Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

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mentecuerpo
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Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby mentecuerpo » Tue May 11, 2021 5:59 am

An absolute beginner in a language would not be able to do intensive reading, only reading pain; according to the Extensive Reading Foundation. It will take high vocabulary knowledge to do intensive and extensive reading.

The site recommends grader readers, bases on the learner's level, but still, an absolute beginner with struggle painfully.

The Extensive Reading Foundation: http://erfoundation.org/wordpress/

ER Guides: https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/guides/

Extensive Reading Foundation (Promoting Extensive Reading in English as a Foreign Language):

There are four reading types: Reading pain, Intensive reading, Extensive reading, and Speed reading.

Reading pain: Too hard, poor comprehension, with effort, de-motivating, below 90% of know vocabulary.

Intensive reading: Instructional level, can learn new words and grammar, the students know between 90% and 98% of the words on a page.

Extensive reading: Fast, fluent, adequate comprehension, enjoyable, when the students know 98% or more of the words, then they are in the extensive reading "sweet spot."

Reading at the right level.
In order for students to benefit from their Extensive Reading, they should be reading at an appropriate difficulty level and at a good speed (150-200 words per minute or a little lower for beginning students) with a major aim of practicing the skill of reading itself.

Research indicates that if the students know about 98% of the words on a page, then they can read it quickly and with high levels of comprehension. Below 90% (one unknown word in 10), the reading becomes frustrating and slow, requiring a lot of dictionary use and comprehension suffers badly. The reading is at an ‘instructional’ level when the students know between 90% and 98% of the words on a page. At this difficulty level, they will know enough of the surrounding language that they will have adequate comprehension but will still need to look up many words if they wish to understand the text better. If the students know 98% or more of the words, then they are in the extensive reading ‘sweet spot’ and can read quickly enough because there isn’t so much unknown language slowing them down and so they can read enjoyably. If the students know everything, or almost everything, on the page, they can then read it very quickly and can use it to build reading speed and their natural reading ability.
Teachers should match the difficulty of the text with the aim of the reading. Students should read at the Instructional level if they wish to learn new things, or in the reading ‘sweet spot’ when the aim is to build Teachers should match the difficulty of the text with the aim of the reading. Students should read at the Instructional level if they wish to learn new things, or in the reading ‘sweet spot’ when the aim is to build reading speed and fluency. Whether a given text is ‘instructional’ or in the ‘sweet spot’ depends on the ability of the students themselves. Not all students in a class will read at the same level, and so a given text might be very frustrating to a low ability student, but very easy for a high ability student.


An obvious point in the reading definition, if the student does not understand the text, even if the student can phonetically pronounce the words, the student is not reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading
Learning to read (or, reading skills acquisition) is the acquisition and practice of the skills necessary to understand the meaning behind printed words. For a skilled reader, the act of reading feels simple, effortless, and automatic.[58] However, the process of learning to read is complex and builds on cognitive, linguistic, and social skills developed from a very early age. As one of the four core language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing),[59][60] reading is vital to gaining a command of the written language.
Last edited by mentecuerpo on Tue May 11, 2021 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby mentecuerpo » Tue May 11, 2021 6:24 am

Youtube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/1STEL7ZMFH8
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Re: Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby mentecuerpo » Tue May 11, 2021 7:33 am

Word Callers:
The student can decode the words in the text into their spoken forms without comprehending the passage.

Like children with a reading disorder coined "Word Callers," a language learner can have a text and decode the text into verbal sounds (or mental sounds, decoding silently) without understanding what he is saying and, potentially, finishing a whole chapter in a book this way. I imagine that it will not be extensive reading at all.

Below is an example of Word Callers, which can illustrate this point.

http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlxb/EN/10.3 ... 2016.01270

Abstract:
According to the Simple View of Reading, reading comprehension is the product of word decoding and linguistic comprehension. Both components are necessary for reading comprehension, but neither is sufficient alone. If a child can read words quickly and accurately, but does not understand the meaning of words, he or she will not understand the text. Some readers can efficiently decode the words in the text into their spoken forms without comprehending the passage. These students are called word callers. Although many researchers agree that word callers indeed exist in reading comprehension, few studies pay attention to Chinese word callers and the factors that may impact poor comprehension in Chinese word callers are unknown.
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Re: Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby Jinx » Tue May 11, 2021 6:43 pm

I've bookmarked the "Guide to Extensive Reading" as a resource to share with others, thank you mentecuerpo!

By the way, I think there's a typo in your original post here:
mentecuerpo wrote:Intensive reading: Instructional level, can learn new words and grammar, the students know between 90% and 80% of the words on a page.
That should be "between 90% and 98%", right?
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Re: Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby Iversen » Tue May 11, 2021 8:24 pm

The fifth reading type would be reading bilingual texts. Here you can form hypotheses based on a smaller vocabulary than otherwise necessary and get them confirmed or shot down on the spot.

Measured on the necessary vocabulary size you could probably put slightly hard reading of such texts at the same level as 'painful reading', but without the pain. Hurray! And relatively smooth reading would be at the level of intensive reading, but without the sweat and toil. The only problem is to get sufficiently long bilinguals because you can zip through a text quite fast when a translation is consulted along the way. Therefore the real advantage of bilingual texts is that intensive study of such texts is an surprisingly efficient learning tool because you can solve problems and get confirmation without delay. You can even survive on mediocre translations, as long as they follow the original closely. And then the text samples don't have to be particularly long.
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Re: Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby mentecuerpo » Tue May 11, 2021 10:26 pm

Jinx wrote:I've bookmarked the "Guide to Extensive Reading" as a resource to share with others, thank you mentecuerpo!

By the way, I think there's a typo in your original post here:
mentecuerpo wrote:Intensive reading: Instructional level, can learn new words and grammar, the students know between 90% and 80% of the words on a page.
That should be "between 90% and 98%", right?


Thank you!
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Re: Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby outcast » Wed May 12, 2021 1:36 pm

I have been for almost 3 months doing heavy reading in Korean. I just bit the bullet and plowed straight through the "painful reading". I didn't have much choice as I was determined to get Korean on the win column at any cost. I probably started at 50-60% coverage rate for texts, on "semi" graded texts (I have been using a series of 6 textbooks just dedicated to reading skills). I read almost every day for at least 2 hours and usually 4 or even more. I had to look up words again and again and again and again and again. It's not something I would recommend for two reasons. One, it is exceedingly frustrating, and actually almost outright painful experience (they are not lying). Two, you need to have TIME. Literally hours a day, because you lose so much time looking up words (even with modern day apps or web-based dictionaries), and it's not just the time you spend searching the word: it's the time you spend reading the definition, trying to understand it, and then going back and re-reading the sentence to see the word in the original context you first saw it.

Worse still, as you get into the intermediate levels of language, you are dumped into the dreaded "sea of words", where soon after drift straight into Hurricane "Synonyms", I don't know about everyone else but I cannot just learn a new word that is a synonym of a word I learned at an earlier stage WITHOUT the uncontrollable urge to find out if there is some slight difference in their meanings, or otherwise if their usage differs in any way. That's where you go down the rabbit's hole, because you are now not only searching again for the new word, you are searching for the old word too, and then trying to look online for information on how the two words compare, or what parts of speech can they stand in for (something tricky in Asian languages), or otherwise asking friends or whatever. Imagine doing that for even a few words a day, you are talking about at least 5 to 10 minutes. When all is set and done you had to read the entire text three times. And then it's on to the next text. One down, 60 to go in just the one volume of 6 levels.

I was very lucky to have this period of free time to plough through this. I spent mornings and afternoons, that's not something most people have. It has paid off obviously, as a painful but significant short-cut. I can now read Korean with a lot less strain to my eyes or mind, and I would estimate I have 95% coverage of spoken every day texts. I only probably have 85-90% coverage within more specific high-level texts, the ones I am reading right about now. Those are still a struggle as a result. But 85%-90% coverage is a monumental improvement over late February, where I would have at best been at 45% or so coverage.

I don't have any regrets, but I can see why people are always trying to find other ways to more painlessly get through this process.
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Re: Reading Pain, Intensive Reading, Extensive reading

Postby sporedandroid » Wed May 12, 2021 5:23 pm

I think going through reading pain might be useful if you’re learning a more obscure language. You just need some ground rules like making sure the text is short and making sure you have access to things like mouse-over dictionaries. I think the instructional level is the minimum level for reading books or longer texts.
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