Teaching Reading &
Vocabulary
TESOL program
Brett Reynolds (브레트)
Overview
•Introduction
•Vocabulary
•Reading
Overview
Vocabulary
– What’s a word?
– Goals of vocabulary
learning
– Knowing a word
– Guessing vocabulary
– Studying vocabulary
– Teaching & explaining
– Testing vocabulary
Reading
– Reading & the brain
– Human Information
processing
– Beginning to read
– Reading & vocabulary
– Purposes for reading
– Reading speed & skills
– Testing reading
What’s a word?
•Senses
•Tokens
•Types
•Lemmas
•Families
What’s a word?
Word senses
•Begin by teaching most common sense of a word
•Good dictionaries LDOCE, Simple Wiktionary
•Most common sense is usually overwhelmingly so
•Don’t teach other senses until the basic sense is well
established
Tokens
Types
Lemmas
Families
What’s a word?
Word senses
Tokens
•any instance of a word
• Vocabulary helps us and puzzles us. (6 tokens)
Types
Lemmas
Families
What’s a word?
Word senses
Tokens
Types
•all identically spelled words are one type
• Vocabulary helps us and puzzles us. (6 tokens & 5 types)
Lemmas
Families
What’s a word?
Word senses
Tokens
Types
Lemmas
•all regularly inflected words sharing a stem and
belonging to the same category
• jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, jumper, jumpers (2 lemmas)
Families
What’s a word?
Word senses
Tokens
Types
Lemmas
Families
•all regularly inflected and derived words sharing a stem
and belonging to the same category
• jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, jumper, jumpers, do, undo, redo,
doable, doing (6 lemmas, 2 families)
Goals of vocabulary learning
How much do learners need to know
–
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–
–
How many words are there in English
How many words do native speakers know
High frequency vocabulary
Low frequency vocabulary
• Idioms
Korean curriculum guidelines
Goals of vocabulary learning
How much do learners need to know
– How many words are there in English
• It depends on what a word is
• OED has about half a million words
• About 114,000 word families (Webster’s)
– How many words do native speakers know
– High frequency vocabulary
– Low frequency vocabulary
Goals of vocabulary learning
How much do learners need to know
– How many words are there in English
– How many words do native speakers know
• About 1,000 lemmas per year of life until finishing school
(why does it slow down after that?)
• Average adult knows about 20,000 word families
– High frequency vocabulary
– Low frequency vocabulary
Goals of vocabulary learning
How much do learners need to know
–
–
–
–
How many words are there in English
How many words do native speakers know
High frequency vocabulary
Low frequency vocabulary
Word frequencies (first 100 lemmas)
Word frequencies (first 1000 lemmas)
Goals of vocabulary learning
How much do learners need to know
–
–
–
–
How many words are there in English
How many words do native speakers know
High frequency vocabulary
Low frequency vocabulary
Word Frequencies (first 6,300 lemmas)
Goals of vocabulary learning
How much do learners need to know
–
–
–
–
How many words are there in English
How many words do native speakers know
High frequency vocabulary
Low frequency vocabulary
• Idioms
Idiom frequencies
•hit the jackpot: 0.32 (2.0 in 1940s)
•on a roll: 0.30 (2.21 in 1990s)
•ace in the hole: 0.04 (0.08 in 1940s)
•play(s/ed/ing): [somebody's] cards close to [somebody's]
chest 0.07 (0.06 in 1960s)
•wild card: 0.54 (1.38 in 1990s)
•shoot the works: 0 (0.80 in 1930s)
•put(s/ting) * money down: 0.05 (0.11 in 1990s)
•beginner's luck: 0.04 (0.32 in 1960s)
•anathema: 1.42 (about the 23,800th most common word
in the British National Corpus)
Goals of vocabulary learning
How much do learners need to know
–
–
–
–
How many words are there in English
How many words do native speakers know
High frequency vocabulary
Low frequency vocabulary
Korean curriculum guidelines
Knowing a word
Learning burden
Receptive vs. productive
Grammatical functions
Collocations
Register
Guessing vocabulary
Studying vocabulary
Key principles
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–
–
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Choosing useful words
Spaced repetition
Depth of processing
Motivation
Computer software
Word cards
Teaching & explaining
Harmer chapter
Reasons for explaining a word
Lower levels vs. higher levels
Anti-teaching
Testing vocabulary
Reasons for testing
Motivation & review
Evaluation
Overview
Reading
•Reading & the brain
– The role of attention & automaticity
– Human Information processing
•Beginning to read
– Phonological awareness
– Phonics
– Aural input
•Reading & vocabulary
•Purposes for reading
– Reading as a skill
– Reading as language input
•Reading speed & skills
•Testing reading
The role of attention & automaticity
•Humans have limited attention/memory
•Reading is hard
•
•
•
•
Print is unnatural
Topics are unfamiliar
No opportunity for feedback
Language style is formal
•Non-automatic processes require attention
•Understanding cannot be fully automatized
Human information processing system
Sensory store
Visual – Iconic memory
↓
Short-term memory
Auditory – echoic memory
(Also known as working memory)
↓
Long-term memory
Including episodic memory &
semantic memory
Phonological awareness
The understanding that words are made of smaller sounds
•In English
• Syllable
• Onset–rime
• Phoneme
•In Korean
• Syllable
• Body-coda
• Phoneme
Phonological awareness
Syllable
Phoneme
English
Korean
/koŋ/
/koŋ/
/k/
/oŋ/
/ko/
/ŋ/
Onset
Rime
Body
Coda
/k/
/o/
/ŋ/
/k/
/o/
/ŋ/
Phonological awareness
•In Korean, kindergarteners’ and second graders’ syllable
and phoneme awareness predicted their real word
reading skills.
•Korean has four syllable types: V, VC, CV, and CVC.
• consonants in the onset (syllable initial position) and the coda
(syllable final position) are optional
• consonant clusters are not allowed in Korean
•Children’s rhyming ability contributes directly and
indirectly to reading and spelling development in
English even after controlling for phoneme awareness.
•English allows very complicated syllables
• syllables may begin with up to three consonants (as in string),
• may end with as many as four (as in prompts).
Phonics
•Teaching children to connect sounds with letters or
groups of letters
• e.g., that the sound /k/ can be represented by c, k, or ck
spellings
•AND teaching them to blend the sounds of letters
together to produce approximate pronunciations of
unknown words.
Eye movement
•The distance the eye moves in each saccade (or short
rapid movement) is between 1 and 20 characters with
the average being 7–9 characters.
•Skilled readers make regressions back to material
already read about 15 percent of the time.
Aural input
Reading and vocabulary
Interactive model of reading
Visual input
•Letter recognition
•Phonological activation
Textual
understanding
•Textual meaning
•Sentence syntax
Word recognition
•Lexical activation
•Sense activation
Word activation
Purposes for reading
•Information
•Entertainment
•Language learning
•Because teacher told me to
Reading for language learning
•Intensive reading
•Extensive reading
Intensive reading
1. Vaguely identify general topic
2. Read through to improve general understanding
3. Reread with various focuses, for example:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Focus on vocabulary
Refocus meaning (overall organisation; listen & follow)
Focus on grammar
Refocus on meaning (personal reaction/evaluation)
Refocus on vocabulary (cloze)
Refocus on grammar (sentence jumbles)
Refocus on meaning (read-out-loud performance)
Reading Speed
Native speakers of English
•Reading for memorization: under 100 words per minute
(wpm)
•Reading for learning: 100–200 wpm
•Reading for comprehension: 200–400 wpm
•Skimming: 400–700 wpm
Non-native readers
•Often half the speed, even for proficient bilinguals
Reading strategies
•Reading for understanding
•Pre-reading
•During reading
•Post reading
Testing Reading