READABILITY & CONTEXT

PPG TESL SEMESTER 3 JUNE 2012 TSL3106

Vocabulary aspects of reading... with special attention to what the teacher can do
Part 1: You need vocab in order to read

 The learner needs to know vocab in order to read... ....but not only vocab.
What other kinds of knowledge does a learner need in order to read? What factors potentially affect readability of text?

Is vocab the top problem?

Factors affecting readability.... Can we improve on this?...

Ease-of-reading is the result of the interaction between the text and the reader.
In the reader, those features affecting readability are 1. prior knowledge, 2. reading skill, 3. interest, and 4. motivation. In the text, those features are 1. content, 2. style, 3. design/format, and 4. structure
(Gray and Leary 1935; style includes vocab and grammatical complexity; design = print font, layout etc.; structure = text organisation, paragraphing etc.)

Gray and Leary found Of the 64 countable variables related to reading difficulty, those with correlations of .35 or above were the following (p.115): 1. Average sentence length in words: -.52 (a negative correlation, that is, the longer the sentence the more difficult it is). 2. Percentage of easy words: .52 (the larger the number of easy words the easier the material). 3. Number of words not known to 90% of sixth-grade students: -.51 4. Number of easy words: .51 5. Number of different hard words: -.50 6. Minimum syllabic sentence length: -.49 .so words are the top = problem with sentence length

Can you spot what lexical items might be least likely to be known in this FCE text?... So
cause vocab-related difficulty

Is it just unknown words?

Types of vocab problem...

Words you know you dont know

Words etc. which you think you know but cannot retrieve
Also unknown meanings and phrases with words that you know in other meanings Words etc. which you think you know but actually dont (Laufer 1997 mistaken ID)

 What % of words in a text actually does a reader need to know in order to read it successfully? (assuming the focus is on reading
comprehension, not vocabulary mining)

The coverage threshold

What % coverage gives an appropriate % comprehension? It depends on..... What?

The ideal % lexical coverage (% of words known by the reader already) depends on:
type of text (fiction, academic...; how clearly structured)
length of text

what % comprehension score you regard as successful: 55% (Laufer 1989) or 100%?
purpose of reading (intensive, extensive) amount of support (dictionary, teacher etc.)

Hu and Nations answer on coverage:

95% needed to read intensively, with support of dictionary, teacher etc. (level i + 1) 98% needed to read extensively1 for pleasure without use of dictionary, for vocab expansion purposes (level i + .5) 100% needed to read extensively2 for pleasure without use of dictionary, for fluency purposes (level i)

What are the teachers (or textbooks) solutions if a text has too many unknown words for specific readers?

Specific to the text:

a. Change the text for an easier one b. Simplify the text c. Preteach the vocab in the specific text d. Allow more resources to be available (e.g. ask teacher, peers, dictionary) when reading the text.

More general solutions to implement, before expecting such texts to be read:

e. Train learners, incl. dic. use f. Raise the readers general lexical prof

a. Change the text for an easier one

Often not an option in practice... e.g. required syllabus, textbook, exam. Fine with extensive reading.

How to choose a suitable text?

Three ways of assessing the vocab level of a text (% of words likely to be unknown)
Teacher judgment of text, based on knowledge of students and what vocab they are likely not to know Use of Compleat Lexical Tutor facilities to check text against general frequency (what frequency level of words do students need to know to attain 95% or 98% coverage?) or a specific syllabus wordlist. Students vocab prof profile can also be measured to assess the match.
Khim.

Rely on learner judgment as to whether a text is at the right level for them? (Hu and Nation found 2/3 students could predict their comprehension scores within 14%)

b. Simplify the text, aka Input modification

Often not an option either...

But anyway how do people do it?

Methods of simplifying text

replacing/removing hard words, so all vocab is within a certain frequency level (the usual choice of publishers).

keeping them, but building in extra clues so they can be easily guessed (context enhancement) providing glosses along with the text (a common teacher choice).

Danger of oversimplification so words are 100% known: triage

Simplification by context enhancement

Our uncle was a nomad, an incurable wanderer who could never stay in one place Ill take the money now before I leave Oh certainly, Professor Ruddle agreed. Of course you can have your cheque immediately. He wrote quickly across the green paper, and tore it out of his chequebook. Cartney looked hard at the number: one hundred dollars. And the name of the bank: the Farmers and Growers Bank. He pushed the cheque into his shirt pocket.
(Longman Structural Readers Me Myself and I)

c. Preteach the vocab in the specific text

Often done in practice A variety of possible ways of doing it. But what are the disadvantages?

Bright and Mcgregors objection

Triage: see again FCE text

d. Allow more resources to be available (e.g. ask teacher, peers, dictionary) when reading the text.
Again not a solution for exam reading typically but fine in other reading circumstances, arguably relies on availability of sources, dictionary skills

a-d overall
Beware making the text too easy if new vocab needs to be met and acquired Allow for some exercise of WAS such as inferencing alongside appeal

e. and f. Have received much attention recently: to prepare students for reading harder texts is it better to teach...
reading strategies (incl. Word Attack Strategy - WAS), or ... vocab?

e. Train learners in WAS, incl. dic. use

Some WAS are not used in L1, so potentially need teaching. E.g....? Some WAS may occur in L1 so arguably dont need teaching. They can be transferred. E.g.....? Some WAS used in L1, however, may be only usable in L2 above a certain threshold level of lang prof (incl. esp. vocab prof) relative to the language level of the text. E.g...? ...so will not transfer or usefully be taught unconditionally

The language proficiency threshold hypothesis: Is L2 reading a reading problem or a language problem?
(Alderson 1984).

L2 reading ability seen as L1 reading ability + L2 language knowledge (incl. vocab) L1 reading ability, apart from L1 language knowledge, largely consists of reading strategic competence (incl. WAS) and relevant nonlinguistic knowledge (content and formal schemata)

General conclusion on (e):

No point in teaching certain reading strategies (incl. some WAS) that are above the threshold to students below (i.e. who would not know a high enough % of words in the texts they have to read) Next week we will look more at teaching WAS and other VLS (e) Where students are below the language competence threshold for texts they need to read, teach vocab (f)!

f. Raise the readers general lexical proficiency

What is the vocab size that may be the threshold for independent reading of general authentic texts? Test readers vocab size and, if it is below the threshold , teach the most frequent word families (f) Then WAS can kick in as per the threshold hypothesis (e).

To read authentic novels and have coverage of 9598% of the running words, so a chance of adequate comprehension, a learner would need a vocabulary size of 3000-5000 word families
(Nation and Waring 1997; or 5000-8000 words). (Note: Proper nouns, which typically account for 4-5% of the running words, are counted as known words that do not need to be learned before reading a novel. A word family is a set of words related by wordformation, such as happy, unhappy, happiness, happily etc. as well as by inflection happy, happier, happiest)

What about ESP reading? To successfully read authentic texts of the field of tourism (EOP), is it more important to know frequent general English words or words distinctively frequent in tourism texts? Carlota

Bibliography
Alderson, J.C. (1984). Reading in a foreign language: a reading problem or a language problem? In J.C. Alderson and A. H. Urquhart (eds.), Reading in a Foreign Language. London: Longman.
Bright J.A. and G.P McGregor. (1970). Teaching English as a second language. London: Longman Gray, W. S. and B. Leary. (1935). What makes a book readable. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hu M. Hsueh-chao and P. Nation (2000). Unknown Vocabulary Density and Reading Comprehension Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1) Hirsh, D. and P. Nation. (1992). What vocabulary size is needed to read unsimplified texts for pleasure? Reading in a Foreign Language 8, 2: 689-696. Krashen S. (1993). The power of reading. Eaglewood Colorado: Libraries Unlimited. Laufer, B. (1989) What percentage of textlexis is essential for comprehension? In C. Lauren and M. Nordman (Eds) Special Language: From Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Laufer, B. (1997). The lexical plight in second language reading: words you don't know, words you think you know and words you can't guess. In Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: a Rationale for Pedagogy, eds. J. Coady and T. Huckin. Cambridge University Press. pp. 20-34 Nation, P & Waring, R. (1997). Vocabulary size, text coverage, and word lists. In Schmitt N, & McCarthy, M. (Eds). Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, Pedagogy. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 6-19