Effective Intensive Reading and Writing Programme for English Language Learners, Cheat Sheet of English Language

Download Effective Intensive Reading and Writing Programme for English Language Learners and more Cheat Sheet English Language in PDF only on Docsity! CHAPTER 1 Learning to Read in Another Language In the companion volume to this one, Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking (Nation and Newton, 2009), the four strands of a language course are described. The basic idea behind the four strands is that, in a wellbalanced language course, equal time is given to each of the four strands of meaning- focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development. Meaning-focused input involves getting input through listening and reading where the learners’ focus is on understanding the message and where only a small proportion of language features are outside the learners’ present level of proficiency. In a reading and writing programme, extensive reading is likely to be the major source of meaning-focused input. Meaning-focused output involves the learners producing language through speaking and writing where the learners’ focus is on others understanding the message. Meaning-focused output occurs when learners write essays and assignments, when they write letters, when they write a diary, when they send email and text messages to each other, and when they write about their experience. Language-focused learning involves deliberate attention to language features both in the context of meaning-focused input and meaningfocused output, and in decontextualised learning and teaching. In the reading and writing programme, language-focused learning occurs in intensive reading, when learners consult dictionaries in reading and writing, when they get language-focused feedback on their writing, when they deliberately learn new vocabulary for receptive or productive use, 1 2 • Learning to Read in Another Language when they practise spelling, when they concentrate on learning to write or form written letters of the alphabet, and when they study grammar and discourse features. There are lots of ways of making language-focused learning a part of the course, but a teacher needs to be careful that this does not take up more than 25 percent of the total course time. Fluency development is often neglected in courses, partly because teachers and learners feel that they should always be learning something new. Fluency development involves making the best use of what is already known. The best-known kind of fluency development is speed reading where learners focus on increasing their reading speed while still maintaining good comprehension. For speed reading courses to work well with learners of English as a second or foreign language, the reading material needs to be well within the learners’ level of proficiency. There should be little or no unknown vocabulary or grammatical features in the speed reading texts. Writing fluency also needs to get attention in a well-balanced course, especially where learners need to sit a written test as part of academic study and where they have to write under time pressure. These four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language- focused learning, and fluency development need to take up roughly equal time in a language course. As we shall see, there are many ways of getting this balance, and the way this is done depends on local conditions, teacher preferences, the way the classes are divided up and scheduled, and timetabling constraints. What is important is that over a period of time probably no greater than a month or two, there is a roughly equal amount of time given to each of these four strands, and that the necessary conditions exist for the strands to occur. In this book, this idea of the four strands will be applied to goals as diverse as learning to spell, learning to write, and becoming fluent in reading. The first six chapters of this book focus largely on reading, and the next four on writing, although links will be made between these skills and also with the skills of listening and speaking. This is a lot to cover in such a small number of chapters, so this book should be seen as a practical overview of what can be done in the reading and writing programme. There are long traditions of research into reading and writing and this research is drawn on particularly to justify certain teaching and learning procedures. Let us now look at a beginner learning to read. Learning to Read in the First Language People learn to read their first language in a wide variety of circumstances. The following description is of a fortunate child in a fortunate country where reading is well prepared for and well taught. An excellent account ofthe teaching of reading to native speakers in New Zealand can be found in Smith and Elley (1997). Children are prepared for reading at an early age by listening to stories, being read to, and interacting with adults and others about the stories they hear. This is done not with the main purpose of preparing a child for reading but as a way that parents and others interact with, show a ection for, and entertain and educate children. The interaction involves asking questions about whatff is going to happen in the story, getting the child to complete sentences in a known story, talking about the interesting and scary parts of the story, and generally having fun. When native-speaking children start to learn to read, they already have a large vocabulary of several thousand words which includes most of the words they will meet in early reading. They also have good control of the grammar of the language, have a lot of knowledge about books and reading conventions, and have had many many stories read to them. They are very keen to learn how to read. They begin formal schooling at the age of about five or six. The teacher and learners work with books that are interesting, are well illustrated, use language that is close to spoken language, and are not too long. The texts contain a lot of repetition, and are often very predictable but in an interesting way. The techniques used to teach reading are largely meaning-focused. That is, they give primary attention to understanding and enjoying the story. They include shared reading, guided reading and independent reading. A small amount of attention may be given to phonological awareness and phonics but this is in the context of enjoying the story and only takes a very small amount of time. Let us now look at the typical techniques used to teach reading to young native speakers. Shared Reading The learners gather around the teacher and the teacher reads a story to the learners from a very large blown-up book while showing them the pictures and the written words. The teacher involves the learners in the reading by asking them what they think will happen next and getting them to comment on the story. Where they can, the learners read the words aloud together. The procedure is an attempt to make the shared book activity like a parent reading a child a bedtime story. The learners are asked to choose what blown-up book they want read to them and the same book may be used in the shared book activity on several occasions. In the later readings, the learners are expected to join in the reading much more. At other times, learners can take the small version of the blown-up book and read it individually or in pairs. After a reading, 4 • Learning to Read in Another Language the learners draw, write, act out the story or study some of the language in the story. The shared book activity is a very popular reading activity in New Zealand pre-schools and primary schools. It was developed by a New Zealander, Don Holdaway, and is such a normal part of a primary teacher’s repertoire that publishers now print blown-up book versions of popular children’s books. The purpose of the shared book activity is to get the learners to see the fun element in reading. In the activity, this fun comes from the interesting story, the interaction between the teacher and the learners in predicting and commenting on the story, and the rereading of favourite stories. Teachers can make blown-up books. Although a blown-up book takes some time to make, it will be used and re-used and well repays the e ort of making it or the cost of buying it. The books also make attractive displays in ff the classroom. The shared book activity was used in one of the experimental groups in the Elley and Mangubhai (1981) Book Flood experiment. Blown-up books can be bought from the following publishers: Nelson Price Milburn (http://www.newhouse.co.nz/), Giltedge Publishing (http:// www.giltedgepublishing.co.nz/). Titles include Where Do Monsters Live?; Bears, Bears Everywhere; Mr Noisy; What Do You See?; Pirate Pete; William’s Wet Week; The Sunflower Tree. Guided Reading Guided reading can be done silently or with a child reading aloud to a friend, parent or teacher. Before the reading the learner and teacher talk about the book. Research by Wong and McNaughton (1980) showed that for the learner they studied, pre-reading discussion resulted in a greater percentage of words initially correct, and a greater percentage of errors self-corrected. The teacher and the learner look at the title of the book and make sure that all the words in the title are known. Then they talk about the pictures in the story and make predictions about what might happen in the story and talk about any knowledge the learner already has about the topic. Important words in the story are talked about but need not be pointed to in their written form. So, before the learner actually starts to read the • Learners should be given training and practice in a range of reading strategies. These strategies could include—previewing, setting a purpose, predicting, posing questions, connecting to background knowledge, paying attention to text structure, guessing words from context, critiquing, and reflecting on the text. Janzen and Stoller (1998) describe a similar list of strategies. • Learners should be given training and practice in integrating a range of strategies. Learners should be familiar with a strategy package procedure like reciprocal teaching or concept-oriented reading (CORI) (see Chapter 3). • Learners should become familiar with a range of text structures, such as those used in newspaper reports, stories, recounts and information reports. Fluency Development • Learners should be helped and pushed to develop fluency in reading. They need to read material that is very familiar and contains no unknown language features. There should also be speed reading practice in word recognition and in reading for understanding. These can include activities like speed reading, repeated reading, paired reading, scanning, and skimming. Chapter 5 focuses on reading fluency. • Learners should enjoy reading and feel motivated to read. Learners should have access to interesting texts and be involved in activities like listening to stories, independent reading, and shared reading (blown-up books). Native-speaking children like to read scary books, comics and cartoons, books about sports and magazines about popular culture (Worthy, Moorman and Turner, 1999). These are not usually found at school. • Learners should read a lot. This can be monitored and encouraged through the use of extensive reading and issue logs. We will examine these principles in detail in later chapters of this book. A well- thought out reading course can be the core of the language programme as it can give rise to activities in the other skills of listening, speaking, and writing, and can provide the opportunity for a useful, deliberate focus on language features. It can quickly become an e ective means of showing that ff language learning can be successful and enjoyable. The four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, languagefocused learning, and fluency development are discussed at length in Chapter 1 of the companion volume to this book, Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking (Nation and Newton, 2009). CHAPTER 2 Learning to Recognise and Spell Words An essential part of the reading skill is the skill of being able to recognise written forms and to connect them with their spoken forms and their meanings. This involves recognising known words and also deciphering unfamiliar words. There has been considerable debate in first language reading over the role and nature of direct systematic teaching of word recognition skills. See Moorman, Blanton and McLaughlin (1994) for an example of this. There is also debate over the role of language-focused activities, such as reading aloud (see Gri n, 1992; Rounds, 1992). The position taken in this book is ffi that there needs to be a balance of the four strands of meaningfocused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development, and there is thus a role for appropriate amounts of formal word recognition instruction. The principles that should guide this teaching are that most attention can be given to rules and items that occur frequently, are simple, and are regular. Prerequisites for Formal Reading Instruction To be able to benefit from instruction on spelling rules, learners need to: (1) know at least some of the letter shapes; (2) be aware that words are made up of separable sounds (phonemic awareness); (3) know basic English writing conventions (we read from left to right, beginning at the top and moving down the page); and (4) know the spoken forms of most of the words that will be met in the initial stages of reading. 9 10 • Learning to Recognise and Spell Words Learning Letter Shapes If a second language learner is already able to read in their first language, and their first language uses the same alphabet as English, then little if any letter shape learning will be needed. A native speaker of Malay who can read Malay already knows the letter shapes needed for reading English. They may have to apply di erent spelling-sound rules to these shapes but the ff written forms are not a problem. Learners who are not literate in their first language, or whose language uses a di erent writing system, like Arabic or Japanese, may need to learn to recognise the ff letter shapes. Because of the detailed recognition skills that are needed, it may be most e ective to ff teach learners how to write the letters rather than just rely on reception. Activities can include tracing over letters; repeated copying of letters of the alphabet; delayed copying (Hill, 1969) where the learners look, look away, and write from memory; letter matching of flash cards (find the pairs); and letter dictation. Letters of similar shapes p, d, b, g, should not be learned at the same time as they are likely to interfere with each other. There may be some value in practising letter patterns, for example, , or , but this is probably more useful for cursive writing and developing writing fluency. Phonemic Awareness Phonemic awareness is the knowledge that spoken words are made up of sounds that can be separated, that is, that /kæt/ (cat) is made up of the sounds /k æ t/. If the learner can already read in their first language, and the writing system of the first language is alphabetic, the learner will already have phonemic awareness. To get a clearer idea of the nature of phonemic awareness, see Table 2.1 which describes two tests of phonemic awareness. In essence, phonemic awareness is not awareness of particular sounds. It is awareness of the general principle that words are made up of separable sounds. It is likely that learners who are not literate in their L1 but who are above the age of seven or eight will already have phonemic awareness in their L1 but this should be checked. Learners who are between four and six years old could be tested for phonemic awareness and, if necessary, could be given phonemic awareness activities (see Table 2.2). Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are the two best predictors of how well first language children just entering school will do at learning to read during the first two years of school. Phonemic awareness training can have positive long-term e ects on spelling. In the vast majority of cases, learners of English as a second ff language will not need phonemic awareness activities because they will already have this knowledge. Learning to Recognise and Spell Words • 11 Table 2.1 Tests of Phonemic Awareness Phoneme deletion test (Bruce, 1964) What word would remain if this sound was taken away? (Practice words c-at, b-r-ight, crie-d). Takes about 10 minutes. 1. S-t-and (middle) 2. J-am (first) 3. Fair-y (last) 4. Ha-n-d (middle) 5. Star-t (last) 6. Ne-s-t (middle) 7. F-rock (first) 8. Ten-t (last) 9. Lo-s-t (middle) 10. N-ice (first) 11. S-top (first) 12. Far-m (last) 13. Mon-k-ey (middle) 14. S-pin (first) 15. For-k (last) 16. C-old (first) 17. Part-y (last) 18. We-n-t (middle) 19. F-r-og (middle) 20. N-ear (first) 21. Thin-k (last) 22. P-late (first) 23. S-n-ail (middle) 24. B-ring (first) 25. Pin-k (last) 26. Le-f-t (middle) 27. Car-d (last) 28. S-p-oon (middle) 29. H-ill (first) 30. Ever-y (last) Phoneme segmentation test (Yopp, 1988) Today we’re going to play a di erent word game. I’m going ff to say a word, and I want you to break the word apart. You are going to tell me each sound in the word in order. For example, if I say old, you will say o-l-d. Let’s try a few words together. (Three more examples are given ride, go, man) Total score = 22. Takes about 5–10 minutes. dog fine she grew red sat lay zoo job ice top do keep no wave that me race three in at by Table 2.2 Phonemic Awareness Activities Activities The most basic procedures involve: (1) the teacher saying separate sounds (/t/ /e/ /n/) and the learner putting the separate heard sounds together to make a familiar word (ten) (i.e. phoneme blending); and (2) the learner saying the separate sounds of a word for the teacher to guess what the word is (i.e. phoneme segmentation). These activities can be done as a game. Other activities include: 1 phoneme isolation (What is the first sound in run?) 2 phoneme identification (What sound is the same in rat, run, ripe?) 3 phoneme deletion (What word do we have if we take /t/ out of stand?) Principles • Phonemic awareness activities should be done with known words. • Phonemic awareness activities should be fun. 12 • Learning to Recognise and Spell Words Writing Conventions English has the following writing conventions. Not all languages follow the same conventions. 1. Writing goes from left to right (cf. Arabic—right to left, Japanese— top to bottom). 2. The lines of writing come one under the other starting from the top of the page (cf. Japanese). 3. The pages go from front to back (cf. Japanese—back to front). 4. Words are separated by spaces (cf. Thai —no spaces between words). 5. Sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark. 6. Quotation marks are used to signal speech or citation. 7. English has upper case (capital) letters and lower case (small) letters. The use of capital letters may carry an extra meaning. 8. Sentences are organised into paragraphs. 9. In formal and academic writing there are conventions that need to be learned, such as the use of bold and italics, the use of headings and sub-headings, the use of indentation, the use of footnotes, the use of references, and page numbering. In early reading, learners may need to be checked for knowledge of these conventions, and some may need to be pointed out and explained. Spoken Language and Reading The experience approach to reading is based on the idea that when learning to read, learners should bring a lot of experience and knowledge to their reading so that they only have to focus on small amounts of new information. Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s (1963) approach to teaching young native speakers to read is an excellent example of this. Here are the steps in her approach. 1. Each learner draws a picture illustrating something that recently happened to them or something that they are very interested in. 2. One by one the learners take their picture to the teacher who asks them what it is about. 3. The teacher then writes the learner’s description below the picture exactly as the learner said it using the same words the learner said, even if it is non-standard English. 4. This then becomes the learner’s reading text for that day. The learner reads it back to the teacher and then takes it away to practise reading it, and to read it to classmates, friends and family. Learning to Recognise and Spell Words • 13 5. These pictures and texts all written by the same learner are gathered together to be a personal reading book for that learner. Note that most of the knowledge needed to read and comprehend the text is directly within the experience of the learner. The ideas come from the learner, the words and sentences come from the learner, and the organisation of the text comes from the learner. The only learning needed is to match the new written forms provided by the teacher with this knowledge. It is possible to learn to read a foreign language without being able to speak it, but learning to read is much easier if the learner already has spoken control of the language features that are being met in the reading. Reading texts used with young native speakers of English use language that is already known to them and are on topics that interest them. However, young native speakers learning to read have an oral vocabulary size of around 5,000 words. Non-native speakers will have a very much smaller English vocabulary and so if native-speaker texts are used to teach second language reading, they need to be checked to see if they contain known and useful vocabulary. Phonics and the Alphabetic Principle Learning phonics is learning the systematic relationships between written letters and sounds, for example, learning that the written form p is usually pronounced /p/. At a very general level, learning phonics means learning the alphabetic principle, that is that letters and groups of letters represent sounds in a largely systematic way. At a detailed level, The e ect of frequency on the type of storageff Highly frequent items, even regular ones, are stored as lexical items. Regular low frequency items are dealt with by rules. The e ect of age on learningff Older learners are better at deliberate learning. The role of developmental sequences Complex items need to be learned through a series of stages. The treatment of error Letting students invent spellings can have positive e ects.ff The e ect of the first languageff The writing system of the first language can have positive and negative e ects on learning the secondff language. Learning to Recognise and Spell Words • 17 (1981) terms) and deliberate learning. Some argue that incidental learning is what really matters and that at best deliberate learning can only play an indirect secondary role. In vocabulary learning, however, there is considerable evidence supporting the deliberate learning of vocabulary as part of a well-balanced programme (Elgort, 2007). First language research on the learning of spelling also supports having both deliberate and incidental learning. Although most learning of the many sound- spelling correspondences is picked up incidentally and good readers are usually good spellers, deliberate analytic learning can speed up learning and can help with learning di culties. System ffi Learning and Item Learning Partly as a result of the impact of corpus linguistics, there has been considerable debate over whether learners develop substantial control of a complex grammatical system or whether what seems to be grammar learning is really the accumulation of knowledge of numerous collocations. That is, much language use is not rule-based but is based on the use of pre- fabricated units (see Pinker, 1999, for an interesting discussion of this). Research on the learning of complex words like decompose, combinability and unrefugeelike suggests that high frequency complex words are stored as whole, readymade units. Low frequency complex words are recreated each time they are met or used. That is, low frequency items are dealt with according to systematic rules, while high frequency items are dealt with by accessing memorised complete units. Frequency and complexity combine nicely in this argument. High frequency items are relatively small in number so there are not too many to store. If they were processed according to rules, because they are very frequent a lot of processing time would be spent dealing with them and that would be di cult. Thus ffi storing them as readymade items is the most e cient option. Low frequency items are very ffi numerous. There are too many of them to store as ready-made complex units. However, low frequency items make up only a small proportion of the running words so dealing with them according to rules does not occupy too much on-line processing time. Thus, processing them according to rules is the best option. Research on spelling supports this high frequency/low frequency distinction. Many high frequency words are irregularly spelled and must be stored as memorised items. Low frequency words tend to be more regularly spelled and can be dealt with by the application of rules. First Language E ects on Second Language Learning In its simplest form, the contrastive analysis ff hypothesis argued that second language learning can be strongly a ected by first language ff knowledge. 18 • Learning to Recognise and Spell Words Where there are similarities between languages, second language learning will be easier. Where there are di erences, second language learning will be more di cult. Complications in the hypothesis ff ffi arise from the ways in which a second language is learned, and in the nature of the similarities and di erences between the two languages. There is evidence of positive and negative e ects of the first ff ff language on the second at the levels of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and discourse. Spelling is no exception, and there is plenty of evidence of first language spellings having both positive and negative e ects according to the degrees of similarity and di erence between the language items andff ff rules. Learning to Spell English spelling is di cult. Although there are many rules, there are also many ffi irregularities and decision points where competing rules need to be chosen. Learning how to spell in more regularly spelled languages like Indonesian, Samoan or Finnish is a much easier task. If learners have poor spelling skills, they will typically avoid writing tasks, and when writing will avoid words that they find di cult to spell. One way of organising an approach to spelling improvement is to ffi ensure that spelling is dealt with across the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. Spelling and Meaning-focused Input The more learners read, the more their spelling will improve. Continual receptive exposure to the written forms of words provides a useful basis for later written production (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1991). In the early stages of learning to read English as an L1, the number of words learners can read is much greater than the number they can spell and the size of this gap persists for several years. Spelling and Meaning-focused Output Spelling is particularly important for writing and at the very least, having to write can make learners aware of gaps in their spelling knowledge. In the early stages of writing by young native speakers, teachers accept the invented spellings they produce as useful steps on the way to more accurate spelling. Writing activities that can help with spelling are copying, delayed copying, read and write from memory, dictation, the various forms of guided writing, writing with the help of a dictionary, and free writing. Too much Learning to Recognise and Spell Words • 19 attention to spelling when responding to learners’ writing can result in an unwillingness to write or avoidance strategies where learners only use very familiar words. Spelling and Language-focused Learning There are numerous techniques for giving deliberate attention to spelling. The critical factor is making sure that there is an appropriate balance of each of the four strands so that there is some deliberate attention to spelling but this attention does not become excessive. Deliberate attention to spelling can include the following. The Deliberate Memorisation of the Spelling of Individual Words Cover and Retrieve The learner writes a list of di cult to spell words down the left-hand side of the page. The first letter or two of each word is ffi written next to it, for example yacht occurrence y o The words are studied and then covered and each word is written from memory using the first letter clue. The first letter is written again so that the activity can be repeated. yacht yacht y Using Analogies Working with the teacher or in pairs or small groups, the learners think of known words that share similar spelling features to words that they have di culty in spelling. For example, if ffi learning to spell apply, the learners think of the known words reply, supply, etc. Using Word Parts For advanced learners, drawing attention to word-building units can help. For example, separate contains the root par which is also in part. The spelling is therefore separate not seperate. Pronouncing the Word in the Way it is Spelled A word like yacht can be deliberately mispronounced as /yæt c˘t/ as a kind of mnemonic for the spelling. Visualising Learners look at a word, close their eyes and try to see the spelling of the word in their mind. If a part of the word is particularly di cultffi 20 • Learning to Recognise and Spell Words to remember, try to think of that part in a striking colour such as red. Tests Teachers can have regular tests to encourage learners to work on spelling. These can be dictation tests or individualised tests as in the cover and retrieve technique where the learners each give the teacher a list of words on one sheet and on another sheet a list of the first letters of the words. The sheet with the first letters is used for the test, and the other for marking. The Deliberate Study of Regular Correspondences and Rules Noticing Patterns Words following a similar set of sound-spelling correspondences are grouped together so that learners see several examples of the same correspondence, for example day, play, say, may, stay Learners’ involvement in such noticing can be deepened by getting learners to work in pairs grouping such words from a mixed list, by dictating the words to the learners, by getting learners to suggest other words that follow the pattern, and by following up these activities with a dictation test drawing on a variety of patterns. Studying Rules A few very common complicated rules deserve a bit of deliberate study, particularly for advanced learners. The most useful of these rules are: 1. i before e except after c 2. free and checked vowels. The rule for free and checked vowels is rather complicated but it is very useful because it provides explanations for the doubling of consonants when adding a xes, the function of final silent e, and the spelling and pronunciation of a large number of words. Toffi understand the rule it is necessary to know what the free vowels are and what the checked (or limited or short) vowels are. The free vowels a e i o u are pronounced / ei i: ai ou u:/, which is the same as their names (for example, the name for the letter a is pronounced /ei/). The checked vowels a e i o u are pronounced /æ e i o u/. Some people call free and checked vowels long and short vowels but this is misleading from a phonological point of view because there is much more than a length di erence ff between the two sets of pronunciations. Here are the rules associated with the free and checked vowels. These rules apply only to stressed syllables. Learning to Recognise and Spell Words • 21 1. Free vowels occur in the pattern free vowel+consonant+vowel. date, medium 2. Checked vowels occur in the patterns checked vowel+consonant with nothing following the consonant hat, fetch, sip, lot, shut checked vowel+consonant+consonant (+consonant)+vowel happen, better, sitting, bottle, funny Note (a) the single letter x behaves like two consonants, (b) y in final position acts as a vowel. If you have understood the above explanation, you should be able to answer these questions. (Answers are supplied on page 24.) 1. What job does final silent e do in the following words? plate, scene, fine, home, tune 2. Why do you have to double the final consonant in the stem when you add y to the following words? fun, fat, slop, bag 3. Why don’t you have to double the final consonant when you add ing or ed to the following words? Look at each word carefully. weed, lengthen, push, hope 4. Why is occurrence correct and not occurence? 5. Why is exclamation correct and not exclammation? There are exceptions to the rules and it may be that the best use of the free/checked rule is as a way of explaining and helping to learn di cult words that follow the rules. The free and checked rules are ffi items AV3, AV14, AV18, AV24, AV1, AV8, AV13, AV16, AV23 in Appendix 1. The exceptions are BV7. Strategy Training Learners should have familiar and well-practised strategies to follow to: (1) commit the spelling of a newly met word to memory; (2) find the spelling of a needed word when writing; and (3) decide how to pronounce a newly met word when reading. These strategies should be Intensive Reading Intensive study of reading texts can be a means of increasing learners’ knowledge of language features and their control of reading strategies. It can also improve their comprehension skill. It fits into the languagefocused learning strand of a course. The classic procedure for intensive reading is the grammar-translation approach where the teacher works with the learners, using the first language to explain the meaning of a text, sentence by sentence. Used on suitable texts and following useful principles, this can be a very useful procedure as long as it is only a part of the reading programme and is complemented by other language-focused learning and by extensive reading for language development and extensive reading for fluency development. At its worst, intensive reading focuses on comprehension of a particular text with no thought being given to whether the features studied in this text will be useful when reading other texts. Such intensive reading usually involves translation and thus comprehension of the text. So, one goal of intensive reading may be comprehension of the text. The use of translation makes sure that learners understand, and when the learners do some of the translation themselves, it allows the teacher to check whether they understand. Intensive reading may also have another goal and that is to determine what language features will get attention in the course. That is, the language features that are focused on in each text become the language syllabus for the course. This has several positive aspects. First, the language features are set in the communicative context of a text. The text can be 25 26 • Intensive Reading used to show how the language features contribute to the communicative purpose of the text and this can be good preparation for subsequent writing activities. Second, choosing features in this way is likely to avoid the interference between vocabulary items or grammatical features that can occur when topic-centred syllabus design is used. There are also negative aspects to letting texts determine the language features of a course. First, the features given attention to may be an uncontrolled mixture of useful and not very useful items. That is, high frequency and low frequency vocabulary, frequent grammatical items and very infrequent or irregular grammatical items may get equal attention. Second, the topic of the text determines the salience of the items and the teaching gets directed towards this text rather than what will be useful in a range of texts. If intensive reading is to be done well, the major principle determining the focus of the teaching should be that the focus is on items that will occur in a wide range of texts. The teacher should ask “How does today’s teaching make tomorrow’s text easier?”. There are four ways of putting this important principle into practice. 1. Focus on items that occur with high frequency in the language as a whole (see Table 3.1 for examples). Such items will occur often in many di erent texts. 2. Focus on strategies that can be used with most ff texts (see Table 3.1 for examples). Table 3.1 Useful Focuses in Extensive Reading Focus Items Strategies Comprehension Question types Question forms Predicting Standardised reading procedures Sound-spelling Regular sound-spelling correspondences Spelling rules Free/checked vowels Vocabulary High frequency vocabulary Underlying meanings of words Guessing Noting and learning on cards Word parts Dictionary use Grammar and cohesion High frequency grammatical features Dealing with sources of di culty (clause insertion, what does what?, coordination, cohesion)ffi Information content Topic type constituents Topic type Genre Features that typify this type of text Generalise to writing Intensive Reading • 27 3. Quickly deal with or ignore infrequent items. 4. Make sure that the same items and strategies get attention in several di erent texts.ff Focuses in Intensive Reading Intensive work on a reading text can focus on the following aspects. These will be looked at in more detail in the rest of this chapter and in other chapters in this book. 1. Comprehension. Intensive reading can aim at understanding a particular text. 2. Regular and irregular sound-spelling relations. This can be done through the teaching of phonics, through teaching spelling rules, and through reading aloud. This is covered in Chapter 2 on sounds and spelling. 3. Vocabulary. Learners’ attention can be drawn to useful words, and the underlying meaning and use of these words can be explained. Words from the text could be assigned for later study. 4. Grammar. Di cult ffi grammatical features can be explained and analysed. 5. Cohesion. Learners can practise interpreting what pronouns refer to in the text, what the conjunction relationships between sentences are, and how di erent words are used to refer to the same idea. 6. Information structure. Certain texts contain ff certain kinds of information. Newspaper reports, for example, can describe what happened, what led to the happening, what the likely e ects will be, who was involved, and when and where it happened. ff Learners can be helped to identify these di erent kinds of information. This is covered in Chapter 9 onff topic types. 7. Genre features. The vocabulary, grammatical features, cohesive features and information all contribute to the communicative e ect of a text. Intensive reading can focus on how theff text achieves its communicative purpose through these features and what this communicative purpose is. 8. Strategies. Intensive reading can be used to help learners develop useful reading strategies. By working intensively on a text, learners can practise the steps in guessing from context, using a dictionary, simplifying di cult sentences and taking notes. They can also receive training in ffi integrated packages of strategies. In this chapter, strategies are included in the sections on comprehension, vocabulary, grammar and cohesion. 28 • Intensive Reading The discussion and explanation of the text need not be done using the first language, but use of the first language makes explanation much easier. The e ect of this teaching should be to get learners to ff actually learn specific features or to make them aware of these so that they notice them in future reading and thus have a greater chance of learning them later. Language-focused learning for reading can occur through intensive reading with a teacher and it can also occur through written exercises accompanying a text. Features of a Good Intensive Reading Exercise Let us look at what a good reading exercise should do. 1. A good reading exercise directs the learners’ attention to features of the text that can be found in almost any text, or to strategies for dealing with any text, with the aim “to develop in the language learner the ability to comprehend texts, not to guide him to comprehension of a text” (Davies and Widdowson, 1974: 172). To put it another way, when learners study a reading text, we want them to gain knowledge that will help them to understand tomorrow’s reading text. We want them to learn things that apply to all texts. We want them to gain knowledge of the language and ways of dealing with the language rather than an understanding of a particular message. If a reading exercise does not focus on generalisable features of a text, it does not provide much opportunity for any useful, cumulative learning to take place. This requirement is particularly important for teaching reading. 2. A good reading exercise directs the learners’ attention to the reading text. That is, the learners need to read the text or at least part of it in order to do the exercise. It is also important that some reading exercises require the learners to consider parts of the text in relation to their wider context, that is, other parts of the text, and information from outside the text. 3. A good reading exercise provides the teacher and the learners with useful information about the learners’ performance on the exercise. If the learners were not successful on some parts of the exercise, then they should be aware of what they have to learn in order to do the exercise successfully with another text. Also, the teacher can get guidance from the learners’ performance to improve teaching. Good exercises provide useful feedback for the teacher and the learners. Also, if the teacher understands what an exercise is trying to teach, they can judge the value of the exercise according to what they think is important for teaching reading. Intensive Reading • 29 4. A good reading exercise is easy to make. Teachers have to choose texts suited to the particular needs of their learners, and if these texts do not have satisfactory exercises, the teachers must make their own. Often teachers may want the learners to work with a textbook that is used in another discipline they are studying, and so they will have to make their own exercises. This should require a minimum of skill and time. If the preparation of language teaching materials becomes the job only of experts, then language teachers will have lost the flexibility needed for successful teaching. So, a good reading exercise focuses on items or strategies that apply to any text, requires the learners to read the text, provides useful feedback for the learners and the teacher, and is easy to make. Are Comprehension Questions Good Reading Exercises? Comprehension questions in one form or other are one of the language teaching techniques most frequently used to train learners in reading. They can take many forms, namely pronominal questions, yes/no questions, true/false statements, multiple-choice items and blank-filling or completion exercises. However, although comprehension questions may have a role to play in practising reading, the various forms of reading comprehension questions are not so e ective for teaching learners to read. In order to show this, let us look at ff comprehension questions according to the four features of a good reading exercise. After that, a variety of other reading exercises are described which may also be used in intensive reading. The basic weakness of comprehension questions is that a simple question form can do so many things. A question can check vocabulary, sentence structure, inference, supposition, the ability to understand the question itself, and many other things. It is not always easy to decide which of these is being asked for in a particular question. Let us now evaluate comprehension questions as a type of exercise by seeing how they fit the four criteria given in the previous section. 1. Comprehension questions are • 33 higher. Good multiple-choice questions are not easy to make and often they are more di cult than ffi they should be. This is because the wrong choices must seem possible and not stupid. If they are possible then they might be partly correct. 1. A fixation (a) takes about two-tenths of a second (b) is about one word long (c) is the opposite of a regression (d) is longer in Finnish than in English 5. Sentence completion. The learners complete sentences by filling the empty spaces to show that they understand the reading passage. The sentences come after the reading passage. There are four di erent types of sentence completion. (i) The sentences are exact copies of sentences in the ff passage. (ii) The missing words can be found in the passage. (iii) The sentences are not exactly the same as the sentences in the passage although they talk about the same idea. (iv) The missing words are not in the passage so the learners must use their knowledge of vocabulary to fill the empty spaces. A skilled reader makes about A skilled reader makes around fixations per 100 words. fixations per minute. The learners are helped if there is a short line for each letter of the missing word, if the first letter is given and so on. 6. Information transfer. The learners complete an information transfer diagram based on the information in the text (Palmer, 1982). Chapter 9 provides examples of information transfer diagrams. 7. Translation. The learners must translate the passage into another language. Although translation is often a special skill, it can also show areas of di culty that the learners have in reading. ffi It also shows clearly where the learners do not have any di culty. It is a very searching test of ffi understanding, but it includes other skills besides reading. 8. Précis. After the learners read the passage they write a short composition about one-quarter of the length of the passage containing all the main ideas that are in the passage. This is called a précis. It can be done as group work. The learners are divided into small groups. Each group makes a list of the main ideas in the passage. Then the class as a whole discusses the main points and the teacher writes them on the blackboard. Then each group writes the précis (Forrester, 1968). 34 • Intensive Reading Usually, a summary is made by choosing the main ideas from a text. Chambers and Brigham (1989), however, suggest a more teachable strategy, summary by deletion. This involves systematically deleting unimportant parts of the text and using what is left as the text for the summary. The steps are: (1) read the passage and delete all the sentences that merely elaborate the main sentences; (2) delete all unnecessary clauses and phrases from the main sentences; (3) delete all unnecessary words from what remains; (4) replace the remaining words with your own expressions; (5) write the summary out neatly. The Focus of Comprehension Questions There have been several schemes to describe the possible focuses of comprehension questions (Tollefson, 1989; Day and Park, 2005). Typically they cover the following: 1. Literal comprehension of the text. This involves understanding what the text explicitly says. At their easiest, such questions could be answered by quoting parts of the text. These questions would be more demanding if the learners were not allowed to look at the text while answering the questions. 2. Drawing inferences from the text. This involves taking messages from the text that are not explicitly stated but which could be justified by reference to the text. This can involve working out the main idea of the text, looking at the organisation of the text, determining the writer’s attitude to the topic, interpreting characters, and working out cause and e ect and other conjunction relationships ff which might not be explicitly stated. 3. Using the text for other purposes in addition to understanding. This involves applying ideas from the text to solve problems, applying the ideas in the text to personal experience, comparing ideas in the text with other ideas from outside the text, imagining extensions of the text, and fitting the ideas in the text into a wider field as in a review of the literature. 4. Responding critically to the text. This involves considering the quality of the evidence in the text, evaluating the adequacy of the content of the text, evaluating the quality of expression and clarity of language of the text, expressing agreement or disagreement with the ideas in the text, and expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the text. The value in having a list of such focuses is that it allows teachers to check the questions they set their learners to see if they are providing a suitable range of focuses. Kraus-Srebricˇ et al. (1981) have shown that it Intensive Reading • 35 is possible to devise comprehension activities for young learners at di erent levels of challenge using ff Bloom et al.’s (1956) six-level taxonomy. These six levels, starting from the least demanding, involve the focuses of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, four of which are described above. The above list of four focuses is roughly in order of di culty and there is ffi some evidence that more demanding questions involve deeper and more thoughtful processing and can result in more substantial language learning. Learners can also get involved in question making as the following techniques show. In predicting the passage the learners see about eight topic-related words taken from a text they are going to read. They use these words to predict what sort of text it is and what content it will contain (Rinvolucri, 1981). Learners can also be encouraged to make questions rather than statements based on some starting point. Their reading attempts to find answers to those questions. The starting point for the questions can be: (1) the title or the first sentence of the text; (2) the theme of the text; (3) the pictures which accompany the text; (4) the previous parts of the text (Henry, 1984). The first sentence of a text can be used for predicting in the following ways (Nation, 1993). 1. The first sentence is used to decide what topic type the text is likely to be (see Chapter 9 for a discussion of topic types). As topic types are based on the general content matter of texts, this allows for very rich prediction. For example, a text beginning with the sentence “For this recipe, it is better to use fish that will not break up too easily” is likely to tell you how to do something. That is, it is an example of the instruction topic type. Texts which are of the instruction topic type typically tell you what tools and ingredients are needed, what steps to follow, what to be careful about at some of the steps and what the result of following the steps will be. It is surprisingly easy to guess the likely topic type from the first sentence and thus make very useful predictions. 2. The first sentence is used to predict what conjunction relationship might exist between the first sentence and the following sentence. Appendix 2 has a list of conjunction relationships—cause and e ect, time sequence, contrast, etc. Often the first sentence will give a good clue of the following ff conjunction that could be inserted between it and the following sentence and this can suggest the rest of the paragraph. For example, “Independent reading is an activity in which children, alone or with friends, read their own self-selected books during a set period of time each day” (Smith and Elley, 1997: 41) 36 • Intensive Reading suggests that the next sentence(s) will amplify or provide more detail about independent reading. 3. The nouns in the first sentence are looked at to see which ones are indefinite nouns or noun groups. That is, which ones do not have specifying the, are indefinite plurals, begin with a, or are unspecified uncountable nouns. In the sentence on independent reading just quoted above, there are several indefinite noun groups—independent reading (an indefinite unaccountable noun), an activity (an indefinite countable noun with a), children, friends (indefinite plural nouns). Which of these indefinite nouns are likely to be specified or expanded on in the rest of the text? Focusing on clues for prediction in this way applies the principle mentioned earlier, a good reading exercise directs the learners’ attention to features of the text that can be found in almost any text. That is, studying today’s text makes tomorrow’s text easier. Some words are written on the blackboard for the guess the questions activity. The learners are told that these words will be a part of questions and/or answers to questions based on the passage, but the teacher does not tell the learners what the questions will be. While the learners read they thus try to guess what the questions will be and find the answers. This is a very amusing technique and ensures a lot of close attention to the passage. When they finish reading, the teacher then gives the questions or asks the learners to tell him their guesses about the questions and asks for the answers. The teacher can either write all the suggested questions on the blackboard or just choose the questions that are the same as the ones he made. Here is an example based on the sample text on reading faster (Figure 3.1). 1. long 2. jump 3. pattern fixation time fixation jump After the learners have read the passage and tried to guess the questions, the teacher asks them what they thought the questions were. The teacher then puts the real questions on the board and the learners answer them. 1. How long is the average fixation? 2. Does a jump take a long time? 3. What is a typical reading pattern? In group questions, the learners are divided into small groups. Each group makes some questions based on the passage. Then the groups exchange questions and answer them. The groups mark each other’s work. Intensive Reading • 37 The learners are divided into groups for class questions. If the passage is quite long, it is divided into parts. Each group makes some questions for a di erent part. Then the teacher asks the groups, one ff after another, to read out their questions. They are written on the blackboard and the class discusses them. Everybody answers all the questions. Standardised Reading Procedures There are several examples of a range of techniques and strategies which are put together in an approach that is then given its own special name. These approaches are usually more than just a collection of strategies and include principles to guide the teaching and learning, and a theory that justifies the particular approach. Some of these approaches, such as reciprocal teaching and CORI, have been the focus of experimental research. In the standard reading exercise, the learners are taught a series of questions to ask that can be used with any text. These questions can be taught in the learners’ first language. Usually the questions cover what are thought to be the most important reading skills, such as predicting, choosing the main points, deciding on the writer’s purpose, etc. (Edge, 1985; Scott, Carioni, Zanatta, Bayer and Quintanilha, 1984; Walker, 1987). Palincsar and Brown (1986) designed a procedure called reciprocal teaching which involved the training and use of four strategies which could be applied paragraph by paragraph to the text: (1) prediction of the content of the paragraph before reading it; (2) making questions focusing on the main idea of the paragraph; (3) summarising what has just been read; and (4) seeking clarification on di cult points in the paragraph. The set of strategies has been called “reciprocal teaching” and the ffi idea is that the procedure is modelled by the teacher and gradually taken over by the learners working in groups, and finally learners working independently. Concept-oriented reading instruction (CORI) is an integrated strategy approach to reading comprehension (Guthrie, 2003). It involves systematic explicit instruction in the six strategies of activating background knowledge, questioning, searching for information, summarising, organising graphically, and structuring stories. The strategy instruction involves working through the sequence of modelling, sca olding, and guided practice. Strategy ff practice should involve a minimum of 30 minutes per day. Vocabulary Intensive reading can be an opportunity for teachers and learners to work on vocabulary. In the broad scheme of things, vocabulary work in intensive 38 • Intensive Reading miles in diameter. So, the sentence can be rewritten as two 42 • Intensive Reading separate sentences, The Earth is a planet just under 8,000 miles in diameter, moving round the Sun at a distance of 93,000,000 miles and The Earth is a planet just under 8,000 miles in diameter completing one circuit in 365¼ days. Where the items joined by and, but, or or are short, it is not worth rewriting the sentence when answering the exercise. Instead, the similar parts can be underlined and numbered. The teacher writes the line numbers of and, but or or on the whiteboard, for example: (line 20) and The learners have to mark the parallel parts or rewrite the sentence as two or more sentences. If learners find the exercise di cult, it can be broken into the following steps. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.ffi Find and, but or or. Look at what follows. Find a similar part of speech in front of and, but or or. Decide what part of the sentence (if any) the similar parts relate to. Rewrite the sentence so that each sentence contains the common part plus one of the similar parts. This exercise is one step in the strategy of simplifying complicated sentences. Simplifying noun groups, like the coordination activity, involves looking for the essence of a sentence. Noun groups containing items following the headword of the group add considerably to the di culty of a sentence. ffi Here are some examples from the sample text on reading speed. The headword in the noun group has been underlined. three types of action movements back to an item already looked at an item already looked at the maximum number of letters that can be seen clearly in one fixation This exercise teaches the learners to find these parts and thus makes it easier to see the overall plan of the sentence. The learners number the items following the headword simply to make themselves conscious of the forms these items can take so that they will recognise them more readily. This exercise is one step in simplifying sentences. It is also useful for understanding reference words because once the head noun referred to has been found, it is still necessary to find the beginning and end of that noun group. The teacher chooses the headwords of noun groups from the passage and writes the list of headwords with line numbers on the whiteboard. Intensive Reading • 43 (line 1) types (line 1) fixations (line 3) movements (line 13) number (line 17) average The learners find these words in the passage, circle them, and draw a bracket “(” at the beginning of the noun group and another bracket “)” at the end. If the noun group contains words which come after the headword, the learners show what form these following words take by writing a number according to the list given below. Here are the seven kinds of items that may typically follow the headword of a noun group, with examples. The headword has been underlined and the following items are in italics. 1. a preposition + a noun (their own special points of interest) 2. who, that, which etc. + a clause (the only two planets which do not appear overwhelmingly hostile) 3. stem + ing (a planet . . . completing one circuit in 365 days) 4. stem + ed (a contact lens manufactured to a preconceived formula) 5. to + stem (the first contact lenses to enjoy wide use amongst the general public) 6. a noun in apposition (our one natural satellite, the moon) 7. an adjective (the stars visible at night-time) A Sentence Simplification Strategy By combining exercises that they have practised before, reference words, coordination, simplifying noun groups, and What does what? learners can simplify sentences that seem to be too complicated for them to understand. The strategy has four steps. • Step 1—Find the reference words in the di cultffi sentence and find what they refer to. • Step 2—Rewrite the sentences as two or more sentences by removing and, but, or or. • Step 3—Find the nouns and remove the items following the nouns which are a part of each noun group. • Step 4—Do the What does what? exercise with the verbs to make sure their subjects and objects are known. The learners should memorise the steps of this strategy so they can apply it whenever they meet a di cult sentence. If the sentence Of course, the nearest to us ffi are Mars, which may approach the Earth to within 35,000,000 miles, and Venus, which has a minimum distance from us of only about 24,000,000 miles. was simplified according to these steps, the result would be 44 • Intensive Reading Of course the nearest are Mars and Venus Cohesive Devices The classic text on cohesion is Halliday and Hasan (1976) Cohesion in English. Their categorisation of the major cohesive devices is the model for the following activities. The arguments for focusing on cohesive devices are that they occur in every text so the learning from one text should readily transfer to the reading of another text, and that they focus learners’ attention on the message of the text at a level beyond the sentence level. Cohesion involves the devices of reference words, substitution and ellipsis, comparison, conjunction relationships, and lexical cohesion. Exercises focusing on cohesive devices are easy to make and the discussion of the answers can lead to useful insights into language use that can have positive e ects on both reading and writing. ff Reference Words and Substitutes Reference words include words like he, she, his, her, this, that, these, those, it, its, and which. Substitutes consist of so, one(s), the same and not. For the purpose of this reading exercise it is not necessary to distinguish between reference and substitution although Halliday and Hasan (1976: Chapters 2 and 3) have shown that there are important di erences ff between them. This exercise helps learners recognise some of the signals that show that a sentence is related to something that has been mentioned elsewhere in the text. Each reference word or substitute has its own grammar and when learners have di culty understanding these words in a ffi context, this grammar should be used as the basis for preparation before the exercise, and for discussion when marking. Their, for example, can only refer to plural nouns or two or more related singular nouns. This can refer to singular nouns, to a phrase, a clause, or a group of clauses or sentences. He usually refers to a singular, male person. They cannot have singular reference. The exercise can take this form. The teacher writes the reference word on the blackboard with its line number next to it (see Figure 3.1, page 31). it (line 7) these (line 10) this (line 13) The learners copy their answer from the text and give the line number of their answer. The learners can check their answers by making sure the grammar of their answer agrees with the grammar of the reference word and by substituting the words referred to for the reference word to see that Intensive Reading • 45 the sentence containing the reference word makes sense. The exercise on noun groups in the grammar section of this chapter helps with this exercise because often the reference word refers to a noun plus other items in the noun group. The exercise may also be done as a multiple-choice exercise (Mackay and Mountford, 1976). Ellipsis Ellipsis occurs when something which is structurally necessary is left unsaid. What is left unsaid is usually recoverable from a previous part of the passage. Ellipsis is very common in dialogue but it is also found in some written texts, as in the following example. Most words are fixated on, but function words much less often than content words. Exercises on ellipsis help learners make sense of sentences by giving them practice in recovering the missing parts. The easiest type of exercise tells the learner where there is ellipsis. (line 6) What happens less often? The exercise can also take the form of a question. What is missing from this sentence? Rewrite the sentence as a complete sentence. Ellipsis can also occur when two clauses are coordinated with and. The beginning of the second clause may be left out because it is the same as the beginning of the first clause. Here is an example. It is similar to the recreational reading done by adults, and provides a time for children to enjoy reading and to practice the skills learned in guided reading sessions (Smith and Elley, 1999: 41). Comparison Halliday and Hasan (1976) include much of comparison under reference. Words used in comparison include same, similar, identical, equal, di erent, other, additional, else, likewise, so, more, fewer, less, adjectives or adverbs + -er. Often ff comparison between sentences and this type of exercise helps the learners understand the passage by helping them to see what is being compared. The exercise can take this form. others. Other than what? farther than what? smaller, thinner, and lighter than what? In another form, the comparison word with its line number is written on the blackboard. The learners write the two things that are compared. 46 • Intensive Reading Conjunction Relationships Signals of conjunction like and, namely, but, in spite of this, relate sentences or parts of sentences to each other. Generally speaking, they show “the way in which what is to follow is systematically connected to what has gone before” (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 227). The list of types of conjunction relationships in Appendix 2 is complete enough for teaching reading. Knowing about conjunction relationships has five useful e ects. 1. It helps the learners to see how ff ideas in a passage are related to each other and to discover the e ect of a statement on other parts offf the text. 2. It helps in finding the meanings of words in context. If, for example, an unknown word occurs in the e ect clause of a cause–e ect relationship, then it is possible to find the meaning of thatff ff word because the e ect can be guessed from the cause. 3. It is important in finding the main idea in aff paragraph. E ects are usually more important than causes. The second item in a contrast is more ff important than the first. The weightings in column 4 in Appendix 2 show this. 4. It helps in learning new connectives. For example, moreover signals the inclusion relationship. Knowing this simplifies learning the meaning of moreover. 5. It helps in predicting what will come in a passage. Exercises on conjunction may draw attention to the signals of conjunction which include: conjunctions so, because, while; adverbs firstly, however, alternatively; verbs cause, follow, exemplify; preposition groups and other forms. However, many sentences are in a conjunction relationship which is not formally signalled at all. Thus it is the relationship between the two clauses which is most important and which should be given most attention. Here are three types of conjunction exercise in increasing order of di culty (see Figure 3.1, page 31 for the text). 1. Because (line 20) signals a cause-e ect ffi ff relationship. What is the cause? What is the e ect? 2. Find the following words in the passage. Say ff what relationship each one signals and find the two related parts. When (line 1) but (line 5) thus (line 21) 3. What relationship occurs in lines 5–6? What is the signal, if any? What are the two parts? Intensive Reading • 47 Lexical Cohesion Halliday and Hasan (1976: 278) distinguish repetition, synonyms, near synonyms, superordinates, and general words. These are all used to refer to exactly the same item in the passage. Thus, in a passage about Thomas Telford, he is referred to as Tom, their son, the baby, the boy, Thomas. Obviously it is important for the reader to realise that a change in the noun used does not necessarily mean a change in the person being referred to. 1. What does all (line 17) in the passage (Figure 3.1) refer to? 2. What di erent words are used in the passage to refer to words?ff 51 Takaki (2003) used vocabulary tests at three levels of di culty (Which of these words did you meet in ffi the text?, a multiple-choice test, and a translation test) to measure vocabulary learning. The three tests all involved the same 25 words. These three tests represented di erent levels of vocabulary ff knowledge. On the word form recognition test, the learners scored 15.3 out of 25, on the multiple- choice test 10.6, and on the translation test 4.6. These results show that only a small number of words (4.6 out of 25) were learned well, but a much larger number (up to 15 out of 25) had taken a useful step towards being known. Further meetings with these words should strengthen and enrich this knowledge. The Waring and Takaki study included a delayed post-test which showed that over a period of time without further reinforcement, the vocabulary gains from reading were gradually lost. It is thus important to make sure that there are repeated opportunities to meet the same vocabulary in reading, and these repeated opportunities should not be delayed too long. Teachers considering setting up an extensive reading programme should understand very clearly that such a programme needs to involve large amounts of reading and needs to continue for a long time. If this happens, the results will be impressive. Find Your Learners’ Present Vocabulary Level Extensive reading can only occur if 95 to 98 percent of the running words in a text are already familiar to the learner or are no burden to the learner (Hu and Nation, 2000). Hu and Nation investigated learners’ comprehension of a fiction text at di erent levels ff of known word density. Where only 80 percent of the running words were known, no learners gained adequate comprehension. Where 90 or 95 percent of the words were known, a few learners gained adequate comprehension but the majority did not. The degree of comprehension was predictable from the density of unknown words and the optimum density was 98 percent. That is, no more than two words in every 100 running words should be unfamiliar to the reader. This estimate is probably conservative because research with native speakers (Carver, 1994) indicates that a density of 99 percent is preferable for meaning-focused input. If we relate these densities to the vocabulary size needed to read an unsimplified fiction text, we find that learners would need a vocabulary of 9,000 words to read novels written for adults (Nation, 2006). The clear message from this is that for learners of English to do extensive reading at the elementary and intermediate stages of proficiency, it is essential that they read graded readers that have been specially prepared for learners of English. It is only by reading such texts that learners can have the density of known words that is essential for extensive reading. Graded readers typically cover a range of levels beginning at around 52 • Extensive Reading 300–500 words and going to around 2,000–2,500 words. For example, there are six vocabulary levels in the Oxford Bookworms series. Level 1 2 3 4 5 6 New words 400 300 300 400 400 700 Cumulative words 400 700 1,000 1,400 1,800 2,500 In order to know at what level learners should begin reading, it is useful to measure their receptive vocabulary size. This involves measuring their knowledge of the most frequent 2,000 words of English. The test developed by Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham (2001) provides a means of doing this. There are also very useful bilingual vocabulary tests which can be used to do this (see the Vocabulary Resource Booklet at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/ sta /paul-nation/nation.aspx).ff Provide Plenty of Interesting and Appropriate Reading Texts We have looked briefly at the Oxford Bookworms series. This is an excellent and well established series of graded readers with many interesting titles. However, it is only one of many series of readers that are available (see Hill, 1997, 2001; Thomas and Hill, 1993; Hill and Thomas, 1988 and 1989 for reviews). Hill (in Day and Bamford, 1998) says that there are around 1,650 graded readers in print. These are in over 40 di erent series. ff Unfortunately, the levels in these series are not identical with each other in the number of levels, the amount of vocabulary at each level, nor the vocabulary lists on which they are based. This is not as serious as it sounds. There seems to be quite a big overlap between the vocabulary covered in the di erent series, and any particular reader can only make use of some of the words available at a ff particular level. It is thus not important to stick to only one series of graded readers. It is much better to choose titles from any of the available series that are interesting and well written. Hill (in Day and Bamford, 1998) provides a very useful list of what he considers to be the best graded readers and this is a very valuable starting point in building a collection of graded readers. As there is no recent report of what learners enjoy most, it is worth collecting data on this. The Extensive Reading Foundation website (http:// www.erfoundation.org/) is also an excellent source of award-winning graded reader titles. If an extensive reading programme is to be successful, it must provide Extensive Reading • 53 books that learners are interested in reading or that will develop their interest in reading. Teachers’ judgements of books are likely to be di erent from learners’ judgements of books, and learners’ ff judgements should get priority. Set, Encourage and Monitor Large Quantities of Extensive Reading Research on the vocabulary covered by di erent numbers of graded readers (Nation and Wang, 1999) suggests that learners ff need to read many books in order to gain control of the high frequency words of English, preferably at the rate of a graded reader every one or two weeks. There are several techniques and procedures that can be used to motivate learners to do this and to keep a record of their reading. In an extensive reading programme, reading should be the main activity and other activities should occupy only a very small proportion of the time so that time is not taken away from reading. For this reason, most extensive reading programmes do not require learners to do elaborate comprehension tests or exercises on the books they read. Generally, learners are simply required to fill out a short record form indicating the name of the book they have just read, its level, the date, how long it took to read, and a brief comment on the quality of the book (Was it a good story? Would you recommend it to others?). Twelve or more of these short report forms can be printed on one piece of A4 paper, allowing the learner and teacher to see at a glance how much has been read over what period of time. Additional activities to motivate reading may take a bit more time. There may be a slip of paper in the back of each book for learners to record their opinion of the book. Other learners considering whether to choose to read this book could look at this slip of paper to see what others thought of it. Oral book reports involve a learner presenting a commentary on a book to the class or a reading group. The idea behind such reports is not to give away the story of the book but to encourage others to read it. These reports can follow a set format covering questions like what was the name of the book, what type of story was it (a mystery, a love story, etc.), where and when was it set, was it enjoyable, who would like to read it? Discussion groups can bring learners together who have already all read the same book. Such a group should consist of four or five learners. As a result of their discussion, they may prepare an oral book report or a written review to present to others in the class. They then decide what book they will discuss at their next meeting. The Extensive Reading Foundation has been set up to recognise quality in the production of graded readers. Awards are given to the best books each year just like the Oscars for movies. 54 • Extensive Reading After the extensive reading programme has been running for some time, learners can vote on what they thought were the best books they read. Labels can be stuck on the front of the winning books to indicate that they are well worth reading. As well as books getting awards, learners can get awards for the quantity of reading that they do. After reading five books an award can be given, and after ten a further award, and so on. The way books are displayed can encourage reading. Publishers now try to make graded readers as attractive as possible with colourful covers sometimes showing a scene from the movie based on the book. Displays can be arranged to show the di erent types of stories, the ff range of levels, new books, and books that have won awards or have been highly recommended. The aim of all these activities is to keep learners excited about reading and wanting to read more. Support and Supplement Extensive Reading with Language-focused Learning and Fluency Development An extensive reading programme is only one part of a language course. Teachers need to make sure that other parts of the course are supporting extensive reading and that extensive reading is supporting other parts of the course. One of the most useful ways in which the course can support extensive reading is by providing training in reading faster. A speed reading programme involves the learners reading texts that are well within their language knowledge; that is, they contain no unknown vocabulary or grammatical features. Their reading of each text is timed, and their speed and comprehension scores are recorded on graphs so that learners can easily see their progress and are encouraged to increase their reading speed. Properly designed courses are usually very successful with most learners soon doubling their speed. A good reading speed is around 250 words per minute. Most learners without training read at less that 100 words per minute. The essential requirements for such a course are: (1) easy texts (Quinn, Nation and Millett, 2007; Millett, 2005 Books 1 and 2; Nation and Malarcher, 2007); (2) regular practice (about three times a week); and (3) a push to read faster (see Chapter 5). One way an extensive reading programme can contribute to proficiency development is through vocabulary growth. This can be encouraged in extensive reading by making the vocabulary learning more deliberate and less incidental. Care needs to be taken, however, that this vocabulary learning goal does not overshadow reading for pleasure. Here are some brief suggestions that may boost vocabulary learning from extensive reading. Extensive Reading • 55 1. Before reading a text, the learner quickly skims it and selects five or six words to focus on while reading. This has the e ect of raising consciousness about some words and thus making them more ff noticeable when they are met again in the text. 2. While reading the learner can collect new words that are repeated in the text to put on word cards for later deliberate study. 3. A more formal follow up to this is for learners to report to the class on a word that they met while reading—explaining what it means, how it was used in the text, its word parts, its etymology, and any unusual features about it. 4. The use of a dictionary while reading should also have positive e ects (Knight, 1994), although this ff tends to increase the time it takes to read a text (Hulstijn, 1993). After reading a graded reader, the learner can spend a few minutes reflecting on new words that were met in the book and looking back in the book to revise them. Vocabulary learning and reading are helped if the learners are good at guessing the meanings of unknown words from context clues. Guessing from context is a trainable strategy and it is worth spending a few minutes on it each week. There are several ways of practising the strategy, but all require a text where there is not a heavy density of unknown words. Typically, the teacher should model the procedure for the learners, then work together with the learners on some items, then get the learners working together in pairs and eventually working individually. A deductive guessing procedure involves the learners making a guess at the meaning of an unknown word in a text and then justifying their guesses. This involves a discussion of the various available clues. An inductive guessing procedure involves looking at the available clues—the part of speech of the unknown word, its immediate context, and the relationship between the clause with the unknown word and the adjoining clauses (for a detailed description, see Nation, 2001; Nation, 2008). It is worth spending small amounts of time over several weeks or months on practising guessing because it is a very powerful and useful strategy. Help Learners Move Systematically Through the Graded Reader Levels Research on the occurrence of vocabulary in graded readers can provide useful guidelines for planning such reading. Nation and Wang (1999), in a detailed study of 42 graded readers in the Oxford Bookworms series, reached the following conclusions, considering only the aim of vocabulary learning. 56 vocabulary learning and may improve comprehension of the text, although the research on this is not conclusive. Glosses are an alternative to dictionary use and are generally less disruptive than dictionaries. Using dictionaries while reading usually adds considerably to the time taken to complete reading the text. There is renewed interest in research on glossing as a result of the growth in computer-assisted reading. Computer-assisted Reading One of the best computer-assisted reading programs can be found on Tom Cobb’s website www.lextutor.ca. Look under the heading Read with resources. The learner pastes in a text, clicks build, and then starts reading. By clicking once on a word, a spoken form of the word can be heard. By clicking twice, several concordance examples appear. These additional contexts can help with guessing the word’s meaning from context clues. By clicking on a dictionary link, the word can be looked up in one of several possible dictionaries. To make use of this program texts need to be in computer-readable form, but there are now thousands of such texts on the web—out of copyright classics at project gutenberg (http:// www.gutenberg.org/catalog/), and newspapers at the internet public library. Such support e ectively ff individualises intensive reading, allowing learners to seek help of various kinds where it is needed in a speedy way that does not take the learners too far away from the text. There is now a growing body of research supporting the use of concordances, electronic dictionary look-up and hypertext glossing (Cobb, Greaves and Horst, 2001; Cobb, 1997) as aids to vocabulary learning and reading. Elaboration Elaboration involves the rewriting of texts but it involves adding to the original text rather than removing or replacing what is there. The unknown words in the text are, in e ect, glossed in the ff text itself. Here is an example of a piece of elaborated text from the novel Lord Jim. I have put the elaborations in italics and the words outside the 2,000 word level in bold, but in the text they would not be marked in any way. Note that apparelled is not elaborated as the text provides enough elaboration for this word. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop or bend of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging animal like a bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion, that is always saying things in 60 • Extensive Reading a strong way, which had nothing aggressive (like attacking someone) in it. It seemed a necessity, that is, it was something he needed, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in beautifully immaculate white from shoes to the hat on his head, and in the various eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular. A ship-chandler provides supplies for ships, and a clerk works for the chandler. Although there are no published elaborated texts available, there have been several pieces of research looking at the e ect of this elaboration (Chung, 1995; Parker and Chaudron, 1987; Yano, Long and Ross, ff 1994; Kim, 2006). In general, this research shows that elaborated text seems to work about as well as simplified text. The Extensive Reading Programme This discussion of guidelines for an extensive reading programme has focused mainly on learning conditions and research and has not given attention to more practical factors such as how to organise and manage a library of graded readers, how to obtain graded readers, and how many are needed to set up a library. These issues are well covered in Day and Bamford (1998). The main purpose of this chapter is to convince teachers that it is worthwhile setting up an extensive reading programme, making it a substantial, obligatory part of a course, and persisting with it in an organised way. The results of such programmes (Elley, 1991; Waring and Takaki, 2003) are impressive. Note This chapter is a revised and updated version of an article entitled “Planning and running an extensive reading programme” published in NUCB Journal of Language Culture and Communication 3, 1, 2001, pp 1–8. It is reprinted here with the editor’s permission. CHAPTER 5 Reading Faster In a typical speed reading course, each lesson is like this. The learners each select the text they want to read. The teacher then says, Are you ready? Go! At this command, 18 heads dip down and the learners begin reading in earnest. At the same time the teacher is pointing to minutes and seconds written on the board, indicating how much time has passed since the learners began reading. Minutes 0 1 2 3 4 5 Seconds 00 10 20 30 40 50 As each learner finishes reading the short text (usually around 500–600 words long), they look up at the board, note down the time it took them to read, and then turn over the text and start answering the ten comprehension questions on the back of the sheet. When they have answered the questions, they get their answer key and mark their own answers. They look at the conversion chart and convert their time into words per minute. They enter their speed in words per minute onto the speed graph and they enter their comprehension score out of ten onto the comprehension graph. The teacher moves around the class looking at graphs and giving comments and encouragement to the learners. The whole activity has taken 61 62 • Reading Faster about seven minutes. The same activity will happen two or three times more in the same week and will continue for a total of around seven weeks until most of the 25 texts have been read. This is one lesson in a speed reading course for non-native speakers of English. This chapter looks at the reasons for having such a course. It then examines a range of ways in which reading speed can be increased and maintained. The Nature and Limits of Reading Speed To see what reading speed goals it is sensible to aim for, we need to understand the physical nature of reading and how this relates to reading speed. There are many misconceptions about reading faster, particularly about how fast people can read, and these can be cleared up by looking at the physical nature of reading. When people read, three types of action are involved—fixations on particular words, jumps (saccades) to the next item to focus on, and regressions (movements back to an item already looked at). This means that while reading the eyes do not move smoothly along a line of print, but jump from one word to another. There has been a great deal of research on eye movements while reading and recent improvements in eye-tracking technology have confirmed the following findings (Rayner, 1998). 1. A skilled reader reading at around 250–300 words per minute makes around 90 fixations per 100 words. Most words are fixated on, but function words like the and of are fixated on much less often than content words. The longer the word, the more likely it is to receive a fixation. If a word is really long, it may receive two or even three fixations. Around 200 milliseconds are spent on each fixation (about five per second). The length of these fixations varies a lot depending on how di cult a word or sentence is to read. 2. Each saccadic ffi jump is around 1.2 words in English. This is about eight letters. In Finnish, where words are longer, the average jump is ten letters. This is around the maximum number of letters that can be seen clearly in one fixation. During the jump no items can be focused on because the eyes are moving. A jump takes about 20 milliseconds. The basic unit in the jump is the word and languages with quite di erent ff writing systems (for example, English and Chinese) all tend to have an average of one jump for every 1.2 words. 3. A skilled reader makes around 15 regressions in every 100 fixations. Regressions occur because the reader made too big a jump (many regressions when reading in English are only a few letters long), and because there were problems in understanding the text. Reading Faster • 63 What this research shows is that in normal skilled reading, most words are focused on. As there are limits on the minimum time needed to focus on a word and on the size and speed of a jump, it is possible to calculate the physiological limit on reading speed where reading involves fixating on most of the words in the text. This is around 300 words per minute. (Five fixations per second times 1.2 = 6 words per second times 60 = 360 words per minute. If regressions are considered, this reduces the forward movement through the text to around 300 wpm.) If someone is reading at a speed of 400 words per minute or more, then that person is no longer fixating on most of the words in the text. In Urquhart and Weir’s (1998) terms, that person is no longer doing careful reading, but instead is doing “expeditious reading” which includes skimming and scanning. Unless such readers bring a great deal of background knowledge to their reading, they will usually be unable to answer detailed questions on parts of the text not fixated on. Many non-native speakers of English and some native speakers read at speeds which are well below 300 wpm. About one-quarter of the time in a well-balanced language course should be spent on the strand of fluency development helping learners become more fluent in using the language they already know; that is, making the best use of what they have already learned. This fluency development needs to cover the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing and needs to involve substantial amounts of input and output. The physical symptoms of slow reading are: (1) fixating on units smaller than a word (word parts, letters, parts of letters), thus making several fixations per word; (2) spending a long time on each fixation or on some fixations; and (3) making many regressions to look back at what has already been read. Increasing speed will result in a change in these symptoms. Reading speed is a ected by a range of factors including the purpose of ff the reading, and the di culty of the text. The di culty of the text is a ected by the vocabulary, ffi ffi ff grammatical constructions, discourse, and background knowledge. A reasonable goal for second language learners who are reading material that contains no unknown vocabulary or grammar and that has easy content is around 250 words per minute. Chung and Nation (2006) looked at the e ect ff of a speed reading course on Korean learners of English at university level. The learners read 23 passages over nine weeks. The passages were all within the first 1,000 words of English (Quinn, Nation and Millett, 2007). Using a very conservative scoring system (the average speed in words per minute of the last three passages read minus the average speed of the first three passages read), the learners began with the speed of 141 wpm and after 20 passages 64 • Reading Faster reached on average 214 wpm—an increase in speed of 52 percent. Of the 40 learners, two made no increase. The majority of the learners (30 out of 40) made gradual increases, while four increased erratically with rises and drops, two reached plateaus and stayed there for a while before making further increases, and two had a mixed pattern. Most of the gains were made in the first ten texts, but 11 students out of 40 made most gains in the second ten texts, and most students made some gains in the second ten texts. It is thus worth persisting with speed reading. Hunt and Beglar (unpublished paper) looked at the e ect of extensive reading over several months on reading speed and found ff increases especially for those learners who read simplified texts. The gains of speed were significant but not enormous and may have been greater if learners had followed a focused speed reading course. The Nature of Fluency Development We have looked briefly at the physical aspects of reading and how these change as fluency develops. However, these signs are the result of mental processes. One of the mental processes involved in reading is decoding; that is, turning the written form of a word into a familiar spoken form with a known meaning. Readers develop skill in decoding in two related ways. Through practice they become faster at recognising the unit they are working with and, second, they change the size of this basic unit. When someone begins to read an unfamiliar written script there are many things to notice. Say, for example, an Arabic speaker is learning to read English. Because Arabic uses a di erent script from English, learning to read the English letters p b d g is quite di cult ff ffi because although the letters have some similarities, there are important di erences. Where is the ff circle part of the letter, at the top or at the bottom, on the left of the stalk or on the right? p b d have straight stalks, g has a bent stalk. At a very early stage of reading English, each part of a letter is an the text they reached. A part of the class time can be set aside for extensive reading aloud 68 • Reading Faster where learners read to each other or where one learner reads a continuing story to a small group. The story should be easy to read and the reader can concentrate on making it interesting. A variation could be learners making a tape-recording of a story for others to listen to. The read-and-look-up activity does not meet many of the conditions for a fluency activity but it is one that encourages learners to work with a larger basic unit. Michael West (1960: 12–13) devised this technique as a way of helping learners to learn from written dialogues and to help them put expression into the dialogues. West regarded the physical aspects of read-and-look-up as being very important for using the technique properly. The learners work in pairs facing each other. One is the reader, the other is the listener. The reader holds the piece of paper or the book containing the dialogue at about chest level and slightly to the left. This enables the reader to look at the piece of paper and then to look at the listener, moving only their eyes and not having to move their head at all. The reader looks at the piece of paper and tries to remember as long a phrase as possible. The reader can look at the paper for as long as is necessary. Then, when ready, they look at the listener and say the phrase. While they look at the paper, they do not speak. While they speak they do not look at the paper. These rules force the reader to rely on memory. At first the technique is a little di cult to use because the reader has to ffi discover what length of phrase is most comfortable and has to master the rules of the technique. It can also be practised at home in front of a mirror. West saw value in the technique because the learner “has to carry the words of a whole phrase, or perhaps a whole sentence, in his mind. The connection is not from book to mouth, but from book to brain, and then from brain to mouth. That interval of memory constitutes half the learning process . . . Of all methods of learning a language, Read-and-Look-up is, in our opinion, the most valuable” (West, 1960: 12). Good spoken reading speeds range from 100 to 200 words per minute. These are necessarily slower speeds than silent reading speeds. Reading aloud is a useful activity to practise accurate decoding and it is a useful activity in its own right—people gain pleasure from listening to stories and talks and from reading stories to others. The activities in this section provide a useful preparation for the silent reading activities described in the next section. Increasing Careful Silent Reading Speed The classic way of increasing reading speed is to follow a speed reading course consisting of timed readings followed by comprehension measures. For learners of English as a second or foreign language, such courses need Reading Faster • 69 to be within a controlled vocabulary so that the learners are not held up by unknown words. The first published course for foreign learners of English was Reading Faster by Edward Fry (1967) which had an accompanying teachers’ book called Teaching Faster Reading (Fry 1965). The course consisted of texts around 500 words long, each followed by ten multiplechoice questions. The texts were taken from a graded reader and were written at the 2,000 word level. The course worked well but it was not suitable for learners with vocabularies of less than 2,000 words and it also contained the names of diseases like kwashiorkor and yaws which tended to slow the reading. Quinn and Nation (1974) developed a course written well within the first 1,000 words of English consisting of 25 texts, each exactly 550 words long, and followed by ten comprehension questions. Millett (Quinn, Nation and Millett, 2007) has revised the Quinn and Nation text and has produced two other texts, one at the 2,000 word level and one at the 2,000 plus Academic Word List level (Millett, 2005) (see also Nation and Malarcher, 2007). Other speed reading courses have not used a controlled vocabulary and this has meant that they do not meet the conditions needed for fluency development. There have been mechanical reading pacers where the text is revealed at a pre-set speed and there have been films which reveal text at a certain rate. Such aids are fun but are not necessary for increasing reading speed. The essential requirements are suitable texts and questions. Easy extensive reading is another very e ective way of increasing reading speed by asking learners to read graded readers at aff level which is much easier than the level they would normally read to gain meaning-focused input. Learners should be encouraged to do large quantities of such reading and to re-read books that they have really enjoyed. It is important to remember that there need to be two types of extensive reading involving graded readers. One type, reading for meaning-focused input, involves learners reading at a level where about one word in 50 is unknown. These words can be guessed from context and add to the readers’ vocabulary knowledge. The second type of extensive reading, reading for fluency development, should involve texts where there are virtually no unknown words. Such texts should be read quickly for enjoyment, and large numbers of them should be read. In silent repeated reading, the learners silently re-read texts that they have read before. In order to encourage faster reading, they can note the time each reading took so that they have the goal of reading it faster each time. Issue logs are a very e ective way of involving learners. At the beginning of a language course the learners ff each decide on a topic that they will research each week. Each learner should have a di erent topic. ff The 70 • Reading Faster topics can include pollution, global warming, oil, tra c accidents, the stock market, etc. Each week ffi the learners find newspaper reports, magazine articles, academic texts, information from the internet, television reports, and so on, on their topic and write a brief summary. As they are reading lots of material on the same topic, they will soon be in control of the relevant vocabulary and will bring a lot of background knowledge to what they read (Watson, 2004). Careful silent reading is the most common kind of reading. Learners need to be able to read with good comprehension near the upper speed limits of such reading. Increasing Silent Expeditious Reading Speed There are two major kinds of expeditious reading— skimming and scanning. The major goal of expeditious reading would be to increase skimming speed. In skimming the reader goes through a text quickly, not noting every word but trying to get the main idea of what the text is about. This is sometimes called getting the gist of the text. After such reading the reader is unlikely to have noticed details, but should be able to say in a general way what the text is about. The more background knowledge that a reader brings to skimming, the faster the skimming speed is likely to be. Reading speeds higher than 300–400 words per minute are the result of skimming, not careful reading. Being able to skim text is a useful skill because skimming can be used to help decide if a text or section of a text deserves careful reading. Skimming activities should involve texts which are at least 2,000 words long and which are on topics that the learners are familiar with. Comprehension should be measured by questions which ask “What was the text about?”. Multiple- choice or true/false questions which focus on the gist of the text could also be used. Scanning involves searching for a particular piece of information in a text, such as looking for a particular name or a particular number. It is probably better to spend time increasing skimming speed than to devise scanning activities. This is because e ective scanning depends on good careful reading and ff skimming skills, and training in scanning is unlikely to result in more fluent access to items. This is worth researching. Typical scanning tasks include searching a text for a particular quotation, someone’s name, a particular date or number, or a particular word; or searching a list for a telephone number, someone’s name, or a particular word or phrase. Reading Faster • 71 Frequently Asked Questions About Reading Speed What About Comprehension? Comprehension is very important when developing fluency in reading. There is no point in reading faster if little is understood. For careful silent reading, readers should score seven or eight out of ten on a comprehension test. Higher scores than this indicate that the reader is going too slowly and is trying to get too much from the text. It would be easy for the reader to increase their speed. Scores of six or less out of ten are too low and the reader should read subsequent texts at the same speed until comprehension improves. Speed reading courses use both words per minute graphs and comprehension score graphs. Lower comprehension scores are acceptable for skimming tasks, because while skimming readers do not give attention to every part of the text. Questions on skimming texts should look for the main ideas. How can Reading Fluency be Measured? The typical measure for all kinds of fluency tasks is words per minute (see Lennon (1990) for a wide range of measures for speaking fluency). There has been some debate over whether syllables per minute is a more precise measure, but the di culty in counting syllables is much greater than any small returns inffi accuracy it may bring. Moreover, research into eye movements suggests that words not syllables are the primary unit of attention. A useful compromise when doing research may be to use standard word units, that is counting the number of letters in the text (easily done by a word processor) and dividing by eight. Carver (1982) has used six character spaces as the standard word measure, but the speed reading research suggests that eight character spaces may be a more justifiable measure. How can Progress in Reading Fluency be Monitored? • One minute reading. An interesting activity for regularly checking on reading speed is one minute reading (Iwano, 2004). The learners read a text with the time being recorded by a stopwatch. After exactly one minute the teacher says “Stop!”, and the learners mark where they reached in the text. They then count how many words there are up to that point. Doing this on the same text before and after a speed reading programme can be a good way of showing learners how their speed has increased. • Reading logs. A log is a regular record of what happened at particular times. Learners can keep a log of their extensive reading, noting the name of the book, the time they started reading and how much they 72 • Reading Faster read. If this is accurately done, it may provide a rough indicator of reading speed and increases in speed. • Speed reading graphs. When learners do a speed reading course with short texts and questions, they score their speed and comprehension on graphs (see Quinn, Nation and Millett, 2007). Teachers should regularly look at learners’ graphs and give them advice and encouragement. Where progress is not being made, the teacher can suggest remedial procedures like repeated reading, skimming before reading, and discussion and prediction of the content with a friend before reading. What are Good Reading Speeds? A good oral reading speed is around 150 words per minute. A good careful silent reading speed is around 250 words per minute. A good skimming speed is around 500 words per minute. These are reasonable goals for foreign and second language learners who are reading material that contains no unknown vocabulary and grammar. What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading Faster? There are disadvantages of reading faster. The pressure to go faster can be a source of stress. Such pressure can reduce the enjoyment that learners get from reading. It is best to see the skill of reading faster as providing a wider range of choices for a reader. Sometimes it is good to read fast. At other times it is not. Being able to make the choice is an advantage. Research on reading faster has shown that increasing reading speed in one language can result in increases in another known language. This has been tested from the first language to English (Bismoko and Nation, 1974) and from English to the first language (Cramer, 1975; West, 1941). It is likely that the transfer of training here is the transfer of confidence; that is, the confidence that you can read faster and still comprehend. It has been suggested that reading too slowly at speeds of much less than 100 words per minute can have negative e ects on ff comprehension. Anyone who has learned to read another script knows the phenomenon of slowly sounding out the script and then having to go back and read the sentence again more fluently to see what it means. Fluency development is an essential strand in a language course (for a discussion of listening and speaking fluency, see the companion book in this series (Nation and Newton, 2009), Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Learners need to be able to make the best use of what they already know at every stage of their learning. Giving attention to reading Reading Faster possible answers. 78 • Assessing Reading This prechecking by another teacher may result in changes to the questions to limit the answers that are possible. The answer sheet where the learners write their answers can have a set space for each answer and learners have to keep their answers within the limits of that space. True/False, Yes/No, Alternative Questions and Multiple-choice These question forms are all grouped together because the answer to the question is contained within the question or instructions, and thus the learners do not have to compose their answer. This simplifies marking. In the following discussion we will focus on multiple-choice questions because these are the most di cult to make. Typically there is a stem with ffi four choices, one of which is correct. In order to produce a large number of questions to make the test reliable, quite a long text or several short texts are needed. Marking is usually very easy, and most learners are familiar with multiple-choice tests, although they may not have good strategies for sitting them. Good multiple-choice tests tend to be very reliable. Multiple-choice questions can focus on details (microstructure) and on more general aspects (macrostructure) of the text, although some researchers have found di culty in using multiple-choice to measure global comprehension. Multiple-ffi choice tests only involve reading and so the measurement is less likely to be a ected by writing skill ff than it is in a short answer test. If a multiple-choice test has not been well prepared, learners may be able to get a reasonable score without reading the text, and part of the preparation of a good test involves checking this. Multiplechoice questions can be checked by checking the length of the answers to make sure that the correct answer is not always shorter or longer than the distractors, asking a native speaker to answer the test to see if they get all of the answers correct, getting a colleague to look critically at the items to see if they can see any problems with them, and looking at learners’ answers to the items to see if some items are too easy or too hard or if the learners are all choosing the same wrong choice. To make marking easier, a special answer sheet and an answer key may be used. Learners circle the correct answer. Because of the ease of marking, multiple-choice is useful when there are very large numbers of tests to mark. Computer marking is possible. Practicality is a strength of using multiple-choice tests. However, making multiple-choice tests is not easy. Making four plausible choices is usually a challenge and good multiplechoice questions require a lot of trialling. Information Transfer Incomplete information transfer diagrams can be used to measure comprehension of a text. See Figure 6.1 later in this chapter for an example. Assessing Reading • 79 The learners read the text and fill in the diagram with short notes. The advantages are that the information the learner produces can cover a lot of points and yet need not involve a lot of writing. The disadvantage is in gaining consistency in marking. Diagnosing Problems If a learner is having problems with reading, it is very useful to be able to see where the problems lie. As reading is a complex skill, there are many possible sources of di culty. Soffi if a learner performs badly on a proficiency measure such as a cloze test or a comprehension test, it is useful to have a procedure which can be followed to find the reasons for the poor performance. There are four general principles that should be followed. First, diagnosing problems should be done on an individual basis. That is, diagnostic testing should be done with the teacher sitting next to the individual learner and carefully observing what happens. There are several reasons for this. If testing is done with the whole class, individual learners may not give their best e ort. In addition, a teacher ff needs to be able to observe what aspects of the diagnostic task are causing di culty, and should be ffi able to adjust the testing procedure during the process to get the best information about an individual’s problems. Second, diagnosing problems should begin with the smallest units involved and go step by step to the larger units. From a reading perspective, this means starting with word identification, moving to vocabulary knowledge, then to comprehension of single sentences, and then to text comprehension and reading speed. The assumption behind this progression is that the various smaller units combine to contribute to the larger units. Third, as much as possible, learners should feel comfortable with and relaxed during diagnostic testing. This is a difficult principle to apply because in such testing it is obvious to the learner that they are being evaluated in some way. The principle, however, can be applied by the teacher beginning with very easy tasks where the learner can be successful, giving praise for e ort and success, being friendly, and frequently taking small ff breaks to help the learner relax. Fourth, do not rely on only one test. Even where it seems obvious where the problem lies, use a di erent kind of test possibly at a di erent level of unit size to double ff ff check. Decisions about a learner’s level of skill can have far-reaching e ects on their learning. It is ff worth spending time to get the best possible information. Reading Aloud Reading aloud can be used to check the learner’s skill at word recognition. As a very cautious first step it is worth observing carefully to see if the 80 • Assessing Reading learner’s eyesight is good. This could be done by getting them to look at a picture and then asking them questions about it. Quite a large proportion of males are colour-blind to some degree, but that should not a ect reading. If the learner seems to have eyesight problems, it is worth getting their ff eyesight tested by a specialist. Reading aloud should begin with a very easy short text. If the learner has problems in reading aloud very early in the text, it may be worthwhile pausing and talking about the context of the story with the learner, discussing some of the ideas that will occur in the text and predicting what might happen in the story. It is probably not worth keeping a running record of errors for the first text, but if it becomes clear that word recognition is a major problem, then keeping such a record would be useful. If the learner has some problems with word recognition these could be checked against the correspondences in Appendix 1 to see if they are irregular items or if there is some pattern to the errors. A di culty with reading aloud for second language learners is that their ffi skill in reading may be greater than their skill in speaking and so their spoken production may be a poor representation of their reading. Talking to the learner before the reading begins is one way of checking this. Vocabulary Tests Learners may have di culty reading because they do not know ffi enough vocabulary. Note that word recognition during reading aloud is a ected by vocabulary ff knowledge and so very easy texts need to be used at first when testing reading aloud. Similarly, if the vocabulary test is a written test which requires the learners to read the test items, then the measure of vocabulary knowledge will be a ected by word recognition skills. Learners may have a large spoken ff vocabulary but be unable to read the words they know. The following vocabulary tests can be used with learners of English. The Bilingual Levels Tests Here is an item from the Indonesian version of the test (available in Nation, 2004b). 1 could 2 during 3 this 4 piece 5 of 6 in order to dapat, bisa selama supaya These are tests of the first and second 1,000 words of West’s (1953) General Service List. They are available in the following languages—Japanese, Assessing Reading • 81 Indonesian, Thai, Korean, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Tagalog, Samoan, Tongan, Russian, and Vietnamese. The test is easily marked with a marking key. Each of the two levels has 30 items, which is enough for a good level of reliability. The validity of the test is strengthened for lowproficiency learners by the use of the first language to represent the meanings of the words. The learners do not have to deal with the more complex language of English definitions. The words are tested out of context and this can cause problems for words that can have di erent meanings, such as seal which ff can mean “to close tightly” or “the marine mammal”, or bear which can mean “to carry” or “to put up with”. The teacher should sit next to the learner while the test is being done to make sure that the learner takes the test seriously, follows a sensible test-taking strategy, knows how to handle the slightly unusual test format, and is not experiencing reading problems which might interfere with the sitting of the test. It is very important that the teacher does this because it has happened that a whole class of learners sitting a test have not taken it seriously and have got low marks. In this case, the teacher then set up a programme to teach the vocabulary which the learners actually already knew. The True/False Vocabulary Test Here are three sample items (available in Nation, 2001: 412–415; Nation, 2004b; Nation, 1993). When something falls, it goes up. Most children go to school at night. It is easy for children to remain still. There are two versions of this 40-item test of the first 1,000 words of West’s (1953) General Service List. The test can be given in a written form or, if necessary, it can be given orally. There are enough items to get a good level of reliability. The words are tested in sentences and learners need to understand the sentence and apply it to their knowledge of the world in order to make a decision about whether the sentence is true or false. As there are factors other than vocabulary knowledge involved in the test, this a ects the validity of the test. Whether this e ect ff ff is positive or negative depends on what you want to test, words alone or words in use. Other possible tests include the yes/no test, and the monolingual levels test (Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham, 2001). Tests of Grammatical Knowledge If the teacher speaks the first language of the learners, the most straightforward test of grammatical knowledge is to get the learners to translate sentences from reading texts, starting with a very simple text. A validity 82 • Assessing Reading issue with this is that such translation may encourage word by word reading and as a result mistranslation. This can be discouraged by asking the learner to read the whole sentence first before beginning the translation. An example of mistranslation is “He made the theory useful” being translated as “He made the theory which was useful”. If the teacher does not speak the learners’ first language, sentence completion tests could be used, for example, I was very surprised by . It made me . I waiting for at least an hour. Note that grammar tests, both translation and completion, involve word recognition skills and vocabulary knowledge as well as grammatical knowledge. It is thus important that the learners’ word recognition skills and vocabulary knowledge are tested before grammar knowledge is tested. Testing Reading Speed If learners read very slowly, their comprehension can be a ected, either because they do not have enough time to complete the reading or because their ff reading is so slow that ideas within and between sentences are not properly integrated. If reading speed is thought to be a problem, the speed of reading aloud should be checked first. When doing this, it must be remembered that for a native speaker speaking speed is slower than reading speed. So, a spoken reading speed of around 100 to 150 words per minute is fast. If the speed of reading aloud seems fast enough, the speed of silent reading should be measured. This should be done more than once, preferably three times, in order to get a reliable measure of speed. A speed of more than 100 words per minute is desirable. Untrained native speakers can read at 250 words per minute and this is also a sensible goal for nonnative speakers reading easy material. If the silent reading speed is very slow, then the suggestions in Chapter 5 on developing fluent reading need to be followed. Other Causes We have focused on the language aspects of reading in this section on diagnosis. Language issues are only one aspect of reading. Learners may have di culty in reading for good reasons. They ffi may not want to read. They might not have the necessary background knowledge to read certain texts. They might feel embarrassed to be singled out for attention by the teacher. They might be physically ill or very tired. They may have trouble focusing on a task, or they may have mental problems. The language teacher, Assessing Reading • 83 Venus 6. What did the robot Sojourner do? (a) gather information (b) control the spacecraft Pathfinder (c) explore the moon (d) go with humans to Mars 7. According to the text, a major problem with space travel is (a) the lack of cooperation between countries (b) the cost of robots (c) wind speed (d) the travelling time 8. The 2020 mission to Mars will (a) involve the robot Sojourner (b) take over 40 months of travel (c) be the first time a spacecraft will land on Mars (d) carry humans to the planet Information transfer Complete each part of the table. Some have been filled for you. Year Spacecraft Going to With humans? Yes/No Travelling time to get there Apollo more than 7 months by 2020 Short answer 1. Armstrong landed on the moon in the year . 87 88 • Assessing Reading 2. The 2020 mission to Mars will carry . 3. Apollo took days to reach the moon. Figure 6.1 Return Ticket, Please!: A Range of Comprehension Test Formats Good comprehension questions have the following features. Reliability • The learners should know how to go about answering the questions. This means that the format of the test should be familiar to the learners and the instructions should be clear. If the test involves making a written answer, the learner should know how long and detailed these answers need to be. If the test is a multiple-choice test, the learner should know how to indicate the right answer and should have had some practice using a strategy to answer multiple-choice questions. To check this, the test and test instructions should be trialled with a few learners of a similar level. A test of similar format could be used with the learners a week or two before to get them used to the format. In the Return Ticket, Please! example note that learners are told to draw a circle around the correct answer. “Choose the correct answer” is not precise enough. Note also that they are told to make their choice “according to the information in the text”. Most learners are familiar with multiple-choice activities, but it is worth checking with younger learners that they know what to do. Doing the information transfer part of the test could be more confusing. Learners may feel unsure about whether to use phrases or complete sentences, and whether to use their own words or words from the text. Having provided the table already partly filled solves these problems. • The marking must be fair and consistent. If the same marker remarked the tests, the learners should get the same score. If di erent people marked the tests, they should give ff the same score. This is helped if there is an answer key listing the answers with instructions about marking. To check this, get someone else to mark a few tests you have marked. Marking the information transfer part of the test will involve decisions that could a ect the consistency of marking. ff The table in Figure 6.1 has been deliberately made so that the answers are short and can be copied from the text. • The questions should be easy to understand. This a ects both reliability and validity. ff Comprehending the questions should be easier than comprehending the text. Answering might be di cult, but understanding the questions should not be di cult. If a question is di cultffi ffi ffi Assessing Reading • 89 to understand, then it will not be clear if a wrong answer was the result of poor comprehension of the text or poor comprehension of the question. To check this, check the vocabulary level and grammatical complexity of the questions. Get a native speaker to read the questions and answer them. Get someone proficient to translate the questions into the first language of the learners to see if they mean the same when they are translated. The questions in the Return Ticket, Please! example use simple language and language from the text. Validity • Answering the questions should require reading of the text. Sometimes it is possible to answer questions from background knowledge. Sometimes the choices in multiple-choice or true/false questions make it obvious which choice is likely to be the correct answer. To check if the questions require reading of the text, ask a very proficient reader, perhaps a native speaker, to answer the questions without having read the text. Getting that person to think aloud while answering the questions can be very revealing and can be a good guide to the particular changes that need to be made to each question. A few of the questions in the Return Ticket, Please! example can be answered by our well-informed person without reading the text, for example questions 1, 4 and 7. Question 3 about “trundled” could also be answered by a person with a very rich vocabulary, but this word is well beyond the eighth 1,000 word level. Several of the questions, however, require a careful reading of the text. Question 2 requires understanding the implications of “first”. Question 6 requires reading and understanding the text and making inferences. • The question should not use the exact words used in the text. If the question repeats part of a sentence from the text, the learners may be able to answer it in a cut-and-paste fashion without truly understanding the text. Questions that paraphrase the text will be more challenging to answer and will require understanding of both the text and the questions. The danger is that because di erent words ff are used in the questions, the questions may involve vocabulary and grammar that is more di cult ffi than the text. Questions 1, 6, 7 and 8 all involve words that are paraphrases of what is in the text. • The questions should measure reasonable comprehension. This means that the questions should not focus on items of small detail that a proficient native speaker would not remember from the text. The questions should measure comprehension not memory. They should also not require calculations or logical deduction that goes beyond normal comprehension. To check this, ask a highly proficient learner, 90 • Assessing Reading or a native speaker, to read the text and answer the questions. They should get all the answers correct. Filling in the information transfer table for the Return Ticket, Please! text involves quite detailed knowledge from the text and would best be answered by looking back at the text. Similarly, short answer questions 1 and 3 require information that might not be easily remembered without looking back at the text. • The sequence of the questions should not make it more di cult to answer ffi them. Usually the order of the questions should be in the same order as the information occurs in the text. Some researchers argue that global questions focusing on the main idea and overall understanding should come before questions on detail. This is not easy to check, but getting a highly proficient reader to read the text and answer the questions while thinking aloud can help with this. The order of the questions in the Return Ticket, Please! example follows the order of the ideas in the text. Practicality • The test should be set out so that marking is easy to do. If all the places to write the answers to a true/false test are lined up on the right-hand side of the answer sheet, marking can easily be done using an answer key which is held against the side of the page. If a space is provided for each short answer, then it is easy to find the answers and they will all be in the right order. Skill at designing an answer sheet comes with experience, but spending time carefully looking at the design can save a lot of marking time. To check this, see how long it takes to mark the test and how much page turning and searching is required when marking. Some of the guidelines above need not be followed if there is a good reason. For example, in a speed reading course it is usually a good idea to have several easy questions that could be answered without reading the text. This encourages the learner to keep reading faster without being overconcerned with detailed comprehension issues. Similarly, very di cult questions could be set if the reading has an application goal; that is, if the ffi purpose of the reading is for the learner to apply information from the text to solve a problem. In general, however, it is worth checking comprehension tests to see that they meet the above guidelines. For a further discussion of reliability, validity and practicality, see Nation and Newton (2009) Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Assessing Reading • 91 Issues in Making and Using Reading Comprehension Tests There are several issues that are of concern in the construction and use of reading comprehension tests. Should the Test Consist of One Text or Several Shorter Texts? A major reason for using several texts is to try to reduce the e ects of ff background knowledge on the test. If a learner happens to know a lot about the topic of the text, they are much more likely to do better on a comprehension test on that text. If several texts on di erent ff topics are used, this reduces the likely e ect of background knowledge because any one learner is ff unlikely to have good background knowledge of all the texts in the test. A second reason for using a range of texts is to make the test more representative of the di erent genres of texts that the learners ff will have to read in their normal use of the language. A third reason is so that there can be several questions each focusing on the same kind of information. For example, if the test is to measure skill in finding the main idea of a text, the test will be more valid if there are several texts each with its own main idea question. Should the Time Allowed to Sit a Reading Comprehension Test be Limited? Obviously, tests cannot be allowed to go on hour after hour, but in general if the aim of the test is to measure skill, it is best if learners have plenty of time to demonstrate this skill. Sometimes the distinction is made between a power test and a speed test. In a power test, learners have largely unrestricted time to show what they can do. A power test where many learners do not have enough time to answer every question is not going to provide a meaningful result. Should Learners be Allowed to Look Back at the Text when they Answer the Questions? If learners are not allowed to look back at the text, then the test involves a strong element of skill in remembering. When looking at the results of such a test, we do not know if a poor score is the result of poor comprehension, poor memory or both. It could be argued that for some kinds of reading it is important to be able to remember the main ideas of what has been read. If a teacher wants to include this skill in a test, then there should not be too many questions on each text, probably no more than four or five. The questions should also focus on what someone could sensibly be expected to remember, such as the main idea and main points rather than very detailed parts of the text. 92 • Assessing Reading Should Learners be Allowed to Use Dictionaries? Studies of the factors involved in reading usually show that vocabulary knowledge is the major component in reading comprehension. Thus, as a general rule, dictionary use should not be allowed during a reading comprehension test. Passages which are appropriate to the level of the learners need to be used. However, if the aim of the test is to find out how well learners can read a particular type of di cult text with assistance, then dictionaries ffi could be allowed. Studies of dictionary use in writing have shown that quite a large proportion of the time is spent consulting the dictionary. If dictionary use takes a lot of time away from reading and considering the questions, dictionary use may interfere with measuring comprehension. Should the Questions be in the First Language and should the Learners be Allowed to Answer in the First Language? The idea behind allowing learners to use the first language to answer questions is that this is more likely to directly measure comprehension. When the learners have to read second language questions and write their answers in the second language, comprehension of questions and second language writing skill are playing a part in measuring comprehension. Do the learners make poor answers because of poor reading comprehension of the text, poor comprehension of the questions, poor skill in writing answers in the second language, or any combination of these? If the learners feel comfortable with first language questions they could be worth using. When Marking Comprehension Questions Requiring Written Answers, should Learners be Penalised for Poor Spelling, Poor Punctuation, and Poor Grammar? Reading comprehension tests are supposed to measure reading tells the teacher the story of the picture and the teacher writes down the learner’s story in the learner’s words. This story then becomes the learner’s reading text. It is not di cult for the learner to read ffi because the language, the ideas in the story, and the sequence of ideas in the story are all within the learner’s experience. The unfamiliar part of the task, which is also the learning goal of the activity, is the decoding of the written words. Here is an example of how a writing task could be brought within the learners’ experience. The learners are given a task to do which involves some reading and a following problem-solving activity that they have to write up. After doing the reading, the learners get together in first language groups and discuss the reading and the activity they will have to do in their first language. When they are satisfied that they have a clear understanding of what needs to be done, they then individually do the activity and write it up in English. The discussion in the first language makes sure that they truly understand the knowledge needed to do the task and the nature of the task. Helping Learners Write • 97 There are several ways of presenting or controlling a task so that much of it is within the learners’ experience. Making Sure Learners have the Experience to do a Task If learners do not have enough experience to do a task, then either the task can be changed so that it is brought within their experience, or the learners can be provided with the experience which will help them do the task. A common way of providing learners with experience is to take them on a visit or field trip. For example, the teacher may take the class to a fire station. While they are there, they find out as much as they can about the fire station. They may even have a set of questions to answer. After the visit the writing task should be easier because the learners have experienced the ideas that they will write about, they have used or heard the language items that they need in the writing task, and they can choose how they will organise the writing. Their only di culty should be putting the ideas into a written form and this is the ffi learning goal for the task. Learners may already have experience that they can draw on, but they are not aware of the relevance of this experience or their knowledge of the experience is largely unorganised. By discussing and sharing experience, learners can prepare themselves for certain tasks. A more formal way of providing learners with experience to do a task is by pre-teaching. For example, before the learners read a text, the teacher can teach them the vocabulary they will need, can give them practice in finding the main idea, or can get them to study some of the ideas that will occur in the text. Table 7.1 shows the three main ways of making sure learners have the experience needed to do a particular task. Experience tasks are ones where the learners already have a lot of Table 7.1 Ways of Providing Experience Control through selection or simplification Recall or sharing of previous experience Pre-teaching or experiencing Using simplified material Using carefully graded material Using learner produced material Using material based on first language material Discussions and brainstorming Questioning peers Direct teaching of sounds, vocabulary, grammar, text types . . . Visits and field trips Direct teaching of content 98 • Helping Learners Write the knowledge needed to do the task. Preparation for experience tasks thus involves choosing topics that the learners already know a lot about, providing learners with knowledge and experience to use in their writing and, through discussion, stimulating previous knowledge relevant to the writing task. Here are some experience tasks for writing. In draw and write the learners draw a picture about something that happened to them or something imagined, and then they write about it, describing the picture. The picture provides a way of recalling past experience and acts as a memory cue for the writing. Linked skills tasks are the commonest kinds of fluency task. The writing task is set as the final activity in a series that involves speaking about, then listening to and then reading about the topic. By the time they get to the writing task, the learners have a very large amount of content and language experience to draw on. Such linked skills activities fit easily into theme based work (Nation and Gu, 2007). In partial writing, working together the learners list useful words that they will need in the following writing task. Ten perfect sentences involves the teacher showing the learners a picture or suggesting an easy subject like my family, cars, etc., and the learners must write ten separate sentences about that. They are given one mark for each correct sentence. At the beginning of a course, each learner chooses a topic that they will research and keep up-to-date each week during the course. This recording of information is their issue log. At regular intervals they give talks to others about their topic and prepare written reports. Setting your own questions is an amusing activity. Each student produces the question they want to write about. This is then translated into good English and is made into an examination question which the students answer under examination conditions (McDonough, 1985). Shared Tasks A task which is too di cult for an individual to do alone may be done successfully if a ffi pair or group does it. A well-known example is group composition where three or four learners work together to produce a piece of writing that is superior to what any one of the group could do alone. There are several reasons why this happens, particularly in second language learning. First, although learners may be of roughly equal proficiency, they will certainly have learnt di erent aspects of the ff language (Saragi et al., 1978). Second, although learners may know a particular language item, they may find di culty in accessing it. The prompting and help of others may allow them to do this. Third, ffi where groups Helping Learners Write • 99 contain learners of di ering proficiency, there is the opportunity for more personalised teaching to ff occur with one learner working with another who needs help. Many experience tasks and guided tasks can be done in a group, thus increasing the help that learners are given with the tasks. Most shared tasks have the advantages of requiring little preparation by the teacher, reducing the teacher’s supervision and marking load, and encouraging the learners to see each other as a learning resource. When doing a reproduction exercise the learners read or listen to a story and then they retell it without looking at the original. This type of composition is easier if the learners are allowed to read or listen to the story several times, before they write it. The teacher can tell the learners to try to write the story so that it is very similar to the original, or to add extra details and make changes if they wish. The same technique can be used with spoken instead of written input. The teacher reads a story to the class. After they have listened to the story, they must write it from their memory. If the teacher wants to give the learners a lot of help, the teacher reads the story several times, but not so many times that the learners can copy it exactly. As the learners cannot remember all the words of the story, they have to make up parts of it themselves. This gives them practice in composition. This exercise is sometimes called a dicto-comp (Ilson, 1962; Riley, 1972; Nation, 1991), because it is half-way between dictation and composition. Marking is easy. The exercise can be made more di cult to suit the abilities of the ffi learners. Here are three di erent ways of doing this, the second way is more di cult then the first, ff ffi and the third is more di cult than the second. 1. The teacher reads a short passage several times. 2. ffi The teacher reads a long passage once or twice. The learners can take notes while the passage is being read. 3. The learners listen to the passage once. When they write they must try to copy the style of the original (Mitchell, 1953). This activity is called a dicto-gloss (Wajnryb, 1988 and 1989) if it is done as group work and if the learners take notes during two listening sessions. To make a blackboard composition the whole class works together. The teacher or the learners suggest a subject and a rough plan for the composition. Members of the class raise their hands and suggest a sentence to put in the composition. If the sentence is correct it is written on the blackboard. If it is not correct, the class and the teacher correct it and then it is written on the board. In this way the composition is built up from the learners’ suggestions and the learners’ and the teacher’s corrections. When the whole composition is finished, the learners read it and then it is rubbed 100 • Helping Learners Write o the blackboard. The learners do not copy it in their books before this. Then the learners must ff rewrite it from memory. This last part can be done as homework (Radford, 1969). The teacher has only to prepare a subject. Marking is easy as the learners usually make very few mistakes when rewriting. The learners are divided into groups for group-class composition. The teacher gives the subject of the composition and then the learners in their groups discuss and make a list of the main ideas that they will write about. Then the teacher brings the class together and, following the learners’ suggestions, makes a list of the main ideas on the blackboard. After this is discussed, the learners return to their groups and write a composition as a group. When the composition is finished each member of the group makes a copy of the composition. Only one copy is handed to the teacher for marking. The learners correct their copies by looking at the marked copy when the teacher gives it back to them. It is useful if they discuss the teacher’s corrections in their groups. In group composition, the learners are divided into groups or pairs. Each group writes one composition. Each learner suggests sentences and corrects the sentences suggested by the other learners. When the composition is finished, each learner makes a copy but only one composition from each group is handed to the teacher to be marked. When the composition has been marked, the learners correct their own copy from the marked one. The teacher just has to suggest a subject. Marking is usually easy because the learners correct most of the mistakes themselves before the composition is handed to the teacher. The teacher marks only one composition for each group. When writing with a secretary, the learners work in pairs to do a piece of writing. One member of the pair has primary responsibility for the content and the other has to produce the written form. Guided Tasks Most coursebooks make tasks easier by using exercises that carefully guide the learners. This usually has the e ect of narrowing the task that the learners have to do. For example, ff guided composition exercises, such as picture composition, provide the ideas that the learners will write about. The exercises often provide needed vocabulary and structures and determine how the piece of writing will be organised. The learners’ job is to compose the sentences that make up the composition. Guided tasks provide a lot of support for the learners while they do the task. This has several e ects. 1. First, as we have seen, the task is narrowed. That is, the learners only do a part of ff the work that would normally be required in such an Helping Learners Write • 101 activity. This is good if that part of the task is worth focusing on and helps learners achieve a useful learning goal. It is not good if the narrowed task results in learners doing things that bear little relation to the normal wider task. Substitution exercises have often been criticised for this reason. 2. A second e ect of the support given during guided tasks is that it allows grading and sequencing of tasks. ff Experience tasks require the teacher to be sensitive to learners’ familiarity with parts of a task and to provide and stimulate previous experience where necessary. Guided tasks, on the other hand, are designed so that guidance is provided as a part of the activity. It does not have to be provided by the teacher. For this reason, most coursebooks for English language teaching contain a lot of guided tasks. For the same reason, teachers may be reluctant to make their own guided tasks because of the amount of skill and work that has to go into making them. 3. A third e ect of the support given during ff guided tasks is the high degree of success expected. If learners make errors in guided tasks this is often seen as a result of a poorly made task; that is, the guidance was not su cient. There are ffi several types of guided tasks which can work at the level of the sentence, paragraph or text. Identification In identification techniques the learners are guided by being presented with an item which they must repeat, translate, or put in a di erent form with a related meaning to show that they ff have understood or correctly perceived the item, or to show that they can produce the related foreign to leave now? (want) him last week? (meet) Some explanation of the grammar can be given at the beginning of the exercise. In backwriting the learners read a passage. After they have understood the text, they copy some of the key words from the passage onto a sheet of paper. Only the base form of the word is copied (i.e. walk not walking). The learners then put the text away and write what they remember of the passage filling in around the key words that they copied. Ordering In ordering techniques the learners are presented with a set of items in the wrong order which they must rearrange in the desired order. For example, the learners are presented with a set of letters o k o b. They must rearrange these letters to make a word, book. Words can be rearranged to make a sentence, sentences to make a passage, pictures to make a story, and so on. Ordering techniques can easily be combined with other types of actions. For example, the learners are presented with a set of letters that can be rearranged to make an English word. The learners respond by giving the first language translation of the word. With put the words in order the learners are given sentences with the words in the wrong order. They must rewrite them putting the words in the correct order. 106 • Helping Learners Write is city it very a important Follow the model shows the learners a pattern and gives them a list of words. They must use the words to make sentences that follow the same pattern as the model. He made them cry. saw I laugh let she go her fight heard him Instead of all the words, just the content words can be provided. Some ordering techniques, like the examples given above, can be done without the learners referring to any other clues. Other ordering techniques contain extra information so that the learners can do the ordering correctly. For example, the learners are given a set of words. The teacher reads the words quickly in a di erent order and ff while listening to this information the learners number or put the words in the same order as the teacher says them. Here is another example. After the learners have read a passage, they are given a set of sentences containing the main points in the message. The learners must put these sentences in the right order so that the order of the main points in the sentences is the same as the order in the passage. Substitution In substitution techniques the learners replace one or more parts of a word, sentence, passage, picture, story, etc. So, the input of a substitution technique has two parts, the frame which contains the part where the substitution must be made, for example a word, sentence, etc., and the item which fits into the frame. So, if the frame is a sentence, He seldom goes there., the teacher can give the item often which is substituted for seldom in the frame to give the response He often goes there. The learners can write sentences from a substitution table. 1 He They I We 2 said agreed decided pretended 3 that 4 it was not a problem. it was the right time. nothing could be done. The substitution table gives the learners the chance to practise making correct sentences, and to see di erent words that can be in each place in the sentence (George, 1965). In What is it? the teacher ff writes some sentences on the blackboard. The sentences describe something or someone. Here is one plan (Nation, 1978). Helping Learners Write • 107 It is thin. It is black. It has many teeth. It is made of plastic. We can find it near a mirror. It costs a pound. Everybody uses it. It is used for combing your hair. What is it? The teacher shows the learners how to change the sentences to talk about di erent things. While he does this the teacher follows the ff plan very closely. For example, a needle. It is thin. It is silver. It has a sharp point. It is made of steel. We can find it in our house. It costs five pence. You need good eyes to use it. It is used for sewing things. What is it? Then the teacher gives the learners the name of something, for example a pen, and they must describe it using the plan. He gives a few new words if they are needed in the description. Each learner can be given a di erent thing to describe. When the learners know how to follow the ff plan, it can be played as a game. One learner writes a description of something and then the others try to guess what it is. As they improve, the learners can add some sentences that are not in the plan and make other changes. The exercise can be made more controlled by asking the learners to follow the sentence patterns of the plan very carefully. It can be made freer by telling the learners to add any sentences that they need to make their description. Thus, everybody in the class can do the exercise with the better learners doing it in an almost free way and with the others doing the exercise in a very controlled way. Transformation In transformation techniques the learners have to rewrite or say words, sentences, or passages by changing the grammar or organisation of the form of the input. This type of technique also includes rewriting passages, 108 • Helping Learners Write substitution where grammar changes are necessary, and joining two or more sentences together to make one sentence. In change the sentence the learners are given some sentences and are asked to rewrite them making certain changes. Here are some examples. Rewrite these sentences using the past tense. 1. He wants to see me. 2. Do you like it? Make these sentences passive. Do not use the subject of the active sentence in the passive sentence. The arrow wounded him. He was wounded. 1. Some people pushed her over the bank. 2. The noise frightened her. For join the sentences (sentence combining) the learners are given pairs of sentences. They must join together the two sentences to make one sentence. This type of exercise is used to practise conjunctions, adjectives + to + stem, relative clauses, etc. Here are some examples. This co ee is hot. I can’t drink it. This co ee is too hot ff ff to drink. 1. She is still young. She can’t marry you. 2. He is tired. He can’t go. I met the man. You talked about him before. I met the man who you talked about before. 1. Your friend is waiting near the shop. The shop is next to the cinema. 2. I will lend you the book. You wanted it. There has been a lot of first language research on sentence combining generally showing positive e ects (Hillocks, 1984; ff Hillocks, 1991). The motivation for sentence combining for first language learners is that the most reliable measure of first language writing development is a measure related to the number of complex sentences (the T-unit). Sentence combining is thus seen as a way of focusing directly on this aspect of writing development. In writing by steps the learners are given a passage. They must add certain things to it, or make other changes. Here is an example from Dykstra, Port and Port (1966). The same passage can be used several times for di erent exercises at di erent levels of di culty.ff ff ffi Helping Learners Write • 109 Why the Hyena has Stripes (Part 1) 1 Ananse, the spider, and his neighbour, the hyena, decided to go to the river together. 2 There they met the King of the river who presented them with a gift of many fish. 3 Ananse and the hyena made a fire, and as Ananse cooked the fish, he threw them over his shoulder on to the river bank to cool. 4 H owever, the greedy hyena caught and ate all of them. 5 When Ananse turned to eat his fish, tears of anger filled his eyes. 6 The hyena asked the spider why he was weeping, but Ananse calmly replied that the smoke from the fire was in his eyes. 7 Nevertheless, he was already planning his revenge. 1. Copy. 2. Rewrite the entire passage changing the word hyena to zebra each time it appears. 3. Rewrite the entire passage changing Ananse, the spider to the spiders. (When either Ananse or the spider appears alone, change it to the spiders.) Remember to change both the verbs and pronouns whenever it is necessary to do so. 4. Rewrite the entire passage supplying adjectives before the words spider, hyena, and river (sentence1); shoulder (sentence3); eyes (sentence5); and fire (sentence6). 5. Rewrite the entire passage supplying your own verbal phrases at the beginning of the following sentences. Begin your phrase with the verb form given here: sentence1 (having heard); sentence3 (having agreed); sentence6 (seeing). In guided activities a large part of the writing has already been done for the learners and they focus on some small part that they must do. The activity provides support while learners do the writing. With marking guided writing guided compositions can be marked by a group of learners using model answers before they are handed to the teacher. The teacher just checks to see that the learners have done the marking correctly. Independent Tasks Independent tasks require the learners to work alone without any planned help. Learners can work successfully on independent tasks when they have 110 • Helping Learners Write developed some proficiency in the language and when they have command of helpful strategies. These strategies can develop from experience, shared, or guided tasks. Let us look at learners faced with a di cult independent reading task, such as writing an assignment. 1. An experience approach. ffi The learners could write several drafts. During each rewriting, the learners have the experience gained from the previous writings and preparation. 2. A shared approach. The learners could ask the teacher or classmates for help when they need it. 3. A guided approach. The learners could guide their writing by asking questions, by using an information transfer diagram or a well worked out set of notes that they have prepared, or by finding a good example of the kind of writing they want to do. A good independent task has the following features: (1) it provides a reasonable challenge, i.e. it has some di culty but the learners can see that with e ort they can do it; (2) it is a task that learners are ffi ff likely to face outside the classroom. The di erence between an experience and independent task lies ff in the control and preparation that goes into an experience task. Experience tasks are planned so that learners are faced with only one aspect of the task that is outside their previous experience. Independent tasks do not involve this degree of control and learners may be faced with several kinds of di culty in the same task.ffi Using the Four Kinds of Tasks The aim in describing the four kinds of tasks is to make teachers aware of the possible approaches to dealing with the gap between the learners’ knowledge and the knowledge required to do a task, and to make them aware of the very large number of activities that can be made to help learners. When teachers are able to think of a variety of ways of dealing with a problem, they can then choose the ones that will work best in their class. Let us end by looking at another example of the range of tasks available in a particular situation. Your learners need to write about land use in the Amazon basin. For several reasons this task will be di cult for them. There are ffi new concepts to learn, there is new vocabulary, and the text should be written in a rather academic way. What can the teacher do to help the learners with this task? The first step is to think whether an experience task is feasible. Can the teacher bring the language, ideas, needed writing skills, or text organisation within the experience of the learners? For example, is it possible to bring Helping Learners Write • students the teacher writes personal letters to each learner and they reply in writing. The only rule is each letter should o er the reader some new bit of information about the writer. This technique ff involves genuine communication between the teacher and the learners (Rinvolucri, 1983). Situational composition is a type of free composition. A situation is created using an advertisement, a letter, a table of numbers, etc. The learners must do a piece of writing that suits the situation. The language and the way of writing must suit the situation (Sweeting, 1967; Wingfield and Swan, 1971). Here are a few examples. • The learner is given a letter that must be answered. • The learner is given some facts that must be written as a newspaper report. • The learner is given some facts that must be written as a report of an experiment. Letter writing can be an activity between members of the class. The class can be organised so that some people pretend that they are working in a bank, others are working in shops, a tourist agency, a factory, a building company, and a school. They write letters to each other about various The Writing Process • 117 things, asking for information, looking for jobs, complaining about something, and so on. Or one class can become pen-friends with another class in another town or country. Learners research and write academic assignments. Learners need to be familiar with the form of assignments and the conventions for quoting and acknowledging reference sources. The use of a marking schedule can help learners with this if they see the schedule before they do the assignment. The marking schedule can include space for comments on handwriting, spelling and grammar, use of sub-headings, use and acknowledgement of sources, quality of organisation and quality of ideas. Gathering Ideas Leibman-Kleine (1987) suggests that techniques for gathering ideas about a topic can be classified into three groups. The first group consists of openended, free-ranging activities where all ideas are considered or the learners follow whatever path their mind takes. Typical of these are brainstorming and quickwriting. These activities could be preceded by relaxation activities where learners are encouraged to use all their senses to explore a topic. The second group consists of systematic searching procedures such as questioning (who, why, where, when . . .) or filling in an information transfer diagram. In all cases the learners have set steps to follow to make sure they consider all the important parts of the topic. Research by Franken (1988) has shown that when learners are in command of the ideas in a topic, the grammatical errors are significantly reduced in their writing. The third group consists of techniques which help learners gather and organise ideas at the same time. These include using tree diagrams and concept diagrams or maps. These all involve arranging ideas into relationships, particularly according to importance and level of generality. One of the biggest blocks in writing is a lack of ideas. Techniques which help learners gather ideas will have good e ects on all other aspects of their writing. For group brainstorming the learners get together in ff small groups and suggest as many ideas about the writing topic that they can think of. At first no idea is rejected or criticised because it may lead to other ideas. One person in the group keeps a record of the ideas. With list making before writing, each learner makes a list of ideas to include in the writing. After the list is made then the learner attempts to organise it and this may lead to additions to the list. Looping is when each learner writes as quickly as possible on the topic for 4 or 5 minutes. Then they stop, read what they have written, think about it and write one sentence summarising it. Then they repeat the procedure once more. 118 • The Writing Process Cubing is when the learners consider the topic from six angles: (1) describe it; (2) compare it; (3) associate it; (4) analyse it; (5) apply it; (6) argue for and against it. They note the ideas that each of these points of view suggest and decide which ones they will use in their writing. Other similar procedures include asking, “who, what, when, where, how, why”. So, for the topic “Should parents hit their children?”, the learners work in small groups and (1) describe what hitting involves, (2) compare it with other kinds of punishment, (3) associate it with other uses of physical force such as capital punishment, (4) analyse what cause–e ect sequences are involved in hitting, (5) apply the idea of ff hitting to various age levels, and (6) make a two-part table listing the pluses and minuses of hitting. After doing this the learners should have a lot of ideas to organise and write about. Using topic type grids. Information transfer diagrams based on topic types (Chapter 9) are a very useful way of gathering information before the writing is done (Franken, 1987). They can also be used as a checklist during writing. Reading like a writer is when the learner reads an article or text like the one they want to write. While reading the learner writes the questions that the writer seemed to be answering. These questions must be phrased at a rather general level. For example, the first question that might be written when reading an article might be “Why are people interested in this topic?”. The next might be “What have others said about this topic before?”. After reading and making the questions, the learner then writes an article or text by answering those questions. The learners make concept diagrams or information trees to gather, connect and organise ideas about the topic they are going to write about. With add details the teacher gives the learners several sentences that contain the main ideas of a story. Each sentence can become the main sentence in a paragraph. The learners add description and more detail. The learners can explain the main sentence in a general way and then give particular examples of the main ideas. Quickwriting (speed writing) is used with the main purpose of helping learners produce ideas. It has three features, the learners concentrate on content, they do not worry about error or the choice of words, and they write without stopping (Jacobs, 1986). They can keep a record of their speed in words per minute on a graph. For expanding writing the learners write their compositions on every second line of the page. When they have finished writing they count the number of words and write the total at the bottom of the page. Then they go over their writing using a di erent coloured pen and add more detail. They can make use of the blank lines while they do this. ff They then count The Writing Process • 119 the total number of words again. Further additions can be made using yet another coloured pen. The teacher can then check the work and get the learners to write out their final draft (Chambers, 1985). Organising Ideas The way learners organise ideas gives them a chance to put their own point of view and their own thought into their writing, particularly in writing assignments and answering examination questions. Often the ideas to be included in an assignment do not di er greatly from one writer to ff another, but the way the ideas are organised can add uniqueness to the piece of writing. Two possible ways of approaching the organisation of academic writing is to rank the ideas according to a useful criterion or to classify the ideas into groups. The use of sub-headings in academic writing is a useful check on organisation. With projection into dialogue the learners look at a model letter and list the questions that the writer of the letter seemed to be answering. They then use these questions to guide their own writing. After the learners can do this with model texts, they can apply the same procedure to their own writing to see if it is well organised (Robinson, 1987). Ideas to Text Some learners are able to say what they want to write but have di culty in putting it into written form. That is, they have ffi problems in translating their ideas into text. Some learners can do this but are very slow. That is, they lack fluency in turning ideas to text. A possible cause is the di erence between the writing systems of ff the learners’ first language and the second language. Arab learners of English have greater di culty ffi in this part of the writing process than Indonesian or French learners do because of the di erent ff written script. If the learners’ first language uses a di erent writing system from English, then there is ff value in practising the formal skills of forming letters of the alphabet and linking these letters together. There is also value in giving some attention to spelling. Some learners will find problems even in saying what they want to write. One cause may be lack of practice in writing in any language. Each cause requires di erent techniques to deal with it and teachers need to consider how to discover the ff causes and how to deal with them. Reviewing An important part of the writing process is looking back over what has been written. This is done to check what ideas have already been included 120 • The Writing Process in the writing, to keep the coherence and flow of the writing, to stimulate further ideas, and to look for errors. Poor writers do not review, or review only to look for errors. Chapter 10 looks at responding to written work. One way of encouraging learners to review their writing is to provide them with checklists (or scales) containing points to look for in their writing. Research on writing indicates that such scales have a significant e ect on improving the quality of written work (Hillocks, 1984). In peer feedback ff learners read their incomplete work to each other to get comments and suggestions on how to improve and continue it. The learners can work in groups and read each other’s compositions. They make suggestions for revising before the teacher marks the compositions (Dixon, 1986). Learners can be trained to give helpful comments and can work from a checklist or a list of questions (Pica, 1986). Editing Editing involves going back over the writing and making changes to its organisation, style, grammatical and lexical correctness, and appropriateness. Like all the other parts of the writing process, editing does not occur in a fixed place in the process. Writers can be periodically reviewing what they write, editing it, and then proceeding with the writing. Thus, editing is not restricted to occurring after all the writing has been completed. Learners can be encouraged to edit through the feedback that they get from their classmates, teacher and other readers. Such feedback is useful if it occurs several times during the writing process and is expressed in ways that the writer finds acceptable and easy to act on. Feedback that focuses only on grammatical errors will not help with editing of content. Teachers need to look at their feedback to make sure it is covering the range of possibilities. Using a marking sheet divided into several categories is one way of doing this. Figure 8.1 is such a sheet for learners writing university assignments. It encourages comment on features ranging from the legibility of the handwriting to the quality of the ideas and their organisation. The Writing Process • 121 Name Topic Assessment sheet for the curriculum design assignment Presentation and organisation Coverage of the relevant aspects of curriculum design Integration of experience and linking of the aspects Possible improvements and overall impression Figure 8.1 Example Marking Sheet Feedback to the writer provides a means of focusing attention on the language used in writing and on the writing skill. Note that feedback includes, but is broader than, correction. In order to make sure that this feedback is covering a suitable range of aspects of the writing task, it is useful to have some model or scheme on which to base the feedback. One way is to base the feedback on the parts of the writing process described above. That is, writers should receive comments on the ideas in their writing (Are there enough? Are they relevant?), the organisation of these ideas (Are they well organised? Does the organisation make the ideas clear and interesting?), the ways the ideas are expressed in the text (Is the language use appropriate? Is the language use clear?), and so on. Another way is to base the feedback on the various goals of language courses (Language, Ideas, Skills, Text). The value of having some model to base feedback on is that it makes sure that the feedback is not too narrowly focused on grammatical correction but covers a range of focuses. A useful way of 122 • • The Writing Process Table 8.1 Using Questions to Assess the Writing Process Parts of the writing process Questions Goals of the writer Model of the reader What was your purpose in doing this piece of writing? What is the main message of your piece of writing? Who were you writing this for? Did you feel that you should write this with a certain tone? Did you have a clear picture of who you were writing this for? How much knowledge does the reader already have of this topic? Did you think about that when you were doing the writing? Do you know a lot about this topic? Did you gather information from various sources before doing the writing? What were these sources? Do you find it easy to gather information for your writing? Gathering ideas Organising ideas Ideas to text Reviewing Editing Did you use sub-headings in your writing? Did you plan these sub-headings before writing or did you think of them as you wrote? Did you think of the reader when deciding how to organise your writing and what to give prominence to? Once you had the ideas, did you find it easy to write? How long did it take you to write this? Can you write quickly? Do you find it easier to talk about the ideas than to write them? Are you happy with this piece of writing? Can you see strengths and weaknesses in this piece of writing? What are they? Do you think you could still improve this text? Do you usually find one part of the writing process harder than the others? Do you follow a procedure when checking your writing? Can you use a spellchecker? Did you use it? Can you use a dictionary to get information on how to use a word? Did you do that in this piece of writing? Where? Are you able to correct many of your errors yourself? Do you follow a model when making a list of references? CHAPTER 9 Topic Types The purpose of this chapter is to look at one way of analysing the kind of information that occurs in non-fiction texts. The reason for doing this is to provide learners with a strategy for gathering information to write on a particular topic, and a strategy for taking notes from a reading text or a lecture. Using topic types is most suited to learners who are of at least intermediate proficiency. It is particularly suited to learners with academic goals. Topic type activities are well suited to group work. The Topic Type Hypothesis Although texts may di er in the topic they deal with, they may be similar ff in that they are all based on the same topic type. For example, a recipe for cooking fish curry, a set of instructions for using a cell-phone, a set of directions to a place, and a description of a teaching technique are all examples of the instruction topic type. The instruction topic type includes texts that tell (or instruct) you how to do something. The instruction topic type has the following parts. • • • • • the tools needed the materials or ingredients needed the steps involved the cautions or conditions involved in some of the steps the outcome or result of following the steps. Not all of these parts need to be present (following a set of directions to 127 128 • Topic Types get to a place does not need tools or ingredients). The only essential one is the steps. Here is an example of a recipe broken into its parts. Dumplings 1 cup self-raising flour pinch of salt 1 tablespoon of olive oil milk to mix Mix flour and salt together. Add milk and mix to a soft dough. Add olive oil and mix. Roll into balls the size of a golf ball. Place on top of a gently boiling stew. Cook for about 20 minutes without turning and with the lid on. Materials/ingredients flour, salt, milk, olive oil Tools/equipment (bowl, mixing spoon, pot of stew) Steps Conditions mix flour and salt add milk mix add olive oil mix roll into balls place on top of stew cook Result to a soft dough the size of a golf ball gently boiling for about 20 minutes without turning with the lid on Dumplings The topic type hypothesis says that texts on di erent topics but which are all of the same topic type ff will contain the same general kinds of information. Johns and Davies (1983) described 12 topic types. Some are much more common than others. Table 9.1 is adapted from Johns and Davies and lists the most important topic types and their parts. Topic Types Table 9.1 The Most Useful Topic Types and their Parts Characteristics What are the features of the thing described? What is the proof that some of these features exist? What general category does this thing fit into? What other information is there about this thing? Physical structure What are the parts? Where are the parts located? What are they like? What do they do? Instruction What are the steps involved? What materials and equipment are needed? What do we need to be careful about at some steps? What is the result of the steps? What does this result show? Process What are the stages involved in the development? What material is involved at each stage? Where and when does each stage occur? How long does each stage last? What acts at each stage to bring about change? What is the thing like at each stage? What happens at each stage? State/situation Who are the people, etc. involved? What time and place are involved? What is the background leading up to the happening? What happened? What are the e ects of this ff happening? Principle What is the law or principle involved? Under what conditions does the principle apply? What are some examples of the principle in action? How can we check to see that the principle is in action? How can we apply the principle? (Continued overleaf) • 129 130 • Topic Types Table 9.1 Continued. Theory What is the hypothesis? What led to this hypothesis? How is it tested? What are the results of testing? What is the significance of the results? Topic Types and Writing An important step in the writing process is getting information to write about. As the parts of a topic type are already specified, once the topic type of a writing topic is known or decided, it is relatively easy to see what kinds of information need to be gathered. For example, if the writing topic is to describe how to cut a circle out of a piece of wood, the instruction topic type, then the information that needs to be gathered is as follows. 1. 2. 3. 4. What are the tools that are needed? What materials, e.g. wood, are needed? What steps need to be followed? Is there anything that needs to be given special attention at any of the steps? Note that using topic types helps in the gathering of information but does not say how the information should be organised nor how it should be expressed. There are several ways of describing the steps. They can be written as imperatives as in a recipe (add two cups of sugar, mix well), or they can be written as declaratives (the butter is then added). The following skills are needed when using topic types to help gather information for writing. 1. The learners need to be familiar with the few topic types that are relevant to their area of study. They need to know the parts of each of these topic types. 2. The learners need to be able to relate a particular topic to a particular topic type. Here are some writing topics with their topic type. What is photosynthesis? How do you make a macro in MS-Word? How is chocolate made? Describe the baobab tree. Process Instruction Process Characteristics Topic Types What was the most frightening thing that happened to you? What are lemurs? Why can high interest rates lead to inflation? What are the parts of the eye? • 131 State/situation Characteristics Theory Physical structure Table 9.2 relates topic types and types of writing. Topic Types and Reading Knowledge of topic types is useful when predicting the kind of information that will be in a text, when taking notes from a text, and when evaluating the adequacy of a text. Table 9.2 Topic Types and Types of Texts Topic type Types of texts What happened? (state/situation) coconut with my pocket money. As I carried it home, I could hear liquid sloshing about inside. I could see three things that looked like eyes, on one end. When I got it home, I wasn’t sure what part you were supposed to eat. (Crook, 1978). In this text, the state/situation topic type (What happened?) is used as a way of making the text interesting and accessible for young readers. However, the content of the text (what learners should get from reading the text) is best viewed as an example of the characteristics topic type which tells what something is like, in this case what coconuts are like. The way to test for this is to ask “What should the learners know after reading this text?”. Clearly the answer for the above text is not what happened in the story (state/situation) but what coconuts are like (characteristics). This leads to the last caution when using topic types. Topic types deal only with the information in a text not with the structure of the discourse nor the vocabulary and grammatical devices used to express the information. It is possible to see connections between topic types and organisation and grammar and vocabulary, but these are not the main focus of a topic type approach. Topic Types • 135 Perhaps the greatest value of a topic type approach is in gathering ideas for writing where the topic clearly fits into a known topic type. Using guiding questions like those in Table 9.1 or information transfer diagrams can be a very e ective way of putting learners in control of the datagathering part offf the writing process (Franken, 1987). CHAPTER 10 Responding to Written Work The assessment of learners’ written work can have a range of goals. These goals can be classified under various headings. First, as we have seen in Chapter 8 on the writing process, assessment can focus on the product or the piece of writing itself, or on the process of writing. Second, assessment can di er in its purposes. It can aim at making a summative judgement on the learners’ writing for the ff purpose of awarding a grade, or passing or failing. It can aim at a formative shaping of the learners’ progress in writing by diagnosing problems, by providing encouragement to keep writing and to write more, and by providing constructive feedback on the content and form of the writing. Table 10.1 lists one range of options. Motivating Positive feedback on the content of learners’ writing can do a lot to increase the amount of writing that learners do and to improve their attitude to writing. This feedback includes comments like the following. “The part about the fire was really interesting. Can you tell me more about that?” “You wrote that the end of the movie surprised you. What were you expecting?” Written feedback like this tells the writer that their work is being read, is understood, and interests the reader. Especially with younger learners, it is important not to discourage writing by always giving feedback that points 137 138 • Responding to Written Work Table 10.1 Goals, Purpose and Means of Writing Assessment Goals Purpose Means Motivating Increase amount of writing Develop a love of writing Improve the written product Improve control of the writing process Positive feedback on the content Publication of the writing Peer feedback Conferencing Marking of errors Analytic assessment Use of checklists Self-assessment Analysis of the product Observation of the process Holistic assessment Analytic assessment Assessment of a portfolio Improving the quality of writing Diagnosing problems Measuring proficiency Finding poorly controlled parts of the writing process Award a grade out the errors in the writing. There should be a place in a writing course for feedback on errors but this kind of feedback needs to be very carefully balanced against the positive encouragement to write more, and these two kinds of feedback need to be separated. Another form of positive feedback is publication. This can take many forms. Reading written work aloud to others is a form of publication. Having your work circulated or posted on the wall of the classroom is another, and having it appear in a printed collection is yet another. Some learners are embarrassed by praise, especially in the presence of peers. One way of dealing with this is to praise the piece of work not the person. That is, rather than say “You did a good job with the introduction”, some learners may find it more acceptable to hear “The introduction was very clear and well organised”. The motivation to write is most helped by learners doing a lot of successful writing. Speed writing involves the learners writing for a set time each day and keeping a graph of the number of words written within that fixed time. Special praise is given to those who increase the amount they write within that time. Improving the Quality of Writing In Chapter 8 we have looked at ways of providing feedback on the various parts of the writing process. The techniques used to provide feedback to learners on their writing can di er over a range of factors. Table 10.2 lists the possibilities.ff Responding to Written Work • 139 Table 10.2 Factors Involved in Giving Feedback Source of feedback Teacher Peers Self Mode of feedback Spoken Written Both Size of audience Whole class Small group Individual Focus of the feedback Product—several aspects or narrow focus Process—several aspects or narrow focus Form of the feedback Comments Scale Checklist Amount of writing Single piece of writing A portfolio of writing 1. Source of feedback. The feedback can come from the teacher, from peers, and from the learners themselves in self-assessment. The use of peer feedback can reduce the teacher’s load but is also very valuable in helping writers develop a sense of audience. The use of self-assessment encourages metacognitive awareness of the writing process and the qualities of good writing. 2. Mode of feedback. Feedback can be written or spoken or a combination of these. Spoken feedback allows a dialogue to exist between the writer and the source of feedback. It may also be more e ective in ff getting the writer’s attention than written feedback. Written feedback provides a lasting record which can be used to measure progress and to act as a reminder. 3. Size of the audience. A teacher can give feedback to the whole class, to small groups or to individuals. Where there are common problems in the class, feedback to the whole class can save a lot of time. Working at the individual level, as in conferencing, can provide an opportunity to explore issues as well as give feedback. 4. Focus of the feedback. Feedback can focus on aspects of the written product as, for example, when marking scales are used. It can also 140 • Responding to Written Work focus on the parts of the writing process. The focus can also cover a range of aspects or parts of the process, or it can be narrowed down to focus on only one or two. Having a narrow focus can make peer evaluation more e ective. 5. Form of the feedback. Feedback can be guided by the use of ff checklists or scales. Feedback can be uncontrolled when spoken or written comments are given on the strengths and weaknesses of the piece of writing without the systematic coverage of a scale. Upshur and Turner (1995) describe a way of making scales which can be used for marking large quantities of tests with reasonable reliability and validity. 6. Amount of the writing looked at. Feedback can be given on parts of a piece of writing, for example, when someone sits next to the writer and reads what they have just written after every two or three sentences are written. Feedback can be given on the whole of a piece of writing, or on a portfolio of writing. The advantages of seeing a portfolio are that a range of genres can be looked at, the learner’s progress over time can be seen and commented on, and the assessment is likely to be more reliable and valid because of the numerous points of assessment. Let us now look at some techniques for providing feedback that draw on the factors we have just considered. The various combinations of these factors provide a very large number of feedback possibilities. We will look at a few that together cover most of the factors. Written Feedback to the Class Where learners in the class have common weaknesses and strengths in their writing, an e cient way of giving feedback is to prepare a written report that is handed out to ffi the class. This report can detail what the best pieces of writing were like, what the common errors and weaknesses were, and what to do about them. The teacher may also make individual written comments on each piece of writing but these need not be so extensive if they are accompanied by a class handout. This sheet also provides a useful record that can be looked at again by the teacher for later pieces of writing or for other years to see if the strengths and weaknesses are the same or have changed. If a grade is given to the pieces of writing, the handout sheet can also explain the range of grades and the criteria for each step in the grading scale. Oral Feedback to the Whole Class A very e ective way to give feedback on writing is to get the permission of two or three learners to put their ff pieces of writing on an overhead Responding to Written Work • 141 projector transparency and then go through them orally with the whole class. In e ect, the learners ff are watching the teacher mark a piece of work and this can help the learners see what the teacher is looking for and what the teacher values in a piece of writing. The teacher can also ask the learners to comment and can interact with them on points in the piece of writing. This obviously has to be done tactfully and with praise for the writing playing a large part in the commentary. The name of the writer could be kept confidential, but this is unlikely to be successful in a small class where learners know each other reasonably well. It is worth remembering that when the good points and bad points are mentioned, it is better to end with the good points so that the writer is left with a positive feeling about the piece of writing. If learners know that everyone has a chance of having their writing discussed in this way, they may be less likely to use it as a way of making fun of others. Individual Feedback Using a Scale One way of speeding up marking and making sure a balanced range of aspects of writing are dealt with is to mark each learner’s work using a scale. Each part of the scale can be accompanied by a brief comment explaining why that point on the scale was chosen. Here is an example of a scale. Aspects of writing Comments Richness of vocabulary 1 -------- 2 ------- 3 ------- 4 ------- 5 Mechanics (spelling, punctuation) 1 -------- 2 ------- 3 ------- 4 ------- 5 Grammatical accuracy and complexity 1 -------- 2 ------- 3 ------- 4 ------- 5 Organisation and coherence 1 -------- 2 ------- 3 ------- 4 ------- 5 Content 1 -------- 2 ------- 3 ------- 4 ------- 5 concordance (a list of sentences all containing the problem word) using Tom Cobb’s website (www.lextutor.ca) or using a downloadable concordancer and link this short concordance using the hyperlink function in the insert menu. Here is an example of a concordance for explain. 1. . . . te smoke screen . . . I have nothing to [[explain]].” As for debates, Clin . . . 2. . . . the famous and the powerful squirm and [[explain]], charge and countercharge. L . . . 3. . . . re he will call a Press conference to [[explain]] his sorry side of this financial mess.< . . . 4. . . . eting. Failure to attend the meeting or [[explain]] inability to attend, the letters said, . . . 5. . . . ited States, State Department officials [[explain]], now is mainly interested in setting u . . . 6. . . . inted with this sport I should perhaps [[explain]] that dividend stripping is essentially . . . 7. . . . resentative of Syria called upon her to [[explain]] that his brother would meet her at the . . . 8. . . . a garrulous American egghead tried to [[explain]] the difference between the Senate and t . . . 9. . . . Department officials were inclined to [[explain]] the April sales decline as a reaction f . . . 10. . . . recorder (the “black box”), which could [[explain]] why two engines fell from the plane a . . . 11. . . . to give a performance himself. This may [[explain]] why sometimes his films let personalit . . . 12. . . . term’s law clerks in their search to [[explain]] why Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Sou . . . 146 • Responding to Written Work By looking at several relevant examples, the learner can work out how to correct the error they made when using this word in their writing. All of these types of feedback require the learners to send their writing as a computer file to the teacher, and the teacher responding to it on the computer (see Gaskell and Cobb, 2004 for further description of these activities). Balancing the Feedback in a Course A teacher of writing needs to look at the range of feedback options and work out a suitable balance for a particular learner or a course. Balancing the feedback involves: • Considering the teacher’s workload. Having some peer assessment and self-assessment can reduce this. • Considering how the learners can develop their own self-assessment skills. Having the teacher model assessment, watching peers do it, and practising it with the help of checklists can support this. • Working out the knowledge learners need to improve their writing. Getting feedback on the writing process, developing grammatical knowledge, and gaining awareness of writing conventions can help this. Measuring Proficiency in Writing A good writing test should satisfy the demands of reliability, validity and practicality. One requirement for reliability is that the test should contain a good number of points of assessment. For writing, this means that any assessment based on one piece of writing is not likely to be reliable. Where the assessment is very important, Elley suggests the 2 × 3 rule. That is, learners should be assessed on two pieces of writing which are independently graded by three markers, or on three pieces of writing assessed by two markers. If this is not practical, then there should be at least two pieces of writing, with a second marker where the main marker has doubts. Analytic marking has also been used as a way of increasing the points of assessment. Analytic marking involves having a marking scheme that awards marks for things like richness and appropriateness of vocabulary use, grammatical accuracy, organisation, and overall communicative effectiveness. For each of these categories, marks from 0 to 5 can be awarded. The marks for all the categories can be added up to get a final grade. This contrasts with holistic marking where the marker reads the piece of writing and awards an overall grade for it. In analytic marking each point on each of the categories is arguably a point of assessment. The debate regarding holistic and analytic marking continues. What is Responding to Written Work • 147 clear from the debate is that assessing learners’ writing on just one piece of writing is likely to be neither reliable nor valid. A valid assessment of writing skill needs to consider the range of purposes for which learners write and the degrees of preparation they bring to writing. Some researchers are not happy with seeing a learner’s writing skill summed up in one grade. They argue that it is much more informative and helpful to provide a richer description which provides information about the various aspects of the writing process, indicating both strengths and weaknesses. Practicality is a major issue with the assessment of writing and has encouraged interest in peer feedback and self-assessment. Certainly, for non-native teachers of English, assessing writing can be a major challenge, usually requiring very high levels of language proficiency on the part of the marker. Marking is also very time-consuming, particularly if feedback to the learner on the piece of writing is required. This has encouraged the use of feedback sheets which provide categories for comments. Conclusion This book has described a wide range of techniques and strategies for improving learners’ reading and writing skills. These techniques and strategies should not be seen as isolated activities but need to be seen as ways of bringing the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning- focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development into practice. In other words, one of the teacher’s most important jobs is to plan so that a course provides a properly balanced set of opportunities for learning. Extensive reading is good. Intensive reading provides valuable opportunities for learning. Quick writing helps develop writing fluency. However, all of these activities need to help each other and be present in the course in the proper proportion, so that learners can have an effective range of useful opportunities to learn the language and develop skill in its use. There are many different ways of bringing the four strands into a course. It is possible for each lesson or unit of work to include each of the four strands in a roughly equal balance. This may be the easiest way of planning a balance, but if lessons are about an hour long, it is unlikely to be very successful because fluency development, for example, requires some sustained attention, and meaning-focused input works best if there are substantial amounts of input. Bringing the four strands into a unit of work which stretches over a week or two weeks is much more feasible. It is also possible to focus reasonably large parts of the course on one or two strands. Regarding fluency development, Brumfit (1985) talks of “a syllabus with holes” where the holes are parts of the course when no new language items are introduced. These provide opportunities for strengthening and becoming fluent with what is already known. 149 150 • Conclusion It is also possible to have a less compartmentalised approach where the four strands blend into each other. For example, a course based around themes may begin with meaning-focused input. This then becomes the focus of meaning-focused output with language-focused learning arising from it. Towards the end of the theme, the activities become fluency development because the learners have become very familiar with the material. This more integrated approach to the four strands needs to be monitored to see that there is a rough balance of time between the strands and that each strand truly exists. The initial motivation for developing the idea of the four strands was to make sure that courses were not dominated by language-focused learning. Three of the four strands are strongly message focused. However, it is not a virtue to go the other way, so that language-focused learning largely disappears from a course, and incidental learning (picking it up as the course goes along) becomes the sole means of learning. This is a danger to be aware of in content-based instruction (Langman, 2003). There is a place for language- focused learning in language courses and there is plenty of evidence, particularly in vocabulary learning, that a course benefits from having a suitable amount of deliberate attention to language features. This book has looked at the teaching and learning of reading and writing for learners of English as a second or foreign language. It has suggested principles to of difficulty. 2. What should be introduced first, c = /s/ or c = /k/? 3. This is a part of a reading text used with native speakers who are beginning to read. Which words could be dealt with phonically at this very early stage, which could not? Too Big by Materoa Tangaere (Ready to Read, Learning Media, Wellington, 2000) I am too big for my jeans. I am too big for my T- shirt. I am too big for my shoes. I am too big for my bike. I am too big for my swing. I am too big for my chair. But I am not too big for a hug. Spelling to Pronunciation Correspondences In the following lists, US pronunciations are noted in a separate column where they differ markedly from British pronunciations. Length marks have been used in the US transcriptions although this is not always common practice in the US. List A Vowels AV1 AV2 a a Brit /æ/ /ə, / AV3 aCV /e/ AV4 AV5 ai al all (al ar ay e /e/ /:l/ /:l/ /:/ /:/ /e/ /e/ AV6 AV7 AV8 US I.M.str. I.M.F.unstr. /:l/ /:l/ /:l/ /:r/ F. and before suffixes, str. M.str. I.M.str. M.F.str. M.str.) I.M.F.str. M.F. I.M.str. add back and human comma date bravely rain also salt all smaller ball talk arm dark far played may edge pen 154 • Appendix 1: Spelling and Pronunciation—Points of Correspondence AV9 AV10 AV11 AV12 AV13 AV14 e ea ee er i iCV /ə, / /i:/ /i:/ /ə/ // /a/ AV15 AV16 AV17 AV18 igh o o oCV /a/ // /ə/ /əυ/ AV19 AV20 oo (or (ore ou ow u (uCV (uCV y /u:/ /:/ /:/ /aυ/ /əυ/ // /ju:/ /u:/ /, i:/ AV21 AV22 AV23 AV24 AV25 I.M.unstr. I.M.F.str. M.F.str. M.F.unstr. I.M. F. and before suffixes, str. M.F.str. I.M.str. I.M.F.unstr. F. and before suffixes, str. M.F.str. M.F.str. F.str. I.M.str. I.M.F. I.M. I.M.F. M.F. /ər/ /:/ /oυ/ /:r/ begin problem eat leaf sea deep see pattern never in fish time writer might high on song obey second to bone chosen moon too horse for more out loud own blown low up run use human rule ruler F.str. (+ M.str. or unstr.) duty system Consonants AC1 AC2 AC3 AC4 AC5 AC6 AC7 AC8 AC9 (b = /b/ (bb = /b/ (ca (co = /k/ (cu (ce (ci = /s/ (cy (cC = /k/ (ck = /k/ (ic = /k/ (ch = /tʃ/ (tch = /tʃ/ (d = /d/ (dd = /d/ -ed, -d = /d/ -ed, -d = /t/ -ed, -d = /d/ I.M.F. M. I.M. I.M. I.M. F. F.unstr. I.M.F. M.F. I.M.F. M.F. suffix after /t/ and /d/ suffix after other unvoiced sounds suffix after other voiced sounds Appendix 1: Spelling and Pronunciation—Points of Correspondence AC10 AC11 AC12 AC13 AC14 AC15 AC16 AC17 AC18 AC19 AC20 AC21 AC22 AC23 AC24 AC25 AC26 AC27 AC28 AC29 AC30 AC31 AC32 (f = /f/ (ff = /f/ (ga (go = /g/ (gu (gC = /g/ (gg = /g/ (g = /g/ (ge = /d / (gi = /d / (dge = /d / h = /h/ j = /d / (dj = /d / k = /k/ (l = /l/ (ll = /l/ (Cle = /l/ (m = /m/ (mm = /m/ (n = /n/ (nn = /n/ (nk (n.g = /η/ ng = /η/ (p = /p/ (pp = /p/ qu = /kw/ (r = /r/ (rr = /r/ (s = /s/ (ss = /s/ (sC = /s/ (Vse = /z/ (VsV = /z/ -es, -s, -=s = /iz/ -s, -=s = /s/ -s, -=s = /z/ sh = /ʃ/ (t = /t/ (tt = /t/ th = /θ/ • 155 I.M.F. M. I.M. I.M. M.F. F. I.M. I.M. F. I.M. I.M. M.) I.M.F. I.M.F. M.F. F. I.M.F. M. I.M.F. M. M. before /k/ or /g/ M.F. I.M.F. M. I.M. I.M. after C or between Vs M. I. in grammatical and lexical words, F. in lexical words only M.F. M.F. when the C is unvoices F. M. suffixes after /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, / , /tʃ/ and /d / suffixes after other unvoiced sounds suffixes after other voiced sounds I.M.F. I.M.F. M. I.F. in lexical words 156 • Appendix 1: Spelling and Pronunciation—Points of Correspondence AC33 th = /δ/ AC34 AC35 AC36 tion = /ʃn/ v = /v/ w = /w/ AC37 AC38 AC39 wh = /hw/, /w/ (x = /ks/ (xC = /ks/ y = /j/ AC40 z = /z/ I. in grammatical words, M. in common lexical and grammatical words F. and before suffixes, unstr. I.M. I.M. when first letter in a syllable or following a C I. M. and F. after a stressed vowel M. I. and M. when y is the first letter in a syllable I.M.F. List B Vowels BV1 BV2 oy u ue // /ə/ /u:/ CV25 CV26 CV27 ur ur ure CV28 CV29 ure y / :/ /ə/ /υə/ /jυə/ /ə/ /a/ /eər/ /ər/ / :r/ /ər/ / :r/ /ər/ /υər/ /jυər/ /ər/ M.unstr. F. and before suffixes, str. F. and before suffixes, unstr. M.F.str. M.F.str. F. in unstr. suffixes F.str. F.str. I.M.str. M.F.str. F.unstr. in -ied suffixes, unstr. M.str. F. and before suffixes, str. M.str. F. and before suffixes, str. M.str. I.M.str. M. before consonants, F.unstr. M.unstr. F.unstr. F.str. M.unstr. F. and before suffixes M.str. M.unstr. F.str. F.unstr. F.str. captain hair unfairly sugar regularly shares care drawn law holiday these year earn heard news few money copied piece die tried bird so goes road oil voice effort doctor famous colour (not in US) boy success blue argued burn surprise pure picture dry 158 • Appendix 1: Spelling and Pronunciation—Points of Correspondence Consonants CC1 CC2 kn = /n/ ph = /f/ I. I.M.F. CC3 CC4 CC5 CC6 Cse = /s/ sC = /z/ s = /z/ wr = /r/ F. M. before a voiced C F. in grammatical words I. know photograph telephone horse husband is write Pronunciation to Spelling Correspondences Vowels /:/ /æ/ /a/ /aυ/ /e/ /ə/ / :/ /eə/ /e/ /əυ/ /i:/ // /ə/ // /:/ // /:l/ /u:/ /ju:/ /υ/ /υə/ /jυə/ // = ar (AV6); a (BV1) = a (AV1); aCe (BV7) = iCV (AV14); igh (AV15); ie (CV14); y (CV29) = ou (AV21); ow (BV6) = e (AV8); ea (BV3) = a (AV2); e (AV9); er (AV12); o (AV17); ar (CV3); or (CV19); ou (CV20); our (CV21); u (CV23); ur (CV26); ure (CV28) = ear (CV9); ir (CV15); ur (CV25) = air (CV2); are (CV4) = aCV (AV3); ai (AV4); ay (AV7) = oCV (AV18); ow (AV22); o (CV16); oa (CV17) = ea (AV10); ee (AV11); eCV (CV7); ie (CV13) = a (AV2); e (AV9); I (AV13); y (AV25); iCe (BV7); ai (CV1); ay (CV6); ey (CV11); ie (CV12) = ear (CV8) = o (AV16); a (BV2); oCe (BV7) = al (AV5) = oi (CV18); oy (CV22) = al, all (AV5) = oo (AV19); uCV (AV24); ew (CV10); ue (CV24) = uCV (AV24); ew (CV10) = oo (BV5) = ure (CV27) = ure (CV27) = u (AV23); o (BV4); oCe (BV7) Consonants /b/ /d/ = b, bb (AC1) = d, dd (AC6); -d, -ed (AC7) Appendix 1: Spelling and Pronunciation—Points of Correspondence /d / /d/ /f/ /g/ /gs/ /h/ /hw/ /j/ /k/ /ks/ /kw/ /k/ /l/ /m/ /n/ /η/ /p/ /r/ /s/ /ʃ/ /ʃn/ /t/ /tʃ/ /θ/ /δ/ /v/ /w/ /z/ • 159 = ge, gi, dge (AC13); j (AC15) = -d, -ed (AC7) = f, ff (AC10); ph (CC2) = ga, go, gu (AC11); gC, gg, g (AC12); ge, gi (BC1) = x (BC3) = h (AC14); wh (BC2) = wh (AC37) = y (AC39) = ca, co, cu (AC2); cC, ck (AC4); k (AC16) = x, xC (AC38) = qu (AC23) = ic (AC4) = l, ll, Cle (AC17) = m, mm (AC18) = n, nn (AC19); kn (CC1) = nc, nk, n.g (AC20); ng (AC21) = p, pp (AC22) = r, rr (AC24); wr (CC6) = ce, cl, cy (AC3); s, ss, sC (AC25); -s, -=s (AC28) = sh (AC30) = tion (AC34) = -ed, -d (AC7); t, tt (AC31) = ch, tch (AC5) = th (AC32) = th (AC33) = v, ve (AC35) = w (AC36); wh (AC37) - Vse, VsV (AC25); -s, -es, -=s (AC29); z (AC40); zC (CC4); s (CC5) (This list was developed by R. 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