This is exactly what I do. The only difference is that I like to dive into difficult texts first (usually translations of fantasy novels) but I paste them into Readlang which makes the process nearly painless. With a regular paper dictionary it would definitely have to be graded readers first.
Great information. I am interested in more detail and it is hard to find. How long should students read every day? Should it be gradually increased? Where can you find graded readers for languages other than English? How exactly does a good extensive reading program work?
Great information here! It seems like Waring would argue against the use of "authentic" texts in extensive reading programs because they simply are not comprehensible enough. Is that correct? Does he see a value in such "authentic" texts in other contexts?
David Talone On this issue, Waring states that "reading native texts" before one has acquired ~5000 word families "change[s] the reading task into a linguistic (study) one rather than one for building fluency." He goes on: "This is not bad necessarily, but learners should be aware that unless they read a lot, they will not have the opportunity to meet the unknown words they need to strengthen their partially-known vocabularies. Therefore, EFL learners would need to use graded readers initially to help even out the density issues by systematizing the vocabulary load. Only when the learners can cope with more advanced texts, should they be exposed to them. Nevertheless, the volume of text needed to be met is immense and far beyond that of most normal courses. What this means is that far more than one book a week at the learner’s level will be required as was recommended by Nation and Wang (1999)." Waring does not explicitly address the use of authentic resources such as commercials, infographics, Tweets, etc. -Justin
Musicuentos Black Box Thanks! That is exactly what I was looking for. Related to your last point about commercials, infographics, tweets, do you think those materials offer the richness required to "develop an overall sense of the language?"
David Talone Dave, my mentors at Rutgers told me that leveled readers are not considered as relevant for the purpose of planning a thematic unit. Seems Waring disagrees. Carol Hill
Rob Waring here. It isn't helpful to call ungraded texts authentic as is presumes authentic is somehow better. Ungraded texts are designed to help scaffold the learning by controlling what language students meet. Text in ungraded materials is random - whatever words are needed are used - but this isn't systematic and leads to inefficient learning for lower levels. Ungraded materials can be use from higher intermediate levels but students will slow down their reading speed to do this - going back to the word-by-word level fo reading and comprehension suffers. But IF (big if) the students have high motivation and they have interesting and appropriate materials they can get past this stage. So yes ungraded texts are fine, but we need to understand why we use them and for what purpose.
This is exactly what I do. The only difference is that I like to dive into difficult texts first (usually translations of fantasy novels) but I paste them into Readlang which makes the process nearly painless. With a regular paper dictionary it would definitely have to be graded readers first.
Oh guys I love so much your channel! I just started watching it and it has been really helpful for understanding all these topics in SLA.
Great information. I am interested in more detail and it is hard to find. How long should students read every day? Should it be gradually increased? Where can you find graded readers for languages other than English? How exactly does a good extensive reading program work?
I want to write the Spanish subtitles for this, could you please make that option available?
Great information here! It seems like Waring would argue against the use of "authentic" texts in extensive reading programs because they simply are not comprehensible enough. Is that correct? Does he see a value in such "authentic" texts in other contexts?
David Talone On this issue, Waring states that "reading native texts" before one has acquired ~5000 word families "change[s] the reading task into a linguistic (study) one rather than one for building fluency." He goes on:
"This is not bad necessarily, but learners should be aware that unless they read a lot, they will not have the opportunity to meet the unknown words they need to strengthen their partially-known vocabularies. Therefore, EFL learners would need to use graded readers initially to help even out the density issues by systematizing the vocabulary load. Only when the learners can cope with more advanced texts, should they be exposed to them. Nevertheless, the volume of text needed to be met is immense and far beyond that of most normal courses. What this means is that far more than one book a week at the learner’s level will be required as was recommended by Nation and Wang (1999)."
Waring does not explicitly address the use of authentic resources such as commercials, infographics, Tweets, etc.
-Justin
Musicuentos Black Box Thanks! That is exactly what I was looking for. Related to your last point about commercials, infographics, tweets, do you think those materials offer the richness required to "develop an overall sense of the language?"
David Talone Dave, my mentors at Rutgers told me that leveled readers are not considered as relevant for the purpose of planning a thematic unit. Seems Waring disagrees.
Carol Hill
+carol hill Not neccessarily? It might not be relevant. It seems to me that he'd just say: "Why do you need to plan a thematic unit?"
Rob Waring here. It isn't helpful to call ungraded texts authentic as is presumes authentic is somehow better. Ungraded texts are designed to help scaffold the learning by controlling what language students meet. Text in ungraded materials is random - whatever words are needed are used - but this isn't systematic and leads to inefficient learning for lower levels. Ungraded materials can be use from higher intermediate levels but students will slow down their reading speed to do this - going back to the word-by-word level fo reading and comprehension suffers. But IF (big if) the students have high motivation and they have interesting and appropriate materials they can get past this stage. So yes ungraded texts are fine, but we need to understand why we use them and for what purpose.