Chinese Name:卓靜吟
English Name: Judy Cho
Class: 碩專一
No. NA4C0002
My Reflection on Paul Nation’s paper
"How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words"
This study gives me great courage to apply extensive reading to my students,
although they are still elementary school students and the suitable reading materials
for them are not as many as 4th or 8th 1000 word levels’. According to Paul Nation,
corpus sizes of just under 200,000 tokens and 3 million tokens provide an average of
at least 12 repetitions at the 2nd 1000 word level and the 9th 1000 word level
respectively.
I believe that suitable kind of input could help our students a lot in English
learning in Taiwan. Paul Nation advised learners to read lots of magazines,
newspapers and novels, and watch plenty of movies, fortunately for me to know the
best advice.
As a primary English teacher, I do want to help my students improve their
English in four abilities, especially English reading and writing. Because our Grade
1-9 Curriculum Guidelines in Taiwan recommend English teachers mostly focus on
speaking and listening skills, we teach reading and writing in class once in a blue
moon.
Also, here is another problem. Students usually have very few time in learning
English in school time- only two periods, eighty minutes a week. It is not enough for
them to build up great vocabulary to understand newspapers or novels or magazines,
not to mention journals. Nevertheless, I think watching some short extracts from
movies can be an appropriate method for kids to learn English vocabulary.
An essential condition for learning vocabulary is repetition and I believe that
extensive reading would benefit students more than teachers’ drill practice in class.
Drill practice is what I do every day because it is simple using flashcards to teach
vocabulary and asking students to repeat after me; however, for students, they can
Chinese Name:卓靜吟
English Name: Judy Cho
Class: 碩專一
No. NA4C0002
improve neither reading ability nor writing ability. If I had my students do vocabulary
drills all the time, they would not know how to use the word correctly in context and
they would know it segmentally.
As a result, it is necessary to select or revise suitable reading materials for our
students in order to read without unknown vocabulary no more that 2% of the running
words. If there are too many words that students do not know, students will quickly
lose their interest in reading. Paul Nation provides a large quantity of excellent
materials—Mid-frequency Readers. Mid-frequency Readers are adapted for learners
with a vocabulary size of 4000 word families, 6000 word families, and 8000 word
families. But, of course, they are still too difficult to read for primary kids.
I visited Paul Nation’s website and found some free graded readers, such as
Fire on the Mountain by Gerry Meister and Paul Nation. It is written within a
vocabulary of 700 words, obviously the most simple one. Nonetheless, perhaps this
graded reader is still too difficult for my sixth graders to read, unless some of them
have learned much more vocabulary than I have imagined. But next week I’ll still
extract a few lines from Fire on the Mountain for my sixth grade students to read and
see whether they can understand the meanings or not. If it is becoming too much of a
burden for them, I’ll surf the Internet to search for suitable materials or revise some
reading materials by myself.
How do I apply Paul Nation’ s advice to teach English in my classroom? I
have planned to add more reading materials that are suitable to my students and use
video clips from movies that are related to the content in our textbooks. As for more
details of practical actions, I am still thinking about it.