Topic/Subject area: Reading in English - a basic skill
Author: Mona Evelyn Flognfeldt, Oslo University College
Targeting vocabulary to enhance learners' reading development
Teachers in Norwegian schools are required to target reading as a basic skill in all school subjects. The reason is that reading is considered a fundamental prerequisite for learning and development. In the English classes, reading is also a language proficiency skill that needs to be developed in its own right. This article looks at how vocabulary development is a central component of reading comprehension, and how reading in turn is a language activity that can serve the purpose of implicit vocabulary acquisition. The overall climate in language education is now more ready for explicit form-focused instruction alongside with meaning-focused and communicative activities. Language teachers do well in modelling awareness-raising methods in their classrooms while at the same time preparing learners for strategic and autonomous learning.
Before we take a closer look at the central role words play in reading comprehension, it may be useful to discuss briefly some of the characteristics of what we refer to as working memory and long-term memory. In the process of trying to understand what happens cognitively when we learn words or when we read, sooner or later we would like to know more about the actual processes involved, especially if our ambition is to promote the effective use of skills and strategies. When we talk about memory work as non-experts, we often use metaphorical formulations that demonstrate how we envisage memory as something like a place at the back of our minds, something we may put things into and take things out of. When Scott Thornbury discusses word learning, for instance, he says we need to "ensure that material moves into permanent long-term memory" (Thornbury 2002:24, my italics). There is and idea of direction involved here, and the horizontal dimension of in front/at the back. Our very use of the word storage about word retention implies the same notion of place.
Another dimension is relevant when we look at working memory. Psycholinguists refer to processes at different levels. There is clearly a vertical dimension at work here. Both in connection with descriptions of reading comprehension and vocabulary activities, shallow/deep levels of processing are involved, or as we shall see below, lower/higher-level processes. Rather than referring to a place in the brain, working memory is "the information that is activated, or given mental stimulation, for immediate storage and processing" (Grabe & Stoller 2002:18). When we focus our attention on the surface form of a word, for example, we are processing the word at a superficial or shallow level. A deeper level of processing would be making decisions about its semantic properties, about meaning relations that exist between that word and other words, for instance, relations of synonymy or antonymy, similarity or opposition.
The problem with working memory is that it has very limited capacity. We have to recognise words quickly when we read if we wish to understand the information we are taking in. This is why it is so important for readers to have a large sight vocabulary. If you are able to recognise whole words and access their meaning really fast instead of having to sound your way through them letter by letter, you can use the limited capacity of your working memory for other purposes, for example working out meaning at a higher level, integrating the information you are reading with your background knowledge, and even monitor your own reading process. Before we look at effective ways of working with words, we need to understand the complex processes involved in reading comprehension. It will be easier to organise potentially useful activities for our learners if we know what kinds of learning processes they encourage.
A very simple and straightforward way of defining reading is to identify it as a process that involves both decoding and comprehension. The American reading researcher William Grabe realises that teachers of a second language, for instance English in a Norwegian context, need to know to what extent the reading process in the second language is similar or different from reading in the first language. Grabe argues that a good starting point for an understanding of the complexity of reading comprehension is to study what fluent L1 readers do. He analyses the reading comprehension process into two parts, the first of which is skills-oriented and the second, which involves more the complex processes of integration and interpretation of written text. He refers to the first part as lower-level processing and the other as higher-level processing. In very simple terms, the lower-level processes have to do with more or less automatic recognition of words and their meaning, fairly automatic recognition of basic grammatical structure, and the combination of words and structures in the text into meaningful elements at the sentence level. One of these lower-level processes, for example, is working out what pronouns and definite noun phrases refer to, so that the sentences make sense overall. According to Grabe, lower-level processes in L1 are basically automatic; they are skills. They have become automatic after hours and hours of practising reading. The reader can't choose not to recognise words on the page; it happens automatically.
The higher-level processes refer to comprehension at the level of text, the reader arriving at an interpretation that is relevant in the situation he or she is in, by integrating the new information in the sequence of sentences with the reader's already existing background knowledge and making inferences where necessary. Finally, higher-level processes involves readers' monitoring and evaluation of their reading process. If something does not make sense, the reader will apply various strategies and will, perhaps, go back and reread certain passages to repair misunderstandings.
We shall not be going into details of higher-level processing at this point but rather focus on the lower-level processes, because it is very likely that these will not be as rapid, automatic and fluent in a second language. Potential challenges exist in both the level of vocabulary and grammatical structure when you have to process elements in another language. At the word level, both the form and meaning of words may be a problem, as well as spelling, pronunciation, sound-spelling correspondences, multiple meanings, etc. Another daunting challenge is the sheer size of the sight vocabulary you need to develop in English if you aim to become a fluent reader. How can learners of English develop their vocabulary? How can we as teachers facilitate our learners' vocabulary development? What are the most effective vocabulary acquisition strategies?
Let us try to answer these questions in turn. First of all, learners can expand their vocabularies by reading a lot of English. Learners of English as a second or additional language will never be exposed to as much English text as L1 users, but there is research to demonstrate that people do learn new words incidentally through extensive reading. But that will not be sufficient for our purposes. Explicit vocabulary instruction in the classroom needs to be included as well. A lot of learners are well served by focusing their attention on specific features of language, and we know now that the more you work with words you would like to learn, the more likely you are to acquire them for later use, either as part of that sight vocabulary you need in order to read efficiently or as words ready for retrieval whenever you speak or write English.
Vocabulary specialists say that you need to encounter a word at least seven times for it to be added to your mental dictionary. The reason is that the more often you process a word, the more likely it is to be available for easy recall and retrieval when you need it on a given occasion. Of course, there are those who are able to memorise a lot of words from lists, but with new insights into levels of processing we know that learners have a better chance of acquiring words for productive use if they have to put these words to work in various ways. They will learn the words better if they have to manipulate them in different ways and make decisions about them.
Thornbury (2002:93) provides the following list of processes that are increasingly demanding cognitively. Therefore, if vocabulary tasks are introduced that activate these processes, we are looking at increasingly more effective ways of facilitating vocabulary acquisition The processes are:
- identifying
- selecting
- matching
- sorting
- ranking and sequencing
At the simplest level, learners may be asked to identify or recognise words in a text. They may be asked to simply count the number of times particular words appear on the page. Admittedly, this is a very simple and not very demanding operation, but it is a way of attending to vocabulary. It may not be the most effective way of learning those words, but from the point of view of practising word recognition, as a vital component of reading, it can be quite useful. We have seen that for the purpose of assisting reading development, building a sight vocabulary is very important. This kind of task makes you scan through a text looking for the shape of the word; you do not even have to consider what the word means. If simple word recognition is your main priority, this is a good design for focusing on frequent words that are problematic from the point of sound/spelling correspondence. Words like through, thought, and though are obvious candidates here.
Moving on to the other processes listed above, selecting words is a more demanding task than simply identifying words. You have to recognise the word and pick it out. Tasks involving choosing "the odd one out" are useful from this perspective. It is possible to make the task more interesting and thereby more memorable by challenging learners to discuss and justify their choice. If learners are asked, for instance, to select the one item that stands out in the following list,
trousers socks jeans T-shirt
not only do they have to relate to several words in the lexical set clothes, they also have to look for relevant criteria for their selection. If this is part of a discussion, they even have to convince others that their choice is an appropriate one. It is possible to introduce lists of words where only one will be the correct choice, but it is easy to see the inherent value of having to argue your point.
Next is matching operation, which can take various forms. If learners are asked to match English words and their Norwegian counterparts, or relevant definitions, they are challenged in relation to aspects of meaning. If they are asked to match the stem of a word with possible suffixes, they will be focusing on word form and morphology. If they are asked to match verbs with nouns that they may be combined with, we are looking at collocations, i.e. possible word partnerships, like for instance make /a mistake, take /an exam.
Sorting is a process that requires you to organise words into categories of various kinds. Again, if decisions about category membership are made less obvious so that you have to justify and argue your point, the operation itself may be more interesting and the words you are working with consequently more memorable. An idea for a possible task is sorting words according to positive and negative overtones, where there is an element of subjectivity involved.
Finally, processes of ranking (and sequencing) are the most complex ones on the list. Making an ordered list of hobbies according to personal preference might be suggested as one ranking task; another one may be ranking personal characteristics in the order of importance as qualifications for a job, for example.
So far we have looked at processes and tasks that are worthwhile from a cognitive point of view. If we add an affective dimension to these task types, we are likely to enhance their learning potential even further. When learners are given opportunities to use targeted words in contexts that are meaningful to them, they are likely to remember them better. The most meaningful contexts of all are probably those that engage the learners, involving them, their lives and experiences personally. An obvious choice of activities on this list would be tasks where learners are invited to produce texts about themselves, in a challenging way, or fun way, or even in an emotionally engaging way - depending on the extent to which you, their teacher, know them.
This overview of cognitive processes, including emotional or affective "twists", can serve as the background for ways of working with words in the classroom. There is enough research available to convince us that it pays to target vocabulary development explicitly and in systematic ways. All of the tasks above may be expanded in order to integrate new vocabulary into the lexical networks that are already in place. In fact, vocabulary specialists tell us that recycling vocabulary is absolutely vital for sustainable vocabulary development. Recycling does not mean mindless repetition of words; it means varied exposure to words that you really want your learners to be able to use, involving new and more demanding operations each time.
The need for recycling of vocabulary is not automatically supported by textbook writers. This is deplorable and understandable at the same time; textbooks have to serve a number of different purposes, not least introducing relevant and interesting topics in accordance with curricular aims and the interests of young learners. It consequently falls on the teacher to find opportunities for recycling useful vocabulary. Ideally, teachers should be making decisions about which words are truly useful for Norwegian learners of English at various stages of their development. Lists of the most frequent words in English are available from a number of sources, words that would naturally qualify as a core vocabulary of English, to be targeted and recycled in the course of English classes. This is an idealistic measure; we know that lots of teachers depend on their textbook for language structures and vocabulary focus. What this article is meant to demonstrate is that there are many wonderfully meaningful ways of working with vocabulary, which are supported by recent insights into cognitive psychology. These activities and tasks may in turn enhance reading comprehension and at the same time facilitate sustainable vocabulary development. In other words, you can't lose!
Sources:
Grabe, W. and F. L. Stoller (2002) Teaching and Researching Reading. Harlow: Longman.
Thornbury, S. (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary. Harlow: Longman.