[Music] [Music] I think was that clear yep good I've got a microphone here something in my pocket here's something in my back pocket here I have a feeling that if I cough my heartbeat temperature and any current diseases will be revealed to the whole audience so I'll avoid coughing I'd like to thank and congratulate campus publishing today they they are sponsoring my trip to Japan and my attendance of this conference campus has done a lot for language teaching in East Asia most people don't realize how much compass publishing is done but one example is that I wrote a couple of books last year which were published this year and one is for sale but campus publishing kindly agreed that the second book would be worked on and formatted by their very skilled design team and made a bed made available free on the web for anybody who wants it and so that's part of the contribution that campus make that people often don't realize I'd like to thank the extensive reading foundation as well I'd also like to say a few words about Rob wearing but I can't because I'm being recorded at the moment but the extensive reading foundation has done a tremendous job and I'm so proud to see the progress of the Association and also the amount of work but the the members of the board of the extensive reading foundation with the notable exception of me and I'm not being modest do enormous amounts of work and that work is apparent at this conference today I want to talk about I want to try and settle an argument there's there's been an argument going on largely between tom cobb and stephen krashen about learning from input and the argument basically says that Tom started at all and Tom said look we we should know whether it's possible to learn enough vocabulary simply by reading or not because we have the technology we should be able to find this out and then so Tom wrote an article looking at whether it would be possible to learn sufficient vocabulary for using the language simply through reading and his conclusion was it is not possible and he was really attacking a statement and the position taken by Steve crafted so McQuillan and krashen replied saying no no we think you're wrong it is possible to learn enough vocab refle language used through reading and so I decided to look closely at this argument and then to when I did look closely at the argument I realized that they they were arguing about completely different things so Tom was looking at extensive reading and saying worked out doing a kind of corpus based study and worked out that because second and foreign language learners didn't have very fast reading speeds and because the texts were so difficult for them because of their low VOC every levels it's not possible to do enough reading and so Tom's argument is based on the difficulty idea it's just too difficult for learners to read enough material to get enough input Steve crashing on the other hand is simply looking at the quantity perspective and saying if the material is at the right level for the learners then you can get enough input through extensive reading so having seen then that they're really arguing about two quite different things then I decided to separate these two things and put the difficulty difficulty issue aside I'll come back to it briefly at the end of this talk so I put the difficulty issue aside and simply simply asked the question if the material is available at the right level for the learners how much reading would learners have to do to meet enough repetitions and enough words from the first 9,000 words of English in order to have a chance of learning those words what a long research question okay so so if you want to learn the first 9,000 words of English how much do you have to read and is this feasible and possible okay now I understand the research question okay so can reading contribute to vocab relearning if we if we simply analyze that according to the psychological conditions which are likely to occur during reading and which we know affect vocab relearning it's clear that these conditions occur if you analyze the reading process taking an approach like Lauver and holstein take in an involvement load hypothesis or like Stuart Webb and I take in technique feature analysis and simply say what psychological conditions are being set up by the reading process then it's clear that the psychological conditions certainly could result in large amounts of vocab relearning the first of these conditions is repetition that is you have to meet the word several times in order to have a chance of learning and the number of repetitions that people need for learning is sort of like the holy grail of input theory because there's really no answer to it but people keep searching for the answer but it's reasonably well one thing you can say for certain is that the more repetitions the more likely something will be learned and so that's that's not greatly revealing but it's still important and so just fairly arbitrarily but with a little bit of research support I decided that about twelve repetitions would be a reasonable number actually nor one of norbit's MIT's PhD students is doing really interesting research at the moment what she's doing is there using eye-tracking technology and what they do is they put up a text and the student reads the text quietly and they track the eye movements while the student reads the text and then when the student comes to a word that they know from pre-testing that the student doesn't know they measure the fixation time on that word and then the learner gets the meaning of that word and then when they meet the word again and so they're trying to find out how many times does the student meet the word before they process it at the same speed as the words that they know and this is fantastic research because you're one step it seems closer to what's actually happening in here by measuring these I fix Asian times the presence root results because she hasn't finished the study suggests about seven times so that by the time you have fixated on the word made at seven times during reading then your fixation time is about the same as for words that you already knew before you started reading so that this is very exciting research and I'm sure knowing norbit's fara professionalism will see an article published on this within a couple of years okay the second condition which helps vocab relearning is really adding how do you say adding quality to repetition and that's called receptive retrieval and receptive retrieval means you see the word and then you try to recall the meaning that you got for that word on the previous meeting and so receptive retrieval is a is a fairly shallow learning condition but it is a good learning condition retrieval is a is a good learning condition a second condition is receptive varied use I used to call a generative use and I'm moving away from that because it it's not very transparent but it simply means that when you read graded readers each time you meet a word that you hadn't met before and then you meet it again more often than not the context of that word will be different so some of my students at Temple University have done Studies on graded readers to see when a word recurs and the graded reader is it simply a repossession repetition I've got to be really careful because the the Australian elections have just been on and the the now new Prime Minister made a terrible terrible vocabulary mistaken in one of his speeches he said that he wasn't the suppository of all knowledge now for the non-native speakers a suppository is something that you stick up your medicine that you put up your backside I'm sure the opposition said that he was the suppository of all knowledge but but so I've got to be careful not to say things like that so ignore the previous statement the repository of all knowledge here I think for the rest of my life I'll never be able to say repository and suppository coucher which I'm getting correct or not and then another condition which leads to good vocab relearning from reading is deliberate attention and deliberate attention occurs when a word is looked up in the glossary or it's looked up in a dictionary or the learner makes a deliberate attempt to say to write it on a VOC every card or something like that in all of these conditions can occur very readily during extensive reading okay now is it feasible to be able to read enough to get enough input to learn vocabulary and the various 1,000 word levels so the assumption I'm making is this we have 1,000 word lists which in decreasing frequency the assumption is learners generally learn words from the most frequent words to the least frequent words there are exceptions to this and it's not a perfect relationship by any means but it's still a reasonably well supported assumption so that's my assumption if you wanted to learn the second 1,000 words of English this is Table one you would need to read 2,000 tokens of language now 2,000 tokens is the equivalent of two not so long native speaker novels okay so in one year you would have to read the equivalent of about two native speaker novels if you were reading at a reading speed of fit of 150 words a minute and that's that's just a moderate reading speed is by no means no means a a fluent reading speed a fluent reading speeds probably about 250 words per minute and a reasonably fast run is about 300 words per minute so I'm not making big assumptions for speed here so reading at a hundred and fifty words per minute you would need to read for 33 minutes a week okay so in order to get twelve repetitions of words at the second 1000 word level you would need to read for 33 minutes a week five days a week forty weeks of the year so it's not I'm only using a school year and I'm only using a working or a school week so this works out in brackets and column three of Table one seven minutes per day so this is easily feasible if you wanted to meet almost all of the words and the second 1000 words of English and meet them on an average of 12 times you would need to read 7 minutes per day 5 days a week for 40 weeks of the year easily done okay it gets harder okay my question to you if you wanted to learn the fifth 1,000 words yeah so you already know 4000 words of English and you want to learn the fifth 1000 words of English how many words would you have to read how many minute would you have to read per day have a chat with your neighbor see if you can see the answer and table work I haven't been a teacher for 45 years to do all the work okay come on have a look I'm gonna ask you for the answer so so how many minutes per day would you have to read in order to learn v 1,000 words of English come on folks it's easy what do you reckon you come on in you look confident so you've probably got it wrong yeah so v 1000 yeah so that's a million tokens in a million tokens is about 10/10 not so long novels kid novels about a hundred and fifty pages or so long yeah so how many minutes per day 33 yeah about half an hour a day 33 minutes a day so that's pretty good yeah it gets harder because if you want to learn the ninth 1,000 there you would need to read for 40 days 40 weeks of the year five days a week you would need to read for one hour forty minutes a day that's getting less feasible but it's it is it's still possible it's still possible now this is simply assuming that this is the only input you get it's it's simply reading input us forgetting about listening it's forgetting about deliberate study it's forgetting about fluency development all of those sorts of other aspects of a course but it's simply focusing on the amount of reading input that you would read so I think stephen krashen is right I think that it is feasible to meet the vocabulary at each of the high frequency and mid frequency levels so the high frequency levels are 1,000 3000 and the mid frequency levels 4,000 to 9000 and the south and these words give you a total of 98 percent coverage of unsimplified text so the reason we now distinguish mid frequency words from other words is because this bunch of 6000 or so words will bring most readers readers of most material up to the level where they can read unassisted and have over 98% coverage of the words in the novel so Tom's wrong Steve's right well Tom's not completely wrong because he was talking about difficulty and so I think he is wrong because there is a lot of graded readers thousands of graded readers which go up to about the 3000 word level but you can see that there's clearly a big gap from the 4th to the 9th but we're going to come to that okay now just to show that I'm not being too optimistic here table 2 looks at further opportunities for learning and for strengthening so that if you if you learnt the words at the 3000 level through reading and you met an average of 12 12 repetitions and then the next year you're saying well I'm going to I'm assuming a thousand words a year I'm being really ambitious here but there's no reason to stick to that and then say you say now I'm going to learn the next thousand what about the ones that you already know will they come back often or not and the answer is they will come back very often because in the next year you have to do a bit more reading then of course you get many more repetitions of the words you've already met before and so if you look down columns 3 & 4 in table 2 you can see that the average sorry out of a thousand when if you were reading at the 9,000 level so this is the 3 million word corpus that corresponds with the bottom of table 1 you could see that you would meet almost all of the second hours almost all of the third thousand in all but 55 of the 4000 and so on and the number of repetitions of these would be 170 170 950 837 so you see that the later reading of course is really strengthening and giving many many more repetitions so certainly very feasible indeed ok table 1 I've played with the figures a little bit these are not precise figures and they shouldn't be precise figures anyway but they're easy to remember and the reason they're easy to remember is it's two thousand four second thousand so two four to two hundred thousand sorry third thousand is three hundred there are thousand and then it goes up in half or five hundred thousand word jumps so if you have to teach this stuff folks this is going to make it easier to teach because then you don't have to look at your paper and you say well each year it's another half million words more than you read last year okay is that okay any comments questions suggestions criticism praise go ahead yeah yes yeah it's it's a good comment there's this sort of research on this but it's that is does it become easier to learn words when you know more words and it seems that it does but there's there's only little bits of research on that which really haven't been pulled together and properly looked at but I think it is true that the more you learn the easier it becomes and so once again this is probably an under it wasn't I'm being pessimistic rather than optimistic yeah good yeah ah it'll probably be different census because as I said when words recur they tend to occur and slightly different at least slightly different contexts and sometimes bigger context so it's more likely to be different senses than the same sense yeah yeah yeah yeah no no I mean ideally those the spacing would be a bit it would be a bit spaced and ideally the spacing would probably be better if it increased but I think you're never going to be able to deal with that as a teacher or a reader you just here's the book this is what I'm going to read and you know it's a manipulation you can't do but that could be a weakness of this could you could argue that the twelve repetitions occurred in one book and therefore that's not as good as if they were spread across a pile of yeah yeah yeah the the the positive thing on my side is that I'm looking at doing daily reading and not saying well you do a bunch of reading in one day of the week you know another one so it's spread and so the chances of the repetitions being spread then a probably greater as well okay moving right along folks okay how hard is it to read a nun simplified text so what I've been talking about then is tics which are written at the right level for the learners now this is really preaching to the converted that's really saying look you really need to have texts which are at the right level for the learners and adapted for the learners but if you look at a nun simplified text is it a good idea if you're a learner of English to pick up a book written for a native speaker and read it from the beginning to the end and learn all the words that you meet it's a terrible idea and one of the reasons why it's a terrible idea is because of zips law and Zipf's law says around about half of the different words in any text will occur only once and so if that text uses a vocabulary of same three or four thousand different words then about one and a half thousand of those different words will only occur once in the text and zips law is reasonably true it's sort of it is like that so that's one reason but another reason is the density of unknown words if you knew only 2,000 words of English this is Table three on the other side then there will be one unknown word in every eight words for you so if you have a 2,000 word vocab REE and you pick up an unsimplified text and read it there'll be more than one unknown word per line on average and then in a book now I put here a typical unsimplified novel captain blood okay haha I am the greatest swordsman in all of France captain blood Rafael Sabatini one of the great classics that's that's that's around just over a hundred thousand words long so I picked that text because it was the sort of average length of a novel there would be three thousand four hundred and forty one unknown words in that book for you so if you with a learner with a vocab of two thousand words struggled your way through that book you would either have to look up guess or give up on 3441 words and if you were a learner with a vocab reify thousand words and you picked up the book there would be one unknown word in every twenty two words one unknown word in every two lines and there would be almost 2,000 unknown words in the book for you so reading unsimplified text is a cruel and unusual punishment so the Americans in the audience you you immediately prohibited from using unsimplified text with learners who have a vocab size below about eight or nine thousand words so Table three simply shows you how tough it is to read unsimplified text and how lucky learners of English are that we have graded readers and books which are adapted to the learners level okay the best opportunities when I looked at the amount of input needed I thought will it be interesting to see Tom and Steve were talking about written text but what would provide the best input in terms of meeting words and repetitions of words would it be a mixture of spoken and written text would it be a mixture of formal or informal texts which ones would allow learners to meet the most words and to meet the most often and so table 7 which I won't spend a lot of time on but it's I looked at various spoken language combinations movies novels and so on and the number of word families which at the top is what in journals and novels that learners read a mixture of journals and novels and journals are sort of how would you say that magazines they're forgotten the name of it there's a ye now some kind of website where they put current affairs and summarize things ease eyes or it easy yeah easy I'll see one one day okay they provided the best number of meetings with words with out of nine thousand if if you if you read two million or met two million tokens you would meet warmer stall eight thousand six hundred and thirty one of them the worst one is at the bottom where if you only had spoken input then you would only meet just over six thousand words of the first nine thousand and in general the sort of conclusion is that it's best to have a mixture of spoken and written input because this will provide the best kind of opportunity to meet the words spoken language tends to use are not so large vocab Ria's written language and but though the repetitions tend to be a bit higher novels only about two-thirds of the way down you'd meet about 8,000 of the first nine thousand words movies and novels eight thousand two hundred and seventy-six now really that this is my justification for life I love reading novels and I love watching movies so I'm doing the right thing from my vocabulary okay good now let me finish by looking at the gap between high-frequency words and reading unsimplified text graded readers go up to the three thousand word level roughly but in order to get ninety-eight percent coverage of the words and most ticks you need a vocab reroute nine thousand words eight or nine thousand words for spoken language children's movies you can do it with about six thousand words so if you want to understand or sorry if you want to understand most of the vocabulary in a children's movie like Shrek or Toy Story or The Lion King then you need to have a vocab of about six thousand words if you want to be able to read a novel and only have two or about six unknown words on a page two percent you need to have a vocab of about nine thousand words and these figures are reasonably stable so there's a big gap then but when someone finishes the graded reader series at the three thousand level and then go to simplified tics which really requires a vocab size of around about eight or nine thousand words so to deal with that we've created what we call mid frequency readers and mid frequency readers are books which are adapted for learners who have a vocab riyo four thousand words six thousand words or eight thousand words so what we've done is to take books which are out of copyright and then run them through a program which is called Antwoord profiler which Lawrence Anthony very ingeniously and kindly worked on which makes the adaptation of such texts really quite easy now with the Antwoord profiler program I can adapt a text and about a third of the time used to take me before that program the program is free and it's on the web so if you want to look at it and adapt it the user print adapting text for your classes it's there for all to use and so what we did was we took each text adapted it to the eight thousand word level so that means we left the words at the 9,000 and 10,000 word level in there because our the new words to learn for somebody who knows 8,000 words and then all the words from the 11,000 onwards we took out at first I did this I thought we would aim for 2% getting 98% coverage of the novel's within the learners knowledge it turned out that this wasn't the way to do it and the reason was that if you if someone read with 98% coverage there would still be over a thousand unknowing words in the novel so that 2% unknown would be over a thousand different unknown words so we actually adapted so there's only about four or five hundred unknown words in each of the text so that's really closer to 99% coverage rather than to 98% coverage but it was clear it wasn't it was be too heavy a burden if you read a novel there were a thousand words that you might want to look up in the dictionary or gloss as you went along so we adapted then adapt a text at the 8,000 level and then save it and then carry on and readapt the text to the 6,000 level save it and then re adapt it to the 4000 level so that for each of the texts we have three versions of the text for learners with a four thousand or a six thousand or an eight thousand word vocab read at present I think we have about nine texts on my website there are free anybody can get them and use them for reading and so these are for learners who are was it too old for mother Goose and too young for Lolita there for Peter Sellers used to say I think so so people who've moved beyond the graded reader level but still want to have some reading which is at the right level for them the goal is to get 50 and once we get 50 then we'll probably stop another reason that we might stop is that it's a waste of time and the reason why it might be a waste of time is that maybe learners don't need to text adapted at this kind of level the thing which leads me to think that they do need them adapted is that if they're not adapted then Table three says you know if you know four thousand words and then you pick up an unsimplified novel to read there will be two thousand three hundred and eighty three and captain blood anyway unknowing words that makes me think it probably is worthwhile but it's still but there still remains to be research done on this the interesting thing with the adaptations is that the adaptations don't change the novel very much because you're only changing a few words on each page but it's different words on each page that you're changing and it and if the adaptation is done carefully then there's no no grammatical change or anything like that so so the adaptations are not too far way from the original text we have a policy of trying to have a mixture of factual texts and fiction texts so the factual texts include things like the art of war by Lao Tzu glimpses of unfamiliar Japan by Lafcadio Hearn oh my my mum and I can't remember the other ones but the idea is to try and get about 50/50 sexual and so on texts I've got an ambition to put up Origin of Species by Darwin I've just been reading that and I think that that can be reasonably adapted to within that level I had an idea once that'd be great idea they have a set of graded readers which took some of the classic books of the world like the Prince by Machiavelli that's on my website I adapted the Prince to about the 3 mm plus academic wordless level once and then decided it was actually a boring book but it's actually a very important book because Machiavelli's Prince is really important in political science in literature because it influenced the themes of Shakespearean drama and things like that and it's interested in it and also there's about three or four subject areas where the prince is an important text for people to read and so the maybe I'll pick up that idea again and then we'll try and get books which are really important that we can then adapt so that they become reasonably easy to read the interesting thing with books like The Prince and the art of war is that these are not really simplifications because there are translations anyway and so now the translation is done at a level which is suitable for learners with different vocab resizes so in a way I don't think they will suffer from the criticism those books sorrowful suffer from the criticisms of being simplifications okay so if you are interested in doing such adaptations then what we do is we put the name of the adapter on the book and it goes up and all available free so anybody interested in trying their hand at doing an adaptation please send me an email we've got about four or five people who are doing them at present and the idea is that once we get to the fifty the reason for going for fifty is that fifty books would give us somewhere around about four million running words and the four million running words would easily give people choice if they wanted to learn the ninth 1000 words because you need three million running words in order to learn the ninth 1000 words and get enough repetitions so that's the logic behind aiming for 50 okay I'm prepared to take questions for a few minutes and all comments ladies great day in the College of English and I use extensive reading extensively and one of the problems with my students that I find is that they come into the program and they only have about 24 hours reading right before their release into and one of the tragedies of English education in Korea is that the students have about 10 years of English education and when they come probably I'm talking where average students not so much unique students but the other students you know you say hello how are you and they say I am fine thank you and you finished or you know kind of stumbled on word and so one of the things and I'm so happy that here that represent Korean education as a whole is that you know you're applying this as a 40 week can you do this how many minutes can you do over 40 weeks and I'm really curious about how you can introduce this in the elementary school level starting in grade one and moving through elementary school to middle school even maybe first year of high school so that those four you could easily be accomplished you know have your comments there are people more qualified than me here to comment on that I think but let me give you an example of the school in New Zealand this is not a primary school but a secondary school so we've we've been running around New Zealand doing vocab testing of secondary school students native speakers to see their boat capsized one of the schools we went to spends twit the whole school after lunch sits down for 20 minutes and reads they read quietly and they do that every day of the week every week of the year every week of the school year now the the headmaster is or sorry the principal isn't it there's sold on the idea the rector yeah the rector yeah this is a pretty pretty fancy school but in a way that's that's really what needs to happen now the material is there that I mean the compass graded readers you know now the reading oceans for very young kids and are suited to young kids the topics that they're interested in everything like that the material is all there all it does is to take the will for teachers to say let's spend a few minutes each day in class now Atsuko Cassie who is here one of the one of the really exciting findings from research she's done is that you really need to do extensive reading in class time initially because learners often don't do it outside class time and so they have to be forced to do it but the success the feelings of success which come from having been forced to do it and then when she I read a book from the beginning to the end I actually enjoyed it that's that's that's really important now another thing which is getting away from it a little bit but I don't have a key Oh photo cameras here but I I keep I'm advertising his language school in Japan but he's got a very unusual language school 18 the students come for three hours per week and they pay a lot of money for the year and half the eighty minutes of those three hours they sit down and do extensive reading the teacher who is being paid and the parents of the students are paying for this sits there quietly and gets on with a bit of record-keeping and things like that and the students read for 80 minutes now this school is making a lot of money it really is you know he took me to his school and you know I didn't when I first met him I thought he was one of the teachers and then I was walk along and someone who is with us here oh that's mr. Faruq I was building there miss mr. Faruq I was building there now the Holy Smoke this is the middle of Tokyo and he owns buildings and these are paid for by the language school so he's managed to convince the parents through the result the examination results they're simply getting these kids to sit down quietly and you say well why don't they do it home to many other distractions when I was there he asked them how many of you do reading at home and so on put up your hand how much reading do you do at home some of them did quite a lot at home but many of them just did a few minutes of her and so in the way it's coming to the school is that the other 80 minutes are sort of conversation type activities and so on but some students can choose to do to 80 minute sessions of extensive reading for their three hours in some fuser so I think it's simply the will and the opportunity by providing the books another another good example of this is the book flood study by a iliyan manga by in Fiji in the book the book flood study was done in rural Fiji with the children are very poor children families these are the cane cutters in Fiji and they studied English for four classes a week but under an hour for each class and so all they did was have a book flood in some schools where they provided each class with 200 really nice books and then they said you got to spend three of the four classes the equivalent of three of the four classes of English reading in the other class the teacher can teach in nine months the experimental group had made fifteen months progress compared to the control group we just went with a normal teacher fronted program they went back a year later and the games were still maintained a year later so it's easily possible to do and it just requires the materials and the will to do it okay where are we oh sorry yeah no you should know what I would do in your your circumstance is I would give them a targeted speed reading course now there are free speed reading courses available here free and so on my website there's one free one and then on Sonya Millett M il le TT Sonya with an eye on her website there are three or four free speed reading courses compass publishing has reading for speed and fluency at the 500 1000 1500 and 2000 word level and I would give a targeted speed reading course because the gains the speed gains which are made from a targeted speed reading course which takes about between five and ten minutes each session for 20 sessions and the normal increase you would expect would be at least a 50% increase in speed and some learners will double their speed there's an article that Teresa Chung and I published in a journal in Korea of a study in Korea with doing this with Korean learners and they made this 50% increase on average and some of them doubled their reading speed you should expect at the end of a speed reading course that learners should be reading around about 250 words per minute now you can increase reading speed through fluence through extensive reading and as some of the papers of this conference will show I think David Biegler and Alan's Hunt's paper shows that you get fluency increases through doing extensive reading but you get bigger fluency increases faster by doing a targeted speed reading course the speed reading course is simply passages questions on the back learners read the passage note down the time answer the questions mark them themselves put the speed on the graph and their score on the graph and then Nix they do it again and so on so that's what I'd be doing there it was an example of what's called the experimenter effect or the Hawthorne effect because each one of these students who are identified in the first four reading speed of the first four texts within we interviewed them one by one and said I know you know you're reading are you translating what you're reading so I'm like F everybody increased their reading speed the attention given to these students made them take the course more seriously and so we spoiled the experiment because everybody increased their reading speed okay yeah oh yeah gone this one okay deliberate learning is extremely important I'm I'm in favor of rote learning I'm a favor of bilingual word cards where the word is on one side and the translation on the other one of the most important pieces of research in my field of vocab REE in the last 20 years has been done by one of our PhD students and she showed that Steve was wrong this time Steve crashing she showed that deliberate learning results in both implicit and explicit knowledge the study has been published in language learning in 2011 I think it is in arena Elgort you can read that study so Steve's wrong because he said deliberate learning doesn't give you the kind of knowledge you need for normal language use you need implicit knowledge well her study showed in three separate experiments that deliberate learning results in both implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge at the same time implicit knowledge is subconscious well integrated with the language system and to some degree fluent so I'm very strongly in favor of but it's only one of the options not the options it's one of the ways which should be in a course but not the only way in the course it needs you need to have both both kinds of learn [Music] you're said 50,000 but people watch cause you want year period of a money 9000 divorce no no no no no the goal the Gumpert house the goal is to learn a thousand words a year nine thousand the goal is nine thousand oh yes no I know the boss of fifty books was it hard if fifty book fifty books would be fifty five hundred thousand homes I'm not saying that you should only learn through reading I'm just exploring the idea where the reading will give you the opportunity you can do this yeah well well there should be other kinds of learning through listening and speaking and reading that's listening and speaking and writing and they should also be deliberate learning going on and it should also be fluency development going on but I'm only looking at the reading aspect do you have any research with the outcome of research No I wish there was yeah I wish there was I wish they were graded readers and other languages you know people tell me that there is and then you see about three or four little books you know there are some in Japanese but you know the whole pile of them is about that thick and the summon French that I've seen but once again about five or six books the other languages have to get get get moving yeah yeah good thank you [Laughter] well all good speed reading courses measure both speed and comprehension and so and I think it'd be foolish to do a speed reading course which only measured speed it's a bit but you know because the the reading takes are accompanied by questions the questions are deliberately easy so that learners are not encouraged to slow up and read in a painstaking way that this is a concern it's a concern that people have with graded reading that you know what how do I know if the learners really understand the book that I'm you know that they're reading all I can say is when I went along to the language school to look at these kids reading who are not being tested on the books they read at all if you want to sit for 80 minutes going like that and not understanding a word get a life now and my mind so my response is that you have to make sure that as teachers you're not encouraging speed without comprehension but my feeling is that once learners read with comprehension and then they can increase their speed with that anyone who goes to reading without comprehension is needs needs a psychiatrist not a teacher so well I mean yeah okay I don't know but but so all I'm saying is I think speed reading courses must have a comprehension element to them there has been recent research which now measure what the effect of fluency is on comprehension and there are small increases in comprehension shown as well the reason the increases are small is because the comprehension tests are easy and so there's a ceiling effect and I have a feeling when we get into into more focus research on the effect of fluency on comprehension we will find that there are probably reasonably substantial comprehension increases as fluency increases yeah thanks for that [Applause]
Extensive reading is the only way to learn enough vocabulary.
Breaking the limits imposed by "classes", other natives or textbooks and taking your own learning into your own hands will yield you more results in a lot shorter. Not only that but there is no ceiling for native content so there is no intermediate plateau, there is no sticking point.
I'm getting to the point where I'd like to begin reading more native books, so this is motivating for sure. Just 7-33 minutes a day for 40 weeks? That's a very doable.
Well that was an excruciating intro track.