Extensive Reading and Vocabulary Range

[From a presentation by Dr Alexander Arguelles]

Types of Reading

. Intensive reading - assisted reading of relatively short, relatively difficult texts, usually for instrumental purposes - initial comprehension is less than 98% vocabulary coverage

. Extensive reading - unassisted reading of long and relatively easy texts, usually for pleasure [and vocabulary growth] - initial lexical comprehension must be around 98%

Non-lexical factors that affect reading comprehension include:

. Grammatical constructions

. Idiomatic constructions

. Reading speed

. Knowledge of content or familiarity with the subject matter

. Knowledge of cultural or historical references

. Stylistic considerations (clarity, sentence length, use of complex clauses etc.)

Defining the word "word"

. "Word" in the sense of the absolute number of units of letter combinations in a text = a "word token"

. "Word" in the sense of the number of different combinations of letters among the tokens in a text = a "word type"

. Example: The sentence, "The cat ate the mouse," contains five word tokens but four word types as the word "the" occurs twice.

. "Word" in the sense of something that you can look up in a dictionary = "headword" or "lemma". Lemmata include not only their base form, but also their inflexions. Thus, most lemmata contain several word types.

. Example: "Book" contains "books," "man" contains "men", "be" contains "am", "is", "are", "was", "were", "been", and "being".

. "Word" in the sense of a fundamental unit of lexical knowledge that allows you to recognize and understand not only inflected forms of a headword, but also related derived forms = a "word family". Many if not most word families contain several lemmata:

. Example: "accept" includes not only "accepts", "accepted", and "accepting", but also "acceptance", "acceptability", "acceptable", "unacceptable", "acceptably", and "unacceptably".

Knowing a word

. Active knowledge = a person speaks or writes a word naturally and spontaneously

. Passive knowledge = a person recognizes, understands, and may even be able to explain a word, but does not use it spontaneously

. Guessing knowledge = a person derives the meaning of a word from contextual clues

. Reading vocabulary knowledge = active + passive + guessing

How many words does a person know?

. Take the vocabulary size test: http://my.vocabularysize.com

. Cervatiuc: http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html

Word Frequency Lists

. Breaking vocabulary into 1000's

. The 1st 1000 word families of most common words give ~80% text coverage

. The 2nd 1000 word families provide additional ~7%

. The 3rd 1000 word families provide additional ~3%

. ∴ the first 3000 words provide ~90% coverage

. Thereafter, the percent coverage provided by each thousand decreases rapidly and geometrically:

. the 4th thousand family provides an average 2%

. the 6th, 1%

. the 8th, 0.50%

. the 10th, 0.36%

. the 12th, 0.25%

. the 14th, 0.14%

Considerations

. With 3000 words, one can begin to function;

. With that plus a specialized list such as the 570-word Academic Word List (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/index.htm), one can begin specialized studies

. With ~6000, one has 98% coverage of spoken language and with ~8000, close to 100% conversational coverage, but

. Written comprehension only begins at 8000-9000: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/Publications/paul-nation/2006-How-large-a-vocab.pdf

. ∴ obviously, lower frequency words are much more common in writing than in speech, and so they can be acquired only by reading

Learning Lower Frequency Words

. The lower the frequency of a word, the harder it is to learn.

. While 98% textual comprehension of books may be provided by the first 9000 words on average, the remaining 2% for 100% coverage is made up of lower frequency families.

. While the 98% textual comprehension provided by higher frequency lists is relatively homogenous, the 2% provided by the lower frequency families is much more diverse.

. In other words, while one may be able to read a given individual book with 99% comprehension at 12,000-14,000 families, in order to be able to pick up and read a variety of different kinds of books at that level, one needs a native range vocabulary (17,000+)

. ∴ the only way to develop an extensive vocabulary is to engage in the systemic extensive reading of progressively more challenging texts.

. As graded readers rarely go past a few thousand words, a language resource learning center for continued advanced development ought to have lists if not actual libraries of books organized by levels of word families that make them appropriate for vocabulary growth through extensive reading.

[Extracted from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYMZZISPrU]