Extensive Voluntary Reading and Listening
(EVR/L). What and How?
(B. Templer & T. Seizova-Nankova)
Part II.
Dr. Temenuzhka
Seizova-Nankova
Intensive Reading/IR The role of the
teacher in achieving it
Core Thesis
Intensive Reading/IR and Extensive Voluntary Reading/EVR
(Templer 2012) are complementary – the solution is a blend of
intentional and incidental learning.
IR: Reading (in order) to learn
A shift of focus from grammar to lexis (Seizova-Nankova 2011)
puts vocabulary size to the fore – this is central to the
teacher’s role.
Even advanced learners with large vocabularies can continue
to fill out their lexical knowledge, as many (or most) of the
words in their mental lexicons will only be partially mastered.
Even native speakers continue to learn new words throughout
their lifetimes.
Reading skills
How to make reading more enjoyable is a
big challenge.
Often the failure to find pleasure and
meaning in reading is caused by a lack of
the necessary skills and strategies.
Some suggested strategies:
skimming, scanning, inference etc.
Skimming and scanning
Do not read everything but just for
i) a general idea or
ii) a specific piece of information
Previewing
Consider the clues given by the
• title,
• contents,
• blurb,
• preface,
• introduction, etc.
Inference
One cause for worry are unfamiliar words:
the first reaction is to reach for a
dictionary, but this is time-consuming and
also demotivating, often unnecessary.
Inference: Not every word is important in order
to get the main idea. There are four stages to
this process:
• Decide from your knowledge of English
sentence structure and word-formation what
part of speech (noun, adj., verb or adverb)
the unfamiliar word is,
• the word before or after
• the grammatical endings
• the affix
Strategies
Success in determining and learning new
meanings, and linking new forms to meanings is
largely determined by the employment of useful
strategies.
Strategies (con’d)
Determination Strategies used by an individual when faced with
discovering a new word's meaning without recourse to another person's
expertise.
• Analyze any available pictures or gestures
• Guess meaning from textual context
• Use a dictionary (bilingual or monolingual)
Social Strategies involve interaction with other people to improve language
learning.
• Ask the teacher for a synonym, paraphrase, or L1 translation of new
word
• Learn and practice new words with a study group
• Interact with native speakers
(Schmitt 1997)
Strategies (con’d)
Memory Strategies (traditionally known as mnemonics, mental
processing) involve relating new words to previously learned
knowledge, using some form of imagery, or grouping.
•
Use semantic maps
•
Use the keyword method
•
Associate a new word with its already known synonyms and
antonyms
“Deep processing” strategies
•
Connect with synonyms
•
Ask the teacher to use it in sentence
•
Analyze the part of speech
Schmitt (1997) lists and categorizes 58 different types of strategies.
Goals of IR
• Linguistic competence – knowledge about the
language system/the code (Chomsky 1957)
• Communicative competence – which includes:
grammatical competence: words and rules,
sociolinguistic competence: appropriateness,
strategic competence: appropriate use of
communication strategies
• Collocational competence – Knowledge of a
co-occurrence of lexical items in combinations.
How to achieve it?
Collocation and its role in the study
of lexis?
What is it to know a word? - knowing its
• form – spelling/sound,
• morphological structure,
• syntactic pattern,
• meaning,
• connotation,
• pragmatics,
• lexical relations, and
• collocations.
J.R. Firth
• The British linguist J.P. Firth introduced the
term ‘collocation’. He famously stated (Firth
[1957], 1968, p. 179): “You shall know the
word by the company it keeps!” He noted that
one of the meanings of ass is its ‘habitual
collocations’ in a limited set of contexts (ibid.):
• E.g. “You silly ____”, “Don’t be such an
______” and in company with a limited set of
adjectives: silly, obstinate, stupid and awful.
USE vs USAGE
The term usage refers to conventions. When we
refer to "word usage," we mean the conventions
for using words, conventions particular for a
given language.
Use of words refers only to the employment of
words.
http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-usevs-and-usage/
Collocation structure
Node/keyword - an item whose collocations are
studied is called a ‘node’;
span - the number of relevant lexical items on
each side of a node/keyword is defined as a
‘span’,
collocates - those items which are found within
the span are called ‘collocates’.
Left and right collocates, use of concordances
(see J. Léon [2007]: pp. 14 and passim)
Corpus links
• Students can check a word or phrase, or even a
specific collocation, in several key corpora
online:
• BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
• Google books http://googlebooks.byu.edu/
• Corpus of Contemporary American English
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Concordance
http://www.just-the-word.com/show_examples.pl?triple=lazy_ADJ+mod_of+day_N
Collocation examples
The adjectives lazy and idle. They can be used in similar
constructions with the verbs: to be , to become etc.
(left collocates of adj.) but actually they differ in the
collocations with nouns they are used with: e.g. lazy
morning/river/journalists but: Idle
talk/chatter/conversation/time/chat/fun.
(right collocates of adj.). Idle has many more
connotations. Consider: ”There was nothing idle about
it”- trivial, silly.
FLLs know the basic meaning of lazy and idle but not
necessarily their collocational range.
Lazy – example 1
Artist/Band: Louis Armstrong
Album: The Very Best Of Louis Armstrong
Up a lazy river by the old mill stream
That lazy, hazy river where we both can dream
Liger in the shade of an old oak tree
Throw away your troubles, dream a dream with me
Up a lazy river where the robin's song
Wakes up in the mornin', as we roll along
Blue skies up above ....everyone's in love
Up a lazy river, how happy we will be, now
Up a lazy river with me
(instrumental break)
Up a lazy river by the old mill run
That lazy, lazy river in the noon day sun
You can linger in the shade of that fine ole tree
Throw, away your troubles, baby, dream with me
Up a lazy river where the robin's song
Wakes a brand new mornin' as we roll along
There are blue skies up above...and as long as we're in love
Up a lazy river, how happy we could be
If you go up a lazy river with me
Ah said with me now.....goin'up that... lazy river..... with me
From: http://www.musicbabylon.com
http://www.musicbabylon.com/artist/Louis_Armstrong/The_Very_Best_Of_Louis_Armstrong/Lazy_River.htm
Youtube, Mills Brothers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH1e6G0K3Pk
]
Lazy – example 2
• Lazy journalism is a term used to describe
situations where journalists use shortcuts
and/or simple stereotypes to explain,
sometimes sensationalising, ideas or thoughts
relating to a story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_journalism
Lazy – example 3
“Since the third year at University started, lazy
mornings are very rare. But it is really nice to
wake up from the sunlight, coming from the
window”.
29 Sept. 2011,
http://truedreamcatcher.blogspot.com/2011/09/lazymorning.html
Grammatical
collocation/grammatical patterns
• These usually consist of a noun, an adjective or
a verb plus a preposition or a grammatical
structure such as ‘to + infinitive’ or ‘thatclause’, e.g. to be afraid that. Some scholars
(e.g. Hoey 2000, Firth 1957: pp. 181-82) call
this ‘colligation’. It defines the grammatical
company and interaction of words as well as
their preferable position in a sentence (see also
Léon [2007]: pp. 5-6).
Lexical collocation/lexical patterns
They do not contain prepositions, infinitives or relative
clauses but consist of nouns, adjectives, verbs and
adverbs.
[verb + noun], e.g. launch a missile
[adjective + noun] e.g. strong tea
[noun + noun] e.g. land reform
[noun + verb] naming the activity which is performed by a
designate of this noun e.g. bees sting
[adverb + adjective] e.g. sound asleep
[verb + adverb] e.g. apologize humbly etc.
These combinations vary of course from language to
language.
Predictability Test
• enhance p---------e
• keep a d---• strong ---d and heavy r--• lodge a c-------t or p----st
• submit a r----t or pr-----l
• tell a s----
Key to test
• enhance performance
• keep a diary
• strong wind and heavy rain
• lodge a complaint/ protest
• submit a report or proposal
• tell a story (not *say a story)
Difficulties with collocations for ELLs
• students know the meaning of the English
word, but they do not know the collocational
range of that word
• they find it difficult to give collocates of a
word, especially if it is required to keep to the
same POS (part-of-speech).
• when translating from English, it is often not
easy to find the correct translation equivalent.
Compare English and Bulgarian
Examples:
• English: Ride a bike/*ride a car
Bulgarian: карам велосипед/кола
• English: Make a cake/*make my homework
Bulgarian: правя кекс/домашното си
Importance of learning collocations
• Part of the meaning of a word is the fact that it
collocates with another word.
• Enhances listening and reading comprehension.
• Increases fluency and frees the mind for other tasks.
• Second language learners rely on the semantic
framework of their first language, relabeling existing
concepts and then adjusting for the
differences/mother tongue interference is both
positive and negative
• Ways should be found to deal with frustrations of this
kind.
• In the long run, studying collocations helps language
learners gain greater confidence.
References
Ellis, N. C. (1997). “Vocabulary acquisition: word structure, collocation, word-class, and
meaning.” In: N. Schmitt, M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: description, acquisition and
pedagogy, (pp. 122-139) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Firth, J. R. (1957). “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-55,” in: F.R. Palmer (Ed.), Selected
Papers of J.R. Firth (1952-59) (pp. 168-205), London: Longmans.
Hill, J. 2000. “Revisiting priorities: from grammatical failure to collocational success.” In: M.
Lewis, (Ed.), Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach (pp. 4769), London: Thomson Heinle LTP.
Hoey, M. (2000). ”A World Beyond Collocation: New Perspectives on Vocabulary Teaching.” In:
M. Lewis, (Ed.), Teaching Collocation (pp. 224-243), London: Thomson Heinle LTP.
Laufer, B. (1997). “What’s in a word that makes it hard or easy: some intralexical factors that
affect the learning of words.” In: N. Schmitt, M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: description,
acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 140-155), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Léon, J. (2007). “Meaning by collocation. The Firthian filiation of Corpus Linguistics,” In: D.
Kibbee (ed.), Proceedings of ICHoLS X, 10th International Conference on the History of
Language Sciences (pp. 404-415), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. URL: <http://bit.ly/KEcHJ6>
Lewis, M. (Ed.) (2000). Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach,
London: Thomson Heinle LTP.
References (2)
Schmitt, N. (1997). “Vocabulary learning strategies.” In: idem, M. McCarthy (eds.),
Vocabulary: description, acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 199-227), Cambridge: Cambridge
UP.
Seizova–Nankova, T. (2011). “Primary Language Education and Computer-based Language
Study.” Presentation, BETA conference, Sofia/Bulgaria, March 31.
Swan, M. (1997). “The influence of the mother tongue on second language vocabulary
acquisition and use.” In: N. Schmitt, M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: description,
acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 156-180), Cambridge; Cambridge UP.
Templer, B. (2012). “Extensive free voluntary reading and free voluntary listening—some
thoughts on why? And how? in Bulgaria.” Presentation, BETA conference Ruse/Bulgaria,
March 31.
Author data
Temenuzhka Seizova-Nankova
Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen
Shumen, Bulgaria
tseizova@yahoo.com