Name: Why extensive reading is so effective for language learning
Uploaded: 2024-12-29T19:06:14.000Z
Duration: 10 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today, I want to talk about extensive reading, also known as free voluntary reading, because I think reading is such a powerful way to improve your language skills, regardless of where you are in the language.

I'm going to refer you to a document that was shown to me from Cambridge University and also another one from Oxford University.

Before getting into the subject, it's interesting to note, because I got curious doing research for this video, the market for language learning worldwide in 2023 was over 60 billion US dollars, and it's projected to reach 115 billion dollars in the year 2032.

Apparently, two thirds of that market is for learning English.

Now, given that it's not expensive to buy a book, we can buy books online.

There's an limitless amount of material available online that we can read, that we can access, that we can read and look up words.

It is amazing that so much money is spent on the language learning industry, on things, for example, like LingQ.

Reading is powerful, but maybe people are discouraged from reading or don't think they can do it on their own or they feel they need to have a teacher to guide them or a system to guide them.

But in fact, a lot can be achieved by a motivated learner who is willing to read.

But there are issues and problems, and I want to get into those.

First of all, if you refer to the link I left, you will see what extensive reading or free voluntary reading is.

It's basically just reading, but it's reading material that's of interest, that's not too difficult, reading on your own, reading at a good speed, reading silently, I would add, although they don't mention it, it's probably a good idea to also have the audio for the material that you are reading.

Now, you'll see in this link that the Cambridge study points out certain obvious benefits to extensive reading should be obvious, but may not be obvious to every language learner, and that is that reading improves our ability to read.

We encounter words, we encounter words in context with other words, we get to see how they work with other words.

When I was learning Chinese in Hong Kong over 50 years ago, my major activity was reading and I would scour the bookstores of Hong Kong to find readers with vocabulary lists behind each chapter, which I would review before reading and then after reading.

There wasn't so much audio available in those days.

I also consider that especially if you listen to the same material that you're reading, it's kind of almost like speaking because when you are reading on your own in a foreign language, you are sub vocalizing.

So therefore, it helps you to get to where you can speak.

It helps you with your comprehension, grasp of grammar, seeing words in context.

All of these things are greatly, you know, assisted by free voluntary reading.

Now, the Cambridge study refers to what they call obstacles to free voluntary reading or extensive reading, and most of those obstacles seem to refer to the resistance from teachers who are reluctant to see the learners go off on their own ahead of what the teacher wants to teach or that the classroom student will spend his or her time reading rather than studying grammar or doing the other things, the activities that the teacher wants to do.

In other words, the teacher is reluctant to give up their teacher time, classroom time to free voluntary reading, although it has been demonstrated that free voluntary reading has all of these benefits.

So the resistance on the part of some teachers is considered the main obstacle.

But I don't see that as the main obstacle.

To me, the biggest problem or the biggest obstacle when it comes to free voluntary reading is vocabulary.

Some of the proponents of free voluntary reading or extensive reading suggest that free voluntary reading should be based on no more than four words per page of unknown words or a couple of percent unknown words for it to be a pleasant experience and that the student should be encouraged to guess or infer the meaning of words that they don't know.

Actually, I shouldn't say it's wrong, but I should say that the strategy when it comes to free voluntary reading depends on who you are and where you are in the language.

Obviously, if you're a school child and you've got 10, 12 years or more to improve your vocabulary and to develop that sense of joy of reading, then free voluntary reading with a very small number of unknown words is a good thing.

Again, I would avoid the sort of teaching, reading strategies, inferring strategies.

Just let the child read, let the words they don't understand go by.

They'll eventually figure them out one way or another.

So that's free voluntary reading in the sense that Krashen describes it for people in school, probably a better use of the student's time than listening to the teacher in many cases.

However, when we as adults, and I include, say, students at a university, say at a foreign university where they're having to take courses in a foreign language, adults wanting to learn a language, we are in a bigger hurry.

We don't have 12 years to gradually, slowly increase our vocabulary.

We need to increase our vocabulary more quickly.

And therefore the strategy has to be different.

We can't be dealing with just 2% unknown words.

When we start in the language, of course, we have no known words or depending on how different the language is to a language we know.

So typically my strategy is I go to the many stories and or you go to other easy content, lots of repetition, so we are able to knock off the 500, you know, most common words of the language.

We all know that frequency declines very, very quickly.

And now we have to deal with chasing those low frequency words that are very important and yet don't appear that often.

So then, in my experience, we need to deal with a larger number of unknown words.

Either we say using LingQ, we look them up and we hope to acquire these words by seeing them often enough, or we just let them go.

You can have free voluntary reading with a book where there's a lot of unknown words.

But there is some benefit in encountering those words in this free voluntary reading format.

However, it's frustrating if you forever don't know what the words mean.

And that's essentially what's at the origin of LingQ.

Typically, early on, when I'm starting in a language, it might have 30% unknown words.

And of course, initially, you may know a bunch of words that the system doesn't yet know that you know.

So that might also push the number up to 50%.

You know, if I were to go into Dutch, for example, it'll show me a large percentage of words that I don't know.

And in fact, in the case of Dutch, I can infer the meaning of those words.

Very difficult for me to infer the meaning of words unless they're connected to words that I already know.

So in terms of the percentage that I can deal with, 15%, 15 to 20% is an acceptable level of unknown words for me.

And so I develop a strategy which says at an early stage, I want material that's five minutes long.

I want that to be about 20 words that I'm trying to learn, 20, 25 words that I've never seen before.

It's a sweet spot in terms of increasing my vocabulary so that I can eventually reach the stage where I can read a paper book because I will have enough vocabulary so that I won't be guessing at every second or third word.

But at the same time, it won't be, you know, only three, four words per page that are unknown to me because then I'm not increasing my vocabulary.

We need a lot of vocabulary, even low frequency vocabulary in order to enjoy free, voluntary reading.

So we have to invest that time in getting our vocabulary level up.

But while we are doing that, we are increasing our familiarity with the language.

Again, the research has shown that people who read a lot, they write better, they have better grammar, they speak better.

There's tremendous benefits to this free, voluntary reading, but you have to be prepared for it.

You have to build yourself up to be able to do it.

If you try to do that from day one, I think it'll be quite difficult.

One other strategy I have is to stay in sort of a limited range, a limited content area for a while so that if I'm doing history, history of, say, in this case, the Ottoman Empire, I will stay with that.

I have found that typically fiction is much more difficult.

And given the tremendous precipitous decline of frequency of words in any language, you want to have a strategy where you have a greater likelihood of meeting the same words or related words again.

But for language learning, video is less effective.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch what people are saying, whereas reading is pure words and to that extent, listening is pure words so that if we're talking not just about what's enjoyable, but how do we improve our vocabulary?

How do we improve our grasp of the language?

Reading and its associated activity of listening, to my mind, are the way to go.

And yes, you want to consume more and more of the language, more and more extensive, more and more free, voluntary, and above all, you don't want to have too much teacher intervention.

Teachers love to have pre-reading questions and post-reading questions and comprehension questions and instructing you on how to infer and critical thinking.

I always quote Ruben Alves, who says, nothing destroys the enjoyment of reading as much as being asked questions about what you have read.

I may not understand it perfectly, but it's what I understood.