Extensive Reading: from graded to authentic text
Andrew Barfield
Abstract
This paper looks at extensive reading for first-year unversity English courses. A basic methodological distinction is drawn between intensive reading and extensive reading, and the different phases of a working extensive reading programme are described. After reporting on some classroom research and student data, questions of strategy training and bridging techniques are addressed. In this, broader connections are made to applied linguistic research, before conclusions are drawn.
Key words: extensive reading; graded readers; reading confidence; reading fluency; reading journals; student documentation; time management; development of reader elaborations; interpretive skills; reader response strategies; paraphrasing; mind-mapping; discourse pattern awareness; local lexical relationships.
1.0 Introduction
What kind of reading experience have first-year students of English had in their pre-university education? The following (unreformulated) learning history from an Art and Design student is fairly typical of what students go through in Junior High and Senior High:
[Junior High School]
In the third year, the substance of the lesson is grammar, grasping the content of the textbook and reading it smoothly. I go to my teacher to have her hear my reading. If I can read the textbook by heart, she gives me marks.
[Senior High School]
Then I entered a high school. We had two kinds of English class, "reading class" and "grammar class". The content of the textbook becomes to be difficult. The vocabularies are rich and complicated. On every Tuesday we have the English test. It was said it "Weekly test" ... In the first year of the high school it was written examinations and mark. My school class emphasized grammar and grasping the content of the sentences.
Striking elements of this pre-university experience include memorization; reading aloud; reading difficult text; sentence-level comprehension; weekly tests. Given the nature of the university entrance examination in Japan, it is neither surprising nor particularly remarkable that many students come to university as slow readers of English who use word-by-word translation and who lack confidence in reading in a foreign language. These are hardly, though, the characteristic skills of a fluent reader. How can we help students become more fluent readers of English? One part of the answer may lie in including extensive reading as a core component of first-year English courses.
2.0 Extensive reading in contrast to other types of reading
What is extensive reading? Reading has traditionally been divided into two types: intensive and extensive. In broad terms, intensive reading may be described as the practice of particular reading skills and the close linguistic study of text. Extensive reading, on the other hand, can be defined as reading a large quantity of text, where reading confidence and reading fluency are prioritised. Although this twin categorization of reading into two basic types can be found in many teacher resource books for the teaching of English as a foreign language (Grellet:1981, Nuttall:1982, for example), it is not the whole story, as the student's learning history clearly pointed out. We need to extend the categorization. We can do this by adding, first, oral reading (Day:1993), or reading aloud in class, where considerable focus is put on correct pronunciation of the text - and, second, text translation, where correct translation of the foreign language text into the learners' mother tongue is emphasized in tandem with the study of an array of grammatical, lexical and phonological points. This creates a four-way methodological categorization of reading in a foreign language, summarised in the following table.
methodological choice classroom focus
Extensive students read a lot of text
Intensive students practise particular reading skills
oral reading students listen and read aloud
text translation students translate from L2 to L1
Table 1 Basic Classroom Approaches to Reading in a Foreign Language
3.0 Objectives in extensive reading in the first term
With regard to the first term of a first-year English reading course at Tsukuba University, 'reading a lot of text' centres on the use of graded readers so that the students read or are involved in reading-related activities for most of each lesson. It also means that the students spend at least one hour a week outside class reading. This principle of independent reading informs the course objectives in the first term. These are:
- to increase student confidence in their English reading ability
- to increase student motivation in their English reading
- to increase student reading fluency, specifically
- to decrease dependence on word by word comprehension
- to increase reading speed (number of pages read per hour)
- to increase student narrative interpreting ability, specifically so that students
- identify and record key/interesting points in a narrative
- write and discuss in English their own ideas and opinions about what has been read, and their own reading progress
- to foster a clear, strong and constant sense of personal success in reading English
As the course progresses through the second and third terms of the year, these objectives hold still true, but are elaborated and become specific, as will be shown later in this paper. Let us turn our attention now to actual classroom procedures in the first term.
4.0 Classroom organisation of extensive reading
In the real world, we exercise choice over the books that we read: we browse through different titles when we go into libraries and bookshops; we take time to choose something of personal interest to ourselves. The same is true when learners use a class library for extensive reading. Let us look at one example in detail.
Class library content
In this instance, for a class of 40+ students (1), in the summer term, the class library consists of 180 books or so. Most are graded readers written within certain controlled vocabulary limits and specifically produced for learners of English. Some are higher level readers especially targeted at native speaker teenagers, while others consist of readers written especially for native speaker children. For the most part, the books are about fifty pages long, and include illustrations and drawings. All of the titles involve narrative stories - from simplified versions of classics like A Tale of Two Cities, Sherlock Holmes and Alice in Wonderland to biographies of Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa; science fiction; adventure stories; love stories; thrillers, and so on. In short, the class library contains an interesting and wide variety of books written at easily accessible levels of English.
Level of reading materials
In terms of level, the books are divided into four bands: green, blue, red and yellow. Green is roughly equivalent to elementary level (upto the 1000 headword level); blue approximates to pre-intermediate (between 1000 and 1500 headwords), red to intermediate (1500 to 2000 headwords), and yellow to intermediate plus (2000 headwords plus). Each book is colour-coded as well as number coded for its level (100.0?? for green, for example, and 400.0?? for yellow), and has a book ticket within a pocket on the inside back cover (2).
Reading and note-taking requirements
In the first term, students are required to read 750 pages, over the course of ten weeks (3). They are also requested to buy an English-English learner's dictionary, Collins Cobuild Student Dictionary. When the students read books from the library, they are required to keep a reading journal. This is a B5 notebook in which they are asked to record in English: double-entry key points/reflection notes; reading performance reviews; weekly reading goals; book reports; half-term and end-of-term self-assessments. (See 6.0 Student Documentation for more detail.)
Using the library
Students can check out of the library up to two books at any one time at the start of the term; this is subsequently increased to three books later in the term after their reading speed has picked up. To check out a book, students write the title, code and date checked out on an individual A4 reading record sheet, as well as indicate the number of pages in the book. A maximum of six students can use the library at a go. While some students are use the library, the rest read, discuss in pairs what they have read, or make notes in their book journal (4).
5.0 Profile of a typical extensive reading lesson
The focus throughout the first term is on fluent reading. Since this is the overriding aim, most phases of the 75-minute lesson are organised to nurture this. Thus, the first part of the lesson - social English - involves the students standing up face-to-face in pairs and holding free conversations in English for a couple of minutes with one or two different people. This helps the students to switch into English for the lesson, and to create good group dynamics at the start of the lesson. Next, the students are asked to focus their attention on what they have achieved in their reading that week. This phase of the lesson involves the students in pairs first asking and answering, then writing questions such as:
- What book(s) did you read this week?
- What did you find particularly interesting?
- How many pages did you read?
- How much time did you spend reading?
- What are your reading goals this week?
After this, the students turn their tables face-to-face in pairs, and using the notes they have made during the last week on what they have been reading, they report to their partner and discuss their books in more detail with each other. During this phase, the reading record sheets are given out, and students start using the library. While some students are browsing and choosing books, the rest of the class (a) continues its pair discussions, or (b) reads, or (c) make notes. If students have finished (a), (b) or (c), they are free to talk in English - with occasional encouragement - until they can go to the front of the class and use the library. Finally, the reading record sheets are collected in before the whole class is taken through a relaxation and visualisation sequence. These fluency phases are summarised in the following table.
lesson phase what the students do
social English in pairs, they hold free conversations
reading performance in pairs, they talk about their reading that week
review: spoken
reading performance individually, they write about their reading that week
review: written in their reading journal
book discussion in pairs, they use their reading journal notes from their
out-of-class reading to talk about their books; readingrecord sheets are given out to the students
reading individually, they read
note-taking individually, they make notes
library individually, they use the class library
reading record sheets reading record sheets are collected in
relaxation/visualisation the whole class is taken through a relaxation sequence,
and led to visualise a positive and peaceful week ahead
Table 2 Lesson phases in extensive reading in the first term
Throughout the term, the students are required to document their reading in different ways. Such documentation provides ample material for the teacher to assess each student's individual achievement over the term, as well as enables the students not only to record their ideas and responses but also to see their own progress for themselves.
Reading journal double-entries (5)
As the students read their books, they keep notes in the following fashion. On the left-hand page of their reading journal, they copy important and/or interesting sentences from the text. On the right-hand page, they select three or four entries from the left-hand page and write their personal response to each of them. Some unreformulated examples of this would be (taken in isolation from different reading journals):
Left-hand page in reading Right-hand page in reading
journal: from the text journal: from the student
'Wake up, Alice dear!' she said. I don't like stories which finishes 'What a long sleep you've had!' with the words 'All of this story was (from Alice in Wonderland) only a dream,' because I think it is the author's escape from the finish of thestory. But only about this story, I
thought it had a different meaning. I like a way of finish in this story.Some of the visitors were nice to This shows how important the money
me, but the others did not notice and position is. This still exist today inme. I was too poor and unimportant. company and other various places. In(from Jane Eyre) Japan, along with position and money, there is age. This is becoming problem, because young people are not being able todo what they want because of it.
From his head down to his shoes It's very good expression. I canone could see that he was a kind imagine that there is finely dressedand sensible person, a real gentleman, but he is very angly, andgentleman. But his face no longer I feel good observation of Dr Watson,looked sensible or happy. His hair too.was standing up and his face was
red and angry. (from Sherlock
Holmes: His Last Bow)
Table 3 Example reading journal double entries
Such notes provide the basis for pair book discussions, where a natural information gap exists because each student is reading a different book. Of course, not all student double-entries are like this, a point that will be discussed further in 7.0 Questions and limits.
Reading performance reviews
These reviews are done on a weekly basis. The students record in their reading journals how many pages they have read; how much time they have spent reading; what their story was about; what their reading goals are now for the next week. The following two unreformulated reviews from the same student show a typical jump in both reading fluency and confidence within a few weeks:
May 16 1995
1. 21 pages
2. About one hour
3. I felt that Frankenstein is the sad story. A monster can't speak and make friends,
so it's very pity. If Frankenstein fear it, he shouldn't give its life again.
4. I would like to read through it and other book.
June 6 1995
1. 121 pages
2. About two hours
3. 'Hansel and Gretel' I had ever heard this story's name. But I didn't know this story, so I could enjoy reading this book. I felt that Hansel and Gretel are very sadly. Their parents left them in the wood. But they became to be happy at last. So I felt that it was very good.4. Last week I could read many pages. So it was good. Graduately I can become to read
fast. I would like to read two books.
Table 4 Example reading performance reviews
Weekly reading goals
These are incorporated in the performance review, as a way of nurturing a positive attitude to reading in terms of a plan-perform-reflect-plan learning cycle. At this stage in the course, this goal setting remains general in many cases without any particular support strategies being articulated. That is, students can express personal learning goals, but do not yet identify specific actions by which they can achieve such goals. Other commonly expressed goals in the first term include: wanting to read more quickly; guessing words from context / imaging.
Book reports
Students can be asked to write summaries and reports about the books that they read. This can be done as a regular activity, or left to the end of term. There are many possibilities here for integrating the skills further: see Greenwood 1992 and Hedge 1984 for further suggestions. On the one hand, such reports provide one assessment tool for the teacher; on the other hand, they indirectly enable the students to review and recycle key ideas and vocabulary from what they read.
It is important to be able to determine how students are coping, and which students may be in need of extra guidance. This can be done through collecting in mid-term reading reports. Students who are below a cumulative total of 250 pages by the end of May will probably have difficulty in reaching the term goal. With these students, I usually arrange group tutorials, where we review together what each person has been doing; discuss ways to improve reading speed and time management; plan how many pages a week each student is going to try and read from then until the end of term. Part of an example mid-term reading report is reproduced below:
Show in the graph the total number of pages that you have read each week:
Figure 1 Example mid-term reading report rubric
End-of-term self-assessments
This is a one-page report written by the students in response to the following questions:
1. What is the total number of pages that you have read this term?
2. What was the most interesting book that you read? Why?
3. How do you think your reading has changed this term?
4. What are your personal goals from now on?
5. What are your reading goals from now on?
This report provides a summary for the teacher to make a subjective judgement of each student's achievement in a preliminary evaluation. Some example end-of-term self-assessments are included in the following table (6).
Student A Student B Student C611 pages 603 pages 594 pages
A Town Like Alice Riders of the Purple Sage Mother Teresa
This book is very serious I could know the lifestyle Because I have seen
story. So I have thought of riders. Mother Teresa and had
many things. I haven't been interested in her.looked the war, but I
studied about the war
from this book.
First, I read Blue or Green First, I could find some I have been able to read
book. But at final, I lend interest points, but I could the book in English by
Red or Yellow books. hardly express my feelings reading it in English in
or opinions. Now, graduary my head.
I can express my own feeling. That's a great
progress for me.
I want to speak English in Continue to talk in English. 100% in English at this
daily life. And I try to talk in English class.
in this class and read English books about design.
I read 600 pages for one I'm going to read books I want to read English
term. So I will read 1800 about "design". Especially I books as Japanese books.
pages for one year. love cars so I will read
about car design books.
Table 5 Example end-of-term self-assessments
The end-of-term self-assessment reports can also be analysed to see in what ways the students align their own progress with the course objectives. Of 32 reports collected at the time of writing this article, the following benefits were mentioned:
Benefits of extensive reading Number of %
as perceived by the students mentions
increased reading speed 27 84.5%
better comprehension 11 34%
reading enjoyment 11 34%
Table 6 Student perceptions of changes in their reading at the end of the first term
Reading journal
To read through a student's reading journal at the end of a ten-week term takes time for a class of over 40 students, but this is time well spent in understanding each student's achievement during the term and in gaining insights into different aspects of the students' learning. Some examples follow in the next section.
Before looking at ways of bridging the gap between graded and authentic text, let us look at some questions that arise from using graded readers. These questions can help both identify limits and provide a rationale for second and third term course content.
Time
How much time is needed for extensive reading to succeed? Given the constraints (30 @ 75-minute lessons in one academic year for reading, with one lesson a week in each term), students must clearly spend substantial time outside class doing reading for an extensive reading programme in this context to work. A reasonable minimum weekly requirement would be between one and two hours outside class. From reading through the journals of four 'failing' students, we can see better why the question of time on task is so important:
Student A( reading total: 280 pages)
This student read six books and started off with detailed left-hand/right-hand page notes, but then left her journal blank from May 21st to June 25th.
Student B (reading total: 440 pages)
This student read eight books and made detailed left-hand/right-hand page notes throughout. He commented in his end-of-term self-assessment:
'I at first tried to read fluently from a word to a word. Every time I saw the unknown words I used my dictionary. It took long time. But gradually if there are a few words which I don't understand in the story I become to read not being anxious for them.'
Student C (reading total: 443 pages)
This student read six books, and kept very brief notes.
Student D (reading total: 456 pages)
This student read seven books and kept detailed left-hand/right-hand page notes. She commented in her end-of-term self-assessment:
'First I hated to read English books because I thought I couldn't understand them, but now I like reading them better than before. I became to be able to understand graduary.'
In the case of students A and C , time management (7) seems to be the key factor. This also seems to be partly true for student B, in the sense that he took a long time to switch from the inefficient strategy of word by word comprehension towards a more confident fluency-based approach. As for student D, again time seems to play a role, but, more importantly, she has gone through an important affective and/or attitudinal change to reading in English. Here, we may tentatively conclude that taking enough time to read is critical. We can also underline again the important role that out-of-class support tutorials (8) can play.
Control of text structure/patterning
Is a sole focus on narrative genre in the form of graded readers sufficient or not, where the stated goals of the first-year university curriculum are to prepare students for reading academic text in English in the field of their majors? In a small-scale piece of classroom research, carried out in June 1996, students were asked to read 8-10 pages of an intermediate-level graded reader and then to write a summary in English of what they had read. They had 35 minutes in which to do this. The opening of the story included characters profiles and four distinct episodes - that is, events set in different places, with different combinations of characters in each episode and different problem-resolutions. Of 39 written recalls,
- 2 failed to summarise any episode at all
- 5 summarised one episode plus part of a second
- 6 students summarised two episodes plus part of a third
- 17 students summarised three episodes plus part of a fourth
- 9 students sumarised all four episodes.
In addition, students who in their summaries reproduced the narrative sequence and structure of the original text managed to achieve two other interesting features too: first, they also included more supporting detail to the main episodes; second, they showed better comprehension of the story's events, characters and their interrelationship than other students. From this, we can tentatively conclude that reading performance can (and needs to) be improved through explicit attention to text structure/patterning (9).
Elaborations of personal interpretations
In what ways do students develop their interpretive skills through double-entry journal writing? There seem to be at least three major stages in the development of such fundamental critical thinking (10). In the first stage, the student is able to give an opinion, but does not support it in any manner:
He did not know who his mother He was very sad person.was, for she had died soon after
his birth. (Oliver Twist)
In the second stage, the student is able to give an opinion, and can give an additional comment:
The ship, the hero and his family In the vast sea, to find an islandwho went on board had the storm is very difficult. I think the herofor almost a week, and at last it and his family was very fortunate.struck a rock and began to sink. So, they took shelter from the ship
by the boat. Then they found an
island which had mountains and
green forests. (Swiss Family
Robinson)
In the third stage, the student is able to give an opinion and comment, and make a higher level connection (cause-effect, comparision, contrast, for example):
I can't remember the last time I He found he was really a human ate something. Listen to those and humans were really animals. They are hungry too, of course. I thought he was killed by wolves
I'm an animal just like them. as their meal, and he accepted it.
(The Year of Sharing) In the last page, Richard's mother
said that he learnt to share and that the world belongs not just to people, but to animals, and we must all learn it. That is all I learned in this book.
Further investigation of this development might well lead to finer distinctions being made, much along the lines of Vygotskian theory (11). What is important here, though, in terms of the organisation of extensive reading is the intimate bond between reading and oral/written expression as a means to developing interpreting ability, and the evidence once again of reading as a developmental process that involves much more than just conventional knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.
Reader response as a basis for teaching decisions
What strategies do students use, after a term of extensive reading, when they read a text and meet words and phrases they do not understand? In a small-scale investigation, 40 students were asked to read a newspaper article, and note down on the left-hand page of their reading journals any parts of the text which they couldn't understand, and on the right-hand page what action they decided to take at that point. Three strategies proved of roughly equal popularity:
- guessing from context (33%)
- checking in an English-English dictionary (28%)
- skipping and continuing to read (27%).
This is interesting in that the students used efficient reading strategies without having been explicitly trained in them, and that they have moved away from translation as a primary strategy. In this regard, Smith (1985:65) notes for L1 readers:
The identification of every word is not necessary for comprehension to take place. On the contrary, stopping to try and figure out every unfamiliar word the moment it is encountered serves only to produce tunnel vision and overload short-term memory. Comprehension is bound to be lost in such circumstances and learning becomes impossible. The tendency to stop dead at the first difficult word and thus to struggle uncomprehendingly through print a word at a time is a characteristic of poor readers of all ages.
Of course, with L2 readers, the L1 is a constant potential resource; Widdowson, for example, argues in favour of the initial parts of text being given in the L1 so that readers find a way into more efficient interpretation of L2 communicative use, or discourse-to-discourse gradual approximation (Widdowson (1988): 18, 159). The point is, though, that this is by no means the same as either equating reading with complete translation of a text or the use of word-by-word translation.
As for variations in reading strategies, the following points can be noted:
- 60% used multiple reading strategies (a combination of skipping, dictionary and guessing);
- 17.5% used just one strategy throughout (of which 12.5% mentioned English-English dictionaries; 2.5% skipping and continuing to read; 2.5% guessing);
- 22.5% mentioned no strategy at all.
At a minimum level, then, we could conclude that interpretive reading skills can be improved through early, explicit training in using simultaneously the three strategies previously mentioned, as Widdowson (1978: 85) points out:
... reading is not simply a matter of correlating words as they occur in context with their dictionary signification but of creating value by the process of active interpreting.
8.0 Review and wider connections
We have seen how classroom research and student data enable us to understand reading as a continuous and multi-faceted process of interaction between lower level interpetive skills, such as contextualised guessing, and higher level interpretive skills, such as global text awareness and critical analysis. This accords with the Vygotskian theory of the ebb and flow between everyday and scientific concepts in cognitive development (Vygotsky (1934): 194):
Though scientific and spontaneous concepts develop in reverse directions, the two processes are closely connected. The development of a spontaneous concept must have reached a certain level for the child to be able to absorb a related scientific concept ... In working its slow way upward, an everyday concept clears a path for the scientific concept and its downward development. It creates a series of structures necessary for the evolution of a concept's more primitive, elementary aspects, which give it body and vitality. Scientific concepts, in turn, supply structures for the upward development of the child's spontaneuous concepts towards consciousness and deliberate use. Scientific concepts grow downward through spontaneous concepts; spontaneous concepts grow upward through scientific concepts.
In terms of extensive reading, this may be interpreted as an argument in favour of extensive reading ('everyday reading') as the necessary base for academic reading ('scientific reading'), where practise of, and training in, multi-level skills with extensive reading creates potentially strong and responsive pathways for the successful development of reading skills in academic text. Further, such a line of thinking maps closely on to recent second language research (Casanave: 1988, Grabe: 1991 and Block: 1992), who in different ways argue that an exclusive conceptual focus on content and formal schemata as a means for understanding the reading process risks providing teachers and learners with an excessively static view of what reading involves. Rather, the current model of reading in a foreign language is also multi-level and dynamic, as Grabe (1991: 383) notes:
In general, the term interactive approaches can refer to two different conceptions. First it can refer to the general interaction which takes place between the reader and the text. The basic concept is that the reader (re)constructs the text information based in part on the knowledge drawn from the text and in part from the prior knowledge available to the reader ...Second , the term interactive approaches refers to the interaction of many component skills potentially in simultaneous operation; the interaction of these cognitive skills leads to fluent reading comprehension... These two perspectives are complementary, though discussions in the literature tend to stress one perspective over the other, or to ignore one of the two perspectives altogether. In fact, most cognitive psychologists and education psychologists stress the interaction-of-skills arrays; in contrast, most second language researchers stress the interaction between the reader and the text.
The question then arises: how can a teacher help students to walk the tightrope between these different levels so as to have optimal access to all modes of interpretation? Or, in the more specific terms of reference of this paper, how can an extensive reading course using graded readers in the first term be developed towards academic text by the end of the third term? For reasons of space, let us briefly outline some possibilities in the next section.
9.0 Towards reading academic text
One way to approach this is to re-consider the reading tasks made of the learner faced with authentic text: the more difficult the text, the simpler the task, in short. How? In the first five weeks of the second term, the students are required to use a different extensive reading library; this consists of a set of 'How to' books, and includes titles such as How to Cook Italian Food, How to Take Colour Photographs, How to Stay Young, and so on. Originally produced for a native speaker general audience, these books are written in an easy-to-read manner.
Each week, the students choose a different book, and read it within certain limits: twenty pages in total, and not all pages to be consecutive, so they must choose a few pages here and there from different parts of the book according to their interests. Why? One indirect lesson that students learn with graded readers is to read through the book cover to cover. But in terms of independent reading, most people never actually finish a book: we usually read selectively rather than every last page. To do this, the students naturally need to be guided to make use of the table of contents, the index, and skimming skills. Furthermore, before the students select what they are going to read, they are asked to write down what they know of the topic so as to activate their real-world knowledge. While reading, the students are asked to focus on the main ideas by reading the first sentence only of each paragraph on their initial reading and keep notes in their reading journal; then, through subsequent readings and underlining of two to three phrases in each paragraph, they are required to create a mind map of the key points. In class, they then use their notes and mind maps as a basis for pair discussions, and write a summary of their discussion.
In the second half of the second term, students are asked each week to find an English newspaper article (12) of personal interest to them (between 300 and 500 words long) to prepare it in the following way before class. First, they cut it out and stick in their reading journal. Next, they read through the article to find answers to these cues: who? what? when? where? how? Third, they are to choose no more than six key phrases from the text; to copy these into their journals; to use their dictionaries to write paraphrases in English. Then, they are required to write a summary of the main points, and to finish this with their personal comments about the topic. Again, in class, they use their notes and summaries to give mini-presentations in pairs as a basis for discussion and for explaining key vocabulary to each other.
In the initial few weeks of the third term, students can be trained in lexical analysis of text where the goal is to identify the lexical relationships of equivalence, opposition and inclusion (McCarthy:1988) across two pages of expository text. Equivalence here means phrases which in the discourse realise the same locally instantiated meaning value with each other; opposition refers to phrases in the discourse which realise the opposite locally instantiated meaning value with each other; inclusive alludes to phrases in the discourse that operate in a general-detail relationship towards each other. In such a lexical analysis, the reader becomes a discourse analyst; and since the relationships are operating across long stretches of discourse (multi-paragraph), the analysis is simultaneously operating at both specific-local and general-global levels. (See Hoey (1993) for detailed analysis of how text operates lexically.)
In the final phase of the third term, students then apply everything that has gone before when they are asked to choose books from their own major; to read twenty non-consecutive pages; to prepare mind maps; to perform lexical analysis; to write a response summary; to present and discuss the contents of the book in pairs; to write a final self-assessment.
10.0 Conclusion
This paper has discussed options, problems and solutions in the organisation of a first-year extensive reading course. First, this analysis has argued that graded readers should form the initial core of a first-year reading course in order to raise reading confidence and fluency in students so that they can be prepared both to tackle higher level text and to develop more effective reading strategies later in the year. Research in the field supports this argument both in terms of reading development (Hill:1992; Huckin et al: 1993), and in terms of core vocabulary development (Nation: 1990). Second, this analysis has argued that an exclusive focus on the extensive reading of narrative text, though necessary and effective as a primary base, is however insufficient through the rest of the year. Attention also needs to be paid to the optimal simultaneous development of extensive reading and vocabulary with general readership expository text. Here, this paper has identified strategic lexical analysis and idea mapping as the key entry points. Further work remains, though, in investigating more finely the critical interface between extensive reading and 'sub-technical' core vocabulary - and the interesting choices that learners can make in moving from graded to authentic text.
Notes
1. Extensive reading library used specifically with Art and Design B 1993, Art and Design A 1994, 1995, 1996. Whole-class graded readers used as core content with Medical B 1996 (Love Story) for oral communication; with Bio-Resources A 1996 (Frankenstein) for writing; with International Studies A 1996 for writing (Cry Freedom). Variations on the lexical analysis approach mentioned later in this paper used with International Relations C 1995 for writing, and other classes in previous years, and being employed with 1996 reading and writing classes in second and third terms.
2. Until 1996, I used the library ticket system, but found this administratively cumbersome. The reading record sheet is more individualised, and provides an easily accessible update each week for both students and teacher.
3. Since I was off sick for three weeks in April/May 1996, and the students were unable to use the class library during this period, the total was reduced to 600 for the 1996 summer term. See Robb and Susser (1989), Kitao et al. (1990) and Day et al. (1991) for different extensive reading targets used at the university level in Japan.
4. This also provides a quick and unobtrusive means to check attendance. As regards loss of books, which is sometimes cited as a problem with extensive reading libraries, I've only lost one or two titles a year with each class. However, if you have a number of repeating students at the start of the year, some of them are more likely to 'disappear' - along with the books that they have checked out.
5.I came across this idea on the Fluency First internet discussion list run on TESL-L from the City University of New York where the emphasis was on writing skills. Simple and elegant, it lends itself to flexible variations according to local needs and context.
6. See note 3 for reasons why the reading total is lower than 750 pages.
7. Of some interest here is the fact that Weinstein's Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), a standardised psychological test that assesses learners' thought processes, behaviours and study techniques, includes time management as one of its ten subscales (Weinstein et al.: 1988). The other LASSI subscales are attitude, motivation, anxiety, concentration, information processing, selecting main ideas, study aids, self testing and test strategies. See Puntambekar (1995) for a description of how LASSI was used to help design an intelligent tutoring system that aimed to improve proficiency in metacognition for L1 teenagers.
8. See note 3 for reasons why there were no support tutorials for these students in the 1996 summer term. In contrast, support tutorials in the 1995 summer term enabled ten or so students to organise their reading so as to reach the term goal of 750 pages. Refer to 6.0 Student Documentation, Mid-term reports, for a brief explanation of such tutorials.
9. The focus would at this stage be on characteristic narrative structuring as a support for global prediction skills and for post-reading summary writing. See Carrell (1992) for using written recalls to assess formal and content schemata awareness.
10. Similar conclusions have been noted on the TESL-L Fluency First internet discussion list.
11.Vygotsky proposes five basic types of complexes, or concrete groupings of objects by 'factual' - as opposed to abstract-logical - connections: (i) associative complexes (ii) collections (iii) chain complexes (iv) diffuse complexes (v) pseudoconcepts; he argues that complexes act as one foundation of mature 'scientific' concept formation: 'The principal function of complexes is to establish bonds and relations. Complex thinking begins the unification of scattered impressions; by organizing discrete elements of experience into groups, it creates a basis for later generalizations. But the advanced concept presupposes more than unification. To form such a concept it is also necessary to abstract, to single out elements, and to view the abstracted elements apart from the totality of the concrete experience in which they are embedded. In genuine concept formation, it is equally important to unite and to separate... '(Vygotsky (1934): 135-136).
12. One problem, noted by Kyongho and Nation (1989), with one-off unrelated stories is the low repetition rate of vocabulary outside the 2,000 most frequent items. They recommend using running newspaper stories instead; this in turn raises the problem of students knowing which stories are going to run over more than one week if the emphasis is on (a) student selection of reading material and (b) practice of vocabulary learning skills, as it is here in the second term.
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