Chapter 3: Balance Your Learning - PDF

Receptiue skills Chapter Balance your learning–learn through 03 listening and reading How can you learn a language through listening? A useful thing to do in the very early stages of learning another language is to listen to the way in which th...

Receptiue skills Chapter Balance your learning–learn through 03 listening and reading How can you learn a language through listening? A useful thing to do in the very early stages of learning another language is to listen to the way in which the language is spoken, even when you don’t understand anything at all. An effective way to do this is to watch a movie with subtitles which uses that language. This kind of form-focused listening helps you get a feel for the language which will be very useful when you begin to speak it yourself. Later, as your skill in the language develops, a good way to get some listening practice is to find a movie where you can download the script of the movie and study it before watching it. The first step is to read the script looking up the words you don’t know and working out what the sentences mean. Then you can watch the movie with subtitles. Then a few weeks later watch it again. Similarly, many graded readers now come with an accompanying CD which provides the spoken version of the text. You can try reading before listening, and reading while listening. 3-to listen to test are at proficiency Activity 3.1: Reading while listening While you listen to a recording, you silently read the same text. This activity uses one skill (reading) to support the other (listening). Learners prefer listening while reading over listening by itself and tend to gain higher vocabulary learning scores and comprehension related scores when reading while listening. How much vocabulary do you need to know to watch a movie? Movies are usually under 10,000 running words long (a novel is usually over 100,000 words long). Movies typically contain around 1,000 different word families. These words come from a range of frequency levels. To follow most of the words in a movie without any preparation, you need to have a reasonably large vocabulary – at least 3,000 words and preferably around 6,000 18 words. Because the number of different words in a movie is not so large, preparing for a movie by reading the script and studying the vocabulary is a manageable task. Because the amount of meaningful input that you get has a strong effect on how much of the language you learn, you should try to regularly get lots of listening and reading input at the right level of difficulty for you. How can you learn a language through reading? There is very good research showing that it is possible to learn a lot of a language through reading. If you want to use reading as a way of developing language proficiency, what should you do? 1 Read texts which are at the right level for you. This is easy to do if you are a learner of English, but probably impossible for learners of many other languages. This is because in English there are many books, called graded readers, which are specially written within a controlled vocabulary for learners of English. Graded readers are books specially written for foreign language learners, so that at almost every level of proficiency learners can read books which are at the right level for them. Graded readers are written at various levels within a controlled vocabulary. Almost every major language teaching publisher has their own series of readers. Oxford University Press has the Oxford Bookworms, Cambridge University Press has the Cambridge English Readers, Penguin has the Penguin Readers and Heinemann has the Foundation Readers and the National Geographic readers. The Oxford Bookworms series has the following levels. Level 1 2 3 4 5 6 New words 400 300 300 400 400 700 Total words 400 700 1,000 1,400 1,800 2,500 So, a learner who knows only 400 words can read several books at level 1 of the series. One of the good things about graded readers is that every word that is met is probably worth learning, even if that word is not repeated in the book. Graded reader series end at around 3,000 words. If you know more words than this, you should read the Mid-frequency readers which are written at the 4000, 6,000, and 8,000 word levels. They are free and can be found at Paul Nation’s web site http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation.aspx. They can be read on electronic readers or tablet computers. Chapter 3 / 19  For more information on graded readers visit the Extensive Reading Foundation web site, and to see which have been voted the best graded readers. There are a few graded readers in Japanese and a few in French. If you are learning a language other than English, it is useful to get hold of the books that native speakers use at school when they begin to learn to read. This is because these books are written for learners with small vocabularies and do not introduce words that these first language learners are unlikely to know. Another good source of reading is to read an encyclopaedia especially written for young children. 2 Accompany reading with deliberate learning from word cards or flash card programs (see Chapter 5). 3 Read electronic texts using a program that has easy dictionary look-up. For example, using Kindle or Kobo, you can look up the meaning of a word just by touching it. To put a text into Kindle, you need to find your special Kindle email address. To find this address, logon to the Amazon Kindle web site. Choose Your account, and click on the first heading of the vertical menu, Your account (If you don’t see the left hand column, it may be because you have not yet logged in to your account). In the far left column, under the heading Your kindle account, click Personal document settings. This will give you a list of the email addresses of your devices or apps. You can email any document you want to read to this address and it will appear on your Kindle app on your device. 4 Make sure you do plenty of reading. The higher your level of proficiency, the more you will need to read in order to meet words at the right level for you enough times to have a chance to learn them (see Note 8.2: How much reading do you need to do?). Reading helps language learning by providing the important learning condition of repetition. That is, through reading learners meet words, word groups and grammatical constructions several times and so have a good chance of learning them. Activity 3.2: Extensive reading Extensive reading involves doing large quantities of reading using material which is at the right level for you. Ideally, this reading should be enjoyable. Material which is at the right level contains no more than two unfamiliar words in every 100 running words (about 1 unknown word or less in every five lines). For elementary and intermediate learners, this means reading books written within a controlled vocabulary (graded readers). 20  How to practice extensive reading The aim should be to read a book a week, spending at least an hour or two per week reading. In a well-balanced language course, just under a quarter of the course time should be spent on extensive reading. Two thirds of this time should be spent reading material containing a few unknown words, and one third of this time should be spent quickly reading very easy material in order to develop reading fluency. Why is extensive is reading importint It is not necessary to sit comprehension tests on the reading, although there are web sites for learners of English which provide such tests (see the Extensive Reading Foundation web site http:// erfoundation.org/wordpress/graded-readers/mreader). The research on extensive reading has shown that it brings about improvement in reading, vocabulary growth and a wide range of language skills and knowledge. Research has shown that through reading we learn vocabulary, word groups, grammatical features and improve our reading skill. Reading can also result in feelings of success; it is not enormously time consuming, and can be very enjoyable. Activity 3.3: Narrow reading Staying within a single topic or subject area is sometimes called narrow reading. It has three major positive effects on language learning. Its strongest effect is to reduce the total number of different words that you meet. Having a lot of different topics results in a very diverse vocabulary, and in many more words that will occur only once in the texts. In addition by staying within the same subject area you build up a lot of useful content knowledge that will make reading easier and so will make guessing unknown words from context easier. You can do narrow reading by (1) reading within a specialist area of knowledge, preferably one that you already know a lot about, (2) following the same story or general topic area when reading newspapers, or (3) doing the Issue logs activity (see Activity 8.1). However, if you already have a rather large vocabulary, over 6,000 or 7,000 words, it may be more useful for you to read widely so that you can meet more unknown words that you can learn. Reading across a range of different topics greatly increases the number of different words that you meet. You need to consider whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for you at your present level of proficiency. Chapter 3 / 21  Way isn’t it a good idea to read a book Is it a good idea to choose a book that interests you and read it from the beginning to the end learning all the new words you meet? Generally this is not a good idea if the book is not written in a controlled vocabulary, or if the book is not on a topic that you already know a lot about. The main reason why it is not a good idea is that it will contain a large number of unknown words (possibly more than 1000), most of which will be well outside your current knowledge and which will not be repeated in the book or even in the next book you read. Around half of the different words in any text occur only once. You are likely to meet an unknown word in every line of the text. However, it is worth struggling through a book if one or more of the following conditions apply: 1 The book is a set text for your course. 2 The book is an important text in the academic field that you are studying. It will help you learn the technical vocabulary of your field. 3 The subject matter of the book is very familiar to you and the technical terms are similar to those in your L1. 4 It is a novel that you have already read in your first language so you can easily guess or skip a lot of the unknown words. You can make reading such a book easier if you buy an electronic version of the text or scan it to make an electronic version (Do not distribute the electronic version to other people as this will break copyright). If you put the text in an electronic reader like Kindle or Kobo you can get easy dictionary look-up. A useful alternative to reading a long text is to do narrow reading of a variety of short texts on the same topic. When you have read a long text, is it better to re-read the same book or read a different one? The advantages of re-reading a book are 1 it will be a lot easier than reading it the first time 2 it will guarantee repetition of the vocabulary 3 it will provide an opportunity for recall of previously met vocabulary to occur 4 it may help develop reading fluency 5 it will take much less time than reading a different book of the same length. 22 The advantages of reading a different book are 1 some of the words met in the previous book will be met again in varied meetings 2 there will be many new words to learn. These lists suggest that re-reading is a good idea, and that it would be good to have a mixture of re-reading and different reading in a language learning program. In the early stages of language learning your goal should be to spend at least around a half an hour to an hour per week doing meaningful listening and reading. You need to increase this time as proficiency develops. Having looked at learning through input, in the next chapter we look at learning through output (speaking and writing). Chapter 3 / 23