The inescapable case for extensive reading
"Verb collocations of Idea. e.g. abandon an idea
abandon, absorb, accept, adjust to, advocate, amplify, advance, back, be against, be committed/dedicated/drawn to, be obsessed with, be struck by, borrow, cherish, clarify, cling to, come out/up with, confirm, conjure up, consider, contemplate, convey, debate, debunk, defend, demonstrate, develop, deny, dismiss, dispel, disprove, distort, drop …
…the occurrence of general English words above about the 2-3000 headword level, becomes rather random, unstable and unpredictable for selection. The data clearly show that learners wishing to master more than 3000 words must resort to upgraded texts as most graded reader series top out at around this level. However, doing this further complicates the task because as frequency lowers, each new word appears less frequently which in turn requires more volume of text to be written to meet unknown or partially known words (one’s “partially-known vocabulary”). Unless the volume of reading is increased, it is likely that any partial knowledge of a given word will be lost from memory especially as each individual occurrence of words above this level appears so randomly and unpredictably in ungraded text. These data together suggest that it is unlikely much learning will occur from only reading above the 3000 word level unless several thousands of words are read per day.
To this point we have examined the vocabulary task at hand. If we now turn to the grammar, we can see a similarly massive task ahead of our learners.
The…the present perfect tense appears with differing subjects and objects, as both yes/no and wh- question forms, in the negative as well as declarative. It can be active or passive, continuous or simple, with have or has and that does not count the myriad regular and irregular past participle forms and the short answer forms. There are about 75 different possible variations of the form of the present perfect tense – and that does not count the different uses such as present perfect for experiences (I’ve been to Paris), present perfect for recent news (He’s got a new car); or present perfect for recently completed events (He’s just finished dinner)! Nor does it count how the present perfect is different from say the past simple or past perfect tenses.
To be able to master the form, function and pragmatic information underlying the forms, let alone the different uses and nuances of the present perfect tense as well as learning how it differs from other tenses, must surely take thousands and thousands of meetings.
We have a fairly good idea about the uptake rates for words, but what about grammatical features? It is sad to say that after an exhaustive search for the uptake rates of grammatical features it appears that in the whole history of language research there is no data at all. None. This is amazing given that the vast majority of language courses taught today have a grammatical focus at least in part.
One might easily conclude from the above that we should not ask learners to learn vocabulary incidentally from reading, but rather adopt a systematic and intensive approach to direct vocabulary learning such as with word cards. One might even go further to conclude that by doing so, learners would not need to “waste” time reading, because they can learn faster from intentional learning and free up valuable class / learning time. However, this would be a grave mistake and a fundamentally flawed conclusion because language learning is far more complex than the extremely simplistic picture given above.
As has been mentioned, the above mentioned studies and the data in Table 1, define a “word” as a single meaning based on orthographic forms that a computer can understand and thus polysemous meanings, collocations and so forth were omitted which vastly underestimates the actual task at hand. To really know a word well, learners need to know not only meanings and spellings, but the nuances of its meanings, its register, whether it is more commonly used for speaking or writing, which discourse categories it is usually found in, as well as its collocations and colligations, among many other things. The above studies see words as single stand-alone objects rather than words that co-exist and are co-learnt (and forgotten) with other words. They vastly underestimate what might be learnt because they only look at a partial, though very important, picture of word learning – the learning of single meanings...
Where are the books that systematically teach this “deeper” vocabulary knowledge and recycle it dozens or hundreds of times beyond the form-meaning relationship (collocation etc.) for even the 1000 most frequent words? A few books exist but do not even come close to more than random selection of a choice few collocations, whereas as we have seen, learners need vastly more. In short, these materials do not exist. Even if they did, it would take a monumental amount of motivation to plough through such books intentionally and I doubt few, if any, learners have this stamina."
http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_wh ... _vital.htmResearch on vocabulary acquisition through listening is limited.