How Many Times Do Students Need to Read a Word

Before They Can Learn It?

Chapter One

1.1. Introduction

In Japan many learners learn a foreign language, which is usually English. Some earlier starters learn their foreign language in kindergarten, while most children start when they become 12 years old in junior high-school. Recently, the government ordered all junior high-schools in Japan to teach junior high-school learners English. High-schools also have put more English into the curriculum.

There are many learners learning English, or other languages, so learning another language or teaching another language is an important focus in the field of education. Nowadays many educators or researchers discuss what kind of learning is best, or what kind of teaching is most useful for learners.

Japanese learners, for example junior high-school learners or high-school learners, do not read so much or get enough exposure to the language that they are learning. Many learners read only their textbook and their teachers also do not introduce books for the learners to read in the language that the learners are studying. When Japanese learners study foreign languages they are given a text and a workbook. They come to class after they read one or two pages of the textbook and try to translate the content by themselves first. In class they are checked by their teacher and the content mostly is grammar. After the class, the teacher gives homework with the main focus is to improve their grammar skills. Learners never read for fun because most of their reading is focused on translating. So as a result, there are many learners who do not like English class. Many Japanese think just reading a book is not useful for learning language. Japanese learners need to read more.

1.2. Effects of reading

Reading is the most important skill for Japanese learners. From reading texts learners or readers can begin to learn new words and enrich their vocabulary that they have already met and improve their grammatical knowledge, become more familiar with text structure, acquire the power of reading, get new information and get pleasure from reading books and so much more. While reading learners can also check their level or know what points they need to learn or relearn. For this reason many researchers have tried to discover what learners do when they read in a foreign language.

1.3. How much vocabulary is learned from reading?

There is a lot of research in reading in a foreign language and it is received wisdom that people learn a lot from reading, especially vocabulary. There is no doubt that by learning from context a learner can improve his/her vocabulary knowledge gradually. Moreover, learners can get additional content knowledge from their reading and if there are large quantities of reading it has a stronger effect. In these cases we can estimate how many unknown words learners can acquire from their reading.

One of the central questions asked in reading in a foreign language is "how much do learners actually learn from their reading?" It is not easy to answer to this question. This is in part because we have to decide what types of knowledge change we are looking for. We could look at reading speed increases, increases in comprehension scores and a whole host of other elements. Most typically though, the answer has been investigated by looking at vocabulary growth. Words are considered an easy way to assess language gains because each word can be treated as a separate unit which allows for easy data collection and analysis. In other words, we can measure the number of words known both before and after reading to see how many words have been learned during the course of the reading.

There have been many attempts to discover the amount of vocabulary that is learned from reading. Some of the vocabulary studies that report gains in vocabulary from reading in a second language.[1] Some of these studies involved rather little reading while others quite a lot.

The general picture that emerges from these studies of second and foreign language reading is that learners do learn vocabulary from their reading but not very much. Typically the gains in scores after reading are only just significant and not much better than random guessing on the tests.

This is hardly surprising, of course because words need to be met several times in the text before they are learned and most of the texts in these studies would not have repeated the words very often. Moreover, as the readers would be reading at very high levels of text comprehension they will meet few unknown words, thus there will be few to learn.

These gains are in stark contrast to the L1 literature that report very high levels of vocabulary growth due to reading. Herman, Nagy and Anderson[2] for example suggest that several thousands of words are learned per year by children learning English as their first language. Nagy[3] estimates that on the assumption that a learner reads a million of running words yearly, and does not know two per cent of these words, it shows he meets 20,000 unknown words yearly. If he can learn five per cent of the unknown words he would gain 1,000 new words per year. One million running words will come to about three or four undergraduate textbooks, or ten to twelve novels, or 25 complete Newsweek magazines[4], or 65 graded readers of various levels.[5]

1.4. Problems with this body of research

This research has left us with some very interesting results, but the results are mixed largely because the studies often have several kinds of problems as pointed out by Waring.[6]

One of the reasons for this difference between native level gains and second language learners’ gains can probably be found in the types of test have been employed when testing gains in vocabulary from reading in a foreign language. Some tests were multiple-choice, others were simple form recognition and so on. It is presumed that the level of difficulty of the test given will have a significant effect on the amount of learning that occurred that can be demonstrated and therefore it will affect the gains that can be shown.

A more sensitive test (i.e. one that allows the subject to demonstrate even a small amount of information about the word such as a simple form recognition test "have you seen this word before?”) will be easier than an insensitive test (i.e. one that demands that the subject demonstrate more detailed knowledge or demonstrate shades of meaning or the differences from similar words, for example.)

Waring shows that the body of Extensive Reading (ER) research often has a lack of quality control in test construction and have often tended to be careless, which means that we can not always be sure of the real amount of learning from context. Most studies looking at gains from context when reading extensively commonly we use multiple-choice test.[7] However, this type of test is not necessarily the most suitable for assessing how much learning has occurred from exposure to ER texts.

Another reason for the difference between L1 and l2 rates may be that that there is something about L2 reading ability which does not allow for such gains to be made. One possible reason could be that L2 readers have a much smaller vocabulary at their disposal than L1 learners from which they can guess the meanings of unknown words. L1 learners know thousands of words even by the time they start school and thus have much better resources for guessing meanings. Moreover, the texts will be culturally familiar and thus easier to read. It seems also that there may be a threshold of vocabulary knowledge at which the vocabulary spurt can really take hold.

One question that rarely gets asked in the research dealing with the amount of vocabulary learned from reading, is how long these effects last. The vast majority of the studies already conducted on gains from exposure are cross-sectional tests which usually take place just after the reading. As knowledge of the new words will be fresh in the mind, the subjects will of course score higher on the test when some of memory of the new words has decayed. This is not enough to measure the subjects’ real amount of learning and we have to suspect that the “real” and lasting gains demonstrated in the research and they would probably have been over-estimated.

Only one study has attempted to gather data on how much learning was kept in the subjects memory over time.[8] From retention data we can get a lot of useful information to improve the quality of the test and the possibility of learning from context but researchers have tended to ignore this aspect of learning from context until now. By getting the retention data we can create more useful extensive reading texts to provide the right rate of repetition to help subjects to learn words.

1.5. Other things to consider when conducting this research

Another body of research has looked at how many meetings of a word is takes before a word can be said to be learned. While all words are different and there will be easy words and difficult words an average word takes between 8-20 meetings before it is said to be learned receptively (Nation 2001). This means that the learners can see the word in their reading and they can know its meaning. This does not mean that the word can be used productively or that shades of meaning and nuances are known.

Waring also said that the rate of unknown words can affect the result of the research. Research has investigated the appropriate density of unknown words to already known words that can allow for successful guessing from context. Hu and Nation[9] explored this question in detail and concluded that 98% to 99% of the other words in fluent reading should be known before successful guessing can occur. They found that if the text is too difficult, say one unknown word in ten (90% coverage) then the chance of a correct guess is almost zero. While it is unclear what rate of known to unknown words was in these texts, the shorter texts would have had a higher than adequate rate.

The focus of this thesis

The above seems to imply that in order to answer the question about how much can be learned from reading it is best to:

a) use a lengthy passage rather than a short one

b) test knowledge gains with several types of test

c) assessed knowledge over a longer period of time

d) use a passage which is not too dense with unknown words so that little learning can take place.

From the above we can see that there is a need to discover how much vocabulary is learned from reading a graded reader to answer the following research questions:

a) How many new words are learned from reading a graded reader over time?

b) Do different test types show different levels of learning from a graded reader?

6. Conclusion

This chapter reviewed much of the research that has been done into learning from context from second language reading. In this review we discovered several areas that are in need of research. Come of these areas will be investigated in an experiment to be conducted in the following chapter. In Chapter Three we will analyze the results.

Chapter Two

The study

2.1. Introduction

In the previous chapter, we reviewed some of the research on how many words learners learn from context. We discovered that there was a lot of research but many of the results from the studies were mixed and these studies had some methodological problems. In this chapter we will report a study that addresses many of the problems found in previous studies with the aim of discovering how many times students need to read a word before they can learn it. Chapter Three we will discuss the results.

2.2. The experiment

2.2.1. Overview

The aim of the study is to determine how many times students need to read a word before they can learn it. In this study 25 words that appeared with different occurrence frequencies were selected from the graded reader, Little Princess, and were changed into substitute words. The subjects read the book and were tested on their recall of the words in three tests over three test periods.

2.2.2. Method

A) Subjects

16 Japanese female subjects from a university in Western Japan were the subjects in this experiment. Twelve of them were in the English department. Their ages ranged from 19 to 22 years old and were at least post-elementary level.

B) Text

Twelve graded readers were selected as candidates for this study. Each book was scanned and converted into text and then analyzed by computer for the frequency of occurrence of various types of words. The aim of this was to find a text with a suitable range of frequencies which would be easy to read for post-elementary level subjects. In the end, the Little Princess was selected as it met the criteria (see below).

The Little Princess text is one of Oxford University Press’s graded readers Level 1, and has 500 different headwords. Level 1 of the Oxford reader books is about at the level that Japanese junior high school students can read and therefore would be quite easy for university students which they would be able to enjoy.

C) Selecting the test words

We needed to select words which the subjects can guess without too much difficulty, but must not already know. Nouns and adjectives are easier to guess than adverbs so these were chosen. Verbs were not selected because they appear with various inflections. This can make it difficult to decide whether the word is “known” because a subject may see the word saw and then seeing and not realize they come from the same word family.

We needed to test at least 25 words which the subjects would have to guess from context. We selected 5 words from 6 different levels of occurrence. These were from words occurring only one time, 2 to 5 times, 6 to 10, 11 to 15, 16 to 20 and 21 to 25 times.