Teaching Extensive Reading in Another Language

I.S.P. Nation, Rob Waring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367408251
• eBook ISBN: 9781000739893
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This comprehensive book by renowned scholars Paul Nation and Rob Waring accessibly covers all aspects of extensive reading in second and foreign language contexts. The book serves as a major update to the field on the topic, with current research findings on extensive reading as they relate to motivation, reading fluency, and vocabulary learning, among other topics.

Clear and straightforward, it includes case studies, strategies, and methods for implementing and assessing effective extensive reading in the classroom and provides resources and tools for preservice teachers of ESL/EFL and foreign languages.

Suitable for programs in TESOL and Applied Linguistics with courses in L2 reading, reading instruction, TESOL methods, and foreign language reading or teaching, it will appeal to students and preservice teachers as well as English language teaching professionals and EFL/ESL teachers.

1 Keeping Extensive Reading Simple

This book might not be necessary because essentially extensive reading should be a straightforward simple activity – namely learners should read plenty of interesting books at the right level for them. Why write a book of several chapters that makes this simple activity seem more complicated?

One motivation for writing is that extensive reading is still not generally accepted by teachers and a book on the topic might help convince such teachers through the weight of evidence and example to make extensive reading part of their learners’ program. Another motivation was that the existing books on extensive reading are not strongly research based. There is now a lot of research directly and indirectly about extensive reading and it would be useful to review this research critically to see what gaps there are in the research and its application, and what lessons for extensive reading can be learned from this research.

This first chapter then is a simple view of extensive reading answering the following questions.

What is extensive reading?

What are the principles that should guide an extensive reading program?

Why are graded readers essential for extensive reading for beginning and intermediate proficiency learners?

How do you set up and run an extensive reading program?

The remaining chapters of the book describe some extensive reading programs in very different situations, explain why extensive reading works, look at the research behind extensive reading, critically examine research on extensive reading, provide guidelines and suggestions for extensive reading research, and examine resources for extensive reading.

Let us look first at a case study of an extensive reading program drawn from personal experience.

An Example of an Extensive Reading Program

This is an account of Paul Nation’s first experience with extensive reading:

The first extensive reading program that I ever set up was in a teachers’ college in Indonesia in the early 1970s. I was familiar with much of the work of Michael West, knew about graded readers, and knew of the value of extensive reading. Our students were teacher-trainees in the first year of their coursework. Although they were all in the English Department, there was a very wide range of English proficiency. Many of the students were quite poor but had done well at secondary school.

Our section of the teachers’ college had a small library that was rarely used, with many of the books locked in glass-fronted cases. My colleague Gerry Meister and I searched the shelves of the library and found a surprising number of graded readers scattered through the shelves. They were from series such as the New Method Supplementary Readers, Pleasant Books in Easy English, Collins English Readers, and the Longman Bridge Series. We put them all together on a shelf in the library. I think we also bought a lot more graded readers.

We realised that our students would need a dictionary to cope with the reading but they could not afford to buy one. So we made a small and primitive 1000 word bilingual dictionary and then a 2000 word dictionary based on West’s General Service List of English Words (West, 1953). It consisted simply of English words with Indonesian translations. We made copies on our hand-cranked Gestetner machine. The librarians were told that the students would need to use the dictionary when they borrowed the graded readers. They were also told that they could sell the copies of the dictionary to the students for a very cheap price and keep the money themselves. The librarians had never worked so hard in their lives but they did so willingly. In the breaks between classes the students were rushing to the library to borrow the books.

We gave each student a sheet of paper divided into twenty sections. In each section they wrote the name of the book they had read, its level, and a brief comment on it. They did the reading outside of class time and when they did writing in class time, they came up one by one to show their corrections to their previous writing and to show their extensive reading record sheet.

It was during that time that Emmy Quinn and I wrote the 1000 word level speed reading book, Speed Reading (Quinn & Nation, 1974), now out of print but available free in an adapted form from Paul Nation’s website. The general format was based on Edward Fry’s Reading Faster (Fry, 1967) which had proved to be too difficult for most of our students. Fry’s book was adapted from a Longman Bridge Series reader, Mankind against the Killers (the killers being various diseases), and was around the 2000 word level. Our newly developed speed reading materials became part of our extensive reading program.

Some of the more proficient students quickly moved on to unsimplified reading, borrowing books from our personal libraries. Extensive reading was popular and I consider it had made a really important contribution to the students’ English proficiency. When I visited the teachers’ college many years later, I was pleased to find that many of the current staff members had been our students.

There was nothing at all complicated in what we did and it would be even easier to do today with bilingual dictionary apps and free electronic reader apps on smart phones, and freely available speed reading courses at numerous levels. If doing it again today, I would not change much except perhaps to start the program in class and I would measure the students’ vocabulary size. There were no vocabulary tests available then. I would also probably be more diligent in pushing the more reluctant readers to read.

Did our program meet the requirements of an extensive reading program? What are these requirements?

What is Extensive Reading?

There are many forms of extensive reading but they all involve each learner independently and silently reading a lot of material which is at the right level for them.

The reading is independent because learners differ in proficiency, reading speed, and interests, and so ideally they need to read at their own level of text difficulty and at their own speed.

The reading is silent because it should eventually be done at a reasonable reading speed of around 200 words per minute (wpm) so that plenty of material can be read. The speed of speaking is around 100 to 150 wpm, so reading aloud will tend to restrict learners to reading at a slow speed.

Reading necessarily involves comprehension and so learners should be gaining comprehensible input and be focused on understanding what they read.

They should read lots of material because the amount of comprehensible input they get will directly determine how much vocabulary they learn, how well their reading fluency develops, and how much other aspects of language knowledge develop. The amount read per year should cover hundreds of thousands of words of text. If the learners are reading graded readers, this will involve at least tens or twenties of books per year, and in some cases many more.

The material should be at the right level for the learners so that only a small proportion of the words on a page are unknown (two words per hundred words or less) and so that the grammatical constructions are largely familiar.

It is good if the content of the books is interesting and motivating for the learners to read because this encourages them to comprehend and motivates them to read more. Table 1.1 outlines these features of extensive reading which have been ranked according to their importance for learning from extensive reading.

Table 1.1 The Ranked Defining Features of Extensive Reading and Their Justification

Definition of extensive reading	Extensive reading involves each learner independently and silently reading lots of material which is at the right level for them.
Feature of the definition of extensive reading	Explanation	Justification
Read at the right level	2% unknown words Largely familiar grammar	Moderately easy texts allow a lot of comprehensible reading and support the learning of unfamiliar items
Read with comprehension	Only a very small amount of dictionary use should be needed	Comprehension allows vocabulary learning and motivates reading
Read a lot	The minimum amount depends on proficiency levels but involves reading hundreds of thousands of words which would occupy upwards of 10 minutes reading per school day	The amount of comprehensible input directly affects the amount of language learning and reading skill development
Read independently	At any one time each learner is typically reading a different book from what others are reading	Each learner should read at the right level for them and should follow their interests
Read silently	Each learner is not reading the text aloud	Silent reading is usually much faster than reading aloud

Reading with enjoyment has not been included as a defining feature of extensive reading, although it is obviously a very desirable feature because enjoyable reading motivates further reading and encourages comprehension. Many of the features described in Table 1.1, such as reading at the right level and reading a lot, help make reading enjoyable, and this in turn adds to learners’ motivation to read. If a learner really wants to read something slightly above their level, the teacher should allow the learner to do so because motivation to read something may overcome all other factors. After all, the long-term goal is to build a reading habit.

Ranking the features is problematical because each feature relates strongly to the other features. However, the ranking is useful because it stresses what teachers and learners should be aiming for in an extensive reading program. Reading at the right level is the most important because if the text is too difficult, then it is hard to read with comprehension, hard to read a lot, hard to read independently, and hard to read silently. A text which is too difficult will mean the students are reading in ‘study’ mode because they are focused on the language items rather than the content or the story. Comprehending what is read is clearly extremely important, but it is tempting to put ‘read a lot’ closer to the top of the ranking. Extensive reading programs should involve reading extensively, that is, reading a lot.

In the very early stages of reading while preparing students for independent self-selected reading, extensive reading preparation classes may involve the whole class reading the same book at the same time with the teacher guiding them through it. Very soon, however, the learners should move to more independent reading.

Extensive reading does not usually mean the whole class or each learner is working through a long difficult text. This is intensive reading and at best needs to be done strategically so that effort is not wasted on vocabulary that is not useful for the learners at their current level of proficiency. See Nation (2018) for a critique of such an intensive reading activity.

Extensive reading is not reading one or two books at the right level per school term. Extensive reading requires large amounts of comprehensible input.

But this is not to say that there is only one form of extensive reading. We could categorize extensive reading along a scale from the more controlled form to a freer version. At one end of the scale, the learners would use graded readers which have a tightly planned syllabus which scaffolds the learning, building on previous learning from level to level in an efficient ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1. Keeping Extensive Reading Simple
• 2. What Are Graded Readers?
• 3. Case Studies of Extensive Reading Programs
• 4. How Do You Set Up and Run an Extensive Reading Program?
• 5. How Vocabulary Is Learned From Extensive Reading
• 6. The Most Important Studies on Extensive Reading in a Foreign Language
• 7. Research Findings Motivation and Pushing Learners to Read
• 8. Research Findings Does Extensive Reading Result in Reading Fluency and Comprehension Improvement?
• 9. Research on Vocabulary Learning From Extensive Reading
• 10. Developing Reading Fluency
• 11. Designing Research Into Extensive Reading
• 12. What Makes a Good Graded Reading Scheme?
• 13. A Way Forward
• References
• Index