meet the most frequent words quite quickly, but there are larger gaps between the less frequent words as frequency rises making the increasingly more difficult to reach very high levels, which means they need to read more each week to make progress.
A.
Typical course books only contain about 30-60,000 words and can take a year to finish. As we have seen, this clearly is not enough text and so teachers should ensure learners are meeting hundreds of thousands of words a year in order to reach the highest levels of English. Graded readers are a fantastic way to do this because they are designed within a set syllabus that makes sure learners only meet the words they are practicing, and removes words they do not need - yet. When reading in this way, the students are building on previous learning in predictable ways that consolidate previous learning. However, native level books are not written with this syllabus, or care, in mind, as each book is independent of each other and the input the learners read is more random which will lead to a lot of forgetting. So learners should read following a well-planned learning system. This does not mean text books are bad, it’s just that they are designed to introduce topics, grammar and vocabulary, but are not designed to deepen this knowledge - that is the task of extensive reading.
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Of course, our students do not need to be native level in order to be good at English. They can pursue English courses in colleges in English-speaking countries if they know about 5,000 words and know most of the academic words they will need in order to do their coursework.
They may also need specialized vocabulary for their topic area such as medicine, engineering or law. In any case this is still millions of words of reading that need to be met before they are ready.
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A huge amount. The Extensive Reading Foundation’s bibliography of research into extensive reading has over 600 articles, books and reports.
Extensive reading has been found to improve motivation, reading speed, deepen vocabulary knowledge, support learner autonomy and have facilitating effects on speaking and writing, as well as spelling. This is why extensive reading is often called the ‘enabling skill’ - the one that ties so much of language learning together to make it indispensable.
