Reading in another language

The learner who reads a page with a dictionary and takes forty minutes has done something useful, and something less useful than reading ten pages without one.

The two kinds

Which serve different purposes.

Intensive reading: short texts, read closely, with every unknown word looked up and grammar analysed.

Useful for accuracy and for noticing structure, and slow.

Extensive reading: large quantities of easy material, read for meaning, without stopping.

Useful for fluency, vocabulary breadth and reading speed.

Most learners do only the first, and the research on extensive reading suggests that is the wrong balance.

Why extensive reading works

The mechanism.

Vocabulary is acquired incidentally from repeated encounters in context, which requires volume.

Estimates of the number of encounters needed for a word to be learned from reading alone are generally in double figures, which means a word must appear often enough to recur.

Which only happens at volume.

Studies of extensive reading programmes consistently find gains in reading speed, vocabulary and general proficiency.

And it builds the tolerance for ambiguity that is necessary for reading real material at all.

Choosing the level

The critical decision.

The usual guidance for extensive reading is that you should know around 98 per cent of the words — roughly one or two unknown words per hundred.

Which feels far too easy, and is the point: at that density you can read for meaning and infer the unknowns.

Below about 95 per cent, comprehension breaks down and the reading becomes decoding.

The practical test: read a page and count the unknowns. More than five on a page and the book is too hard for extensive reading.

Where to find material

At each stage.

Graded readers, which are written to controlled vocabulary levels and are the most efficient starting point by a wide margin.

Children's books, then material for young readers.

Translations of books you have already read, since the familiar plot supplies the context.

Genre fiction, which uses more repetitive vocabulary than literary fiction.

News written for learners.

And eventually anything, which is the destination.

Not looking things up

The discipline.

Read past unknown words, guessing from context, and continue.

Look up only words that appear repeatedly and are blocking comprehension.

Which feels wrong and is the practice that produces reading speed.

A useful compromise: mark words while reading and look up a handful at the end of the chapter.

And use a monolingual dictionary once the level permits, which builds the language rather than the translation habit.

Where intensive reading belongs

Its proper role.

Short passages, chosen for density, worked through carefully.

Useful for noticing grammar you have studied, for collocations, and for building a card deck of vocabulary in context.

A page or two at a time rather than a whole book.

And best done alongside extensive reading rather than instead of it — perhaps one part intensive to five parts extensive.

Reading aloud

An additional use.

Reading aloud in the target language trains pronunciation, rhythm and the connection between spelling and sound.

It is slower than silent reading and is not a substitute for it.

Best used on material you have already read silently, so the comprehension is not competing with the production.

And reading along with an audiobook is a particularly efficient version, since it supplies the model.

Different writing systems

Where the additional work is.

A language with an unfamiliar script adds a decoding load on top of everything else, which slows the early stages substantially.

Which means more time on the script itself before extensive reading is viable.

Character-based systems require a distinct and sustained effort, and there is no shortcut.

And graded material becomes more important rather than less, since the threshold for readable text is higher.

Making it stick

The habit.

Read daily, even briefly.

Read things you would want to read anyway, since anything else is abandoned.

Abandon books that are too hard rather than persevering, which is the most common reason people stop reading in a second language altogether.

Track pages or books, which makes slow progress visible.

And reread, which is undervalued: a second pass through a book at the edge of your level produces more than a first pass through a harder one.