Reading and vocabulary

Date: Sat, 06 Nov 1999 15:24:48 +0100

From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

While I am in agreement with other posters on the utility of showing learners how to use dictionaries, I myself have never used one while reading, either in English or in French. Nevertheless, I have picked up a great deal of vocabulary. That is because I am very good at reading ; I learnt how to do it in a fully literate household and was able to handle books on my own by the time I was about four years old. This is unusual : most of the children we see at school do not begin learning to read until they are six years old or so, and do not have, as I had, the benefit of the full attention of a mother whose commitment to literature was such that she didn't even know she was committed.

Now, there's no point in moaning about this - the children we find in the schools are the children we find in the schools, and it's our job to teach them as they come. A lot of them come from homes where reading is not an ingrained part of family culture, where they do not see their parents, their aunts and uncles or cousins with their noses in a book. The literate have always been in a minority.

Reading is - for those who pick it up late, at least - a difficult skill to master. Many, if not most children are only barely literate when they enter secondary schools, if by literate we mean that they are at home with books, read fast and easily, and understand what they have read. Which suggests to me that Stephen Krashen's idea that a good way of getting learners up to speed with an FL is having them read extensively is rather akin to Marie-Antoinette's advice to bread- rioters. Although you will find some educational theorists who believe that you learn reading through reading - and although that's the way I believe I did it myself - it seems that for most children, that is not enough. Asking a fourteen-year-old whose lips move when he reads the blurb on a cereal packet to acquire a rich vocabulary through reading in an FL is, perhaps, a little bit much.

And when we *do* get them to read, it may be that the ever-open dictionary will only make things harder. We know that reading for sense demands a certain speed of intake - the slow reader doesn't understand what he is reading. Slowing him down even futher makes it that much more difficult to ensure that the input is comprehensible. Moreover, dictionary definitions are often misleading - even quite bright young people can trip up over their use, as I discover every week when marking translation work. Skillful dictionary use is for the committed and the expert language learner. We need to show them how to use these tools - and one of the first things I do is to try to persuade students that over- confident use of a poor dictionary can get in the way of learning. But we don't need to make reading an onerous and painful activity ; it already is just that to far too many schoolchildren.

Regards

Timothy Mason

iufm de versailles