Benefits of extensive reading                Number of                          %
as perceived by the students                     mentions 


     increased reading speed                            27                             84.5%
     better comprehension                               11                              34% 
     reading enjoyment                                    11                              34%

Table 6 Student perceptions of changes in their reading at the end of the first term 

To read through a student's reading journal at the end of a ten-week term takes time for a class of over 40 students, but this is time well spent in understanding each student's achievement during the term and in gaining insights into different aspects of the students' learning. Some examples follow in the next section.

7.0 Questions and limits

Before looking at ways of bridging the gap between graded and authentic text, let us look at some questions that arise from using graded readers. These questions can help both identify limits and provide a rationale for second and third term course content.

Time

How much time is needed for extensive reading to succeed? Given the constraints (30 @ 75-minute lessons in one academic year for reading, with one lesson a week in each term), students must clearly spend substantial time outside class doing reading for an extensive reading programme in this context to work. A reasonable minimum weekly requirement would be between one and two hours outside class. From reading through the journals of four 'failing' students, we can see better why the question of time on task is so important:

Student A( reading total: 280 pages)

This student read six books and started off with detailed left-hand/right-hand page notes, but then left her journal blank from May 21st to June 25th.

Student B (reading total: 440 pages)

This student read eight books and made detailed left-hand/right-hand page notes throughout. He commented in his end-of-term self-assessment:

'I at first tried to read fluently from a word to a word. Every time I saw the unknown words I used my dictionary. It took long time. But gradually if there are a few words which I don't understand in the story I become to read not being anxious for them.'

'First I hated to read English books because I thought I couldn't understand them, but now I like reading them better than before. I became to be able to understand graduary.'

Control of text structure/patterning

Is a sole focus on narrative genre in the form of graded readers sufficient or not, where the stated goals of the first-year university curriculum are to prepare students for reading academic text in English in the field of their majors? In a small-scale piece of classroom research, carried out in June 1996, students were asked to read 8-10 pages of an intermediate-level graded reader and then to write a summary in English of what they had read. They had 35 minutes in which to do this. The opening of the story included characters profiles and four distinct episodes - that is, events set in different places, with different combinations of characters in each episode and different problem-resolutions. Of 39 written recalls,

• 2 failed to summarise any episode at all
• 5 summarised one episode plus part of a second
• 6 students summarised two episodes plus part of a third
• 17 students summarised three episodes plus part of a fourth
• 9 students sumarised all four episodes.

Elaborations of personal interpretations

In what ways do students develop their interpretive skills through double-entry journal writing? There seem to be at least three major stages in the development of such fundamental critical thinking (10). In the first stage, the student is able to give an opinion, but does not support it in any manner:

He did not know who his mother                He was very sad person.
was, for she had died soon after
his birth. (Oliver Twist)

The ship, the hero and his family              In the vast sea, to find an island
who went on board had the storm             is very difficult. I think the hero
for almost a week, and at last it              and his family was very fortunate.
struck a rock and began to sink.  
So, they took shelter from the ship 
by the boat. Then they found an 
island which had mountains and 
green forests. (Swiss Family 
Robinson)

I can't remember the last time I             He found he was really a human 
ate something. Listen to those                and humans were really animals. 
They are hungry too, of course.               I thought he was killed by wolves  
I'm an animal just like them.                  as their meal, and he accepted it.  
(The Year of Sharing)                            In the last page, Richard's mother  
                                                               said that he learnt to share and 
                                                               that the world belongs not just to 
                                                               people, but to animals, and we 
                                                               must all learn it. That is all I 
                                                               learned in this book. 

Reader response as a basis for teaching decisions

What strategies do students use, after a term of extensive reading, when they read a text and meet words and phrases they do not understand? In a small-scale investigation, 40 students were asked to read a newspaper article, and note down on the left-hand page of their reading journals any parts of the text which they couldn't understand, and on the right-hand page what action they decided to take at that point. Three strategies proved of roughly equal popularity:

• guessing from context (33%)
• checking in an English-English dictionary (28%)
• skipping and continuing to read (27%).

The identification of every word is not necessary for comprehension to take place. On the contrary, stopping to try and figure out every unfamiliar word the moment it is encountered serves only to produce tunnel vision and overload short-term memory. Comprehension is bound to be lost in such circumstances and learning becomes impossible. The tendency to stop dead at the first difficult word and thus to struggle uncomprehendingly through print a word at a time is a characteristic of poor readers of all ages.

As for variations in reading strategies, the following points can be noted:

• 60% used multiple reading strategies (a combination of skipping, dictionary and guessing);
• 17.5% used just one strategy throughout (of which 12.5% mentioned English-English dictionaries; 2.5% skipping and continuing to read; 2.5% guessing);
• 22.5% mentioned no strategy at all.

... reading is not simply a matter of correlating words as they occur in context with their dictionary signification but of creating value by the process of active interpreting.

We have seen how classroom research and student data enable us to understand reading as a continuous and multi-faceted process of interaction between lower level interpetive skills, such as contextualised guessing, and higher level interpretive skills, such as global text awareness and critical analysis. This accords with the Vygotskian theory of the ebb and flow between everyday and scientific concepts in cognitive development (Vygotsky (1934): 194):

Though scientific and spontaneous concepts develop in reverse directions, the two processes are closely connected. The development of a spontaneous concept must have reached a certain level for the child to be able to absorb a related scientific concept ... In working its slow way upward, an everyday concept clears a path for the scientific concept and its downward development. It creates a series of structures necessary for the evolution of a concept's more primitive, elementary aspects, which give it body and vitality. Scientific concepts, in turn, supply structures for the upward development of the child's spontaneuous concepts towards consciousness and deliberate use. Scientific concepts grow downward through spontaneous concepts; spontaneous concepts grow upward through scientific concepts.

In general, the term interactive approaches can refer to two different conceptions. First it can refer to the general interaction which takes place between the reader and the text. The basic concept is that the reader (re)constructs the text information based in part on the knowledge drawn from the text and in part from the prior knowledge available to the reader ...Second , the term interactive approaches refers to the interaction of many component skills potentially in simultaneous operation; the interaction of these cognitive skills leads to fluent reading comprehension... These two perspectives are complementary, though discussions in the literature tend to stress one perspective over the other, or to ignore one of the two perspectives altogether. In fact, most cognitive psychologists and education psychologists stress the interaction-of-skills arrays; in contrast, most second language researchers stress the interaction between the reader and the text.

9.0 Towards reading academic text

One way to approach this is to re-consider the reading tasks made of the learner faced with authentic text: the more difficult the text, the simpler the task, in short. How? In the first five weeks of the second term, the students are required to use a different extensive reading library; this consists of a set of 'How to' books, and includes titles such as How to Cook Italian Food, How to Take Colour Photographs, How to Stay Young, and so on. Originally produced for a native speaker general audience, these books are written in an easy-to-read manner.

Each week, the students choose a different book, and read it within certain limits: twenty pages in total, and not all pages to be consecutive, so they must choose a few pages here and there from different parts of the book according to their interests. Why? One indirect lesson that students learn with graded readers is to read through the book cover to cover. But in terms of independent reading, most people never actually finish a book: we usually read selectively rather than every last page. To do this, the students naturally need to be guided to make use of the table of contents, the index, and skimming skills. Furthermore, before the students select what they are going to read, they are asked to write down what they know of the topic so as to activate their real-world knowledge. While reading, the students are asked to focus on the main ideas by reading the first sentence only of each paragraph on their initial reading and keep notes in their reading journal; then, through subsequent readings and underlining of two to three phrases in each paragraph, they are required to create a mind map of the key points. In class, they then use their notes and mind maps as a basis for pair discussions, and write a summary of their discussion.

In the second half of the second term, students are asked each week to find an English newspaper article (12) of personal interest to them (between 300 and 500 words long) to prepare it in the following way before class. First, they cut it out and stick in their reading journal. Next, they read through the article to find answers to these cues: who? what? when? where? how? Third, they are to choose no more than six key phrases from the text; to copy these into their journals; to use their dictionaries to write paraphrases in English. Then, they are required to write a summary of the main points, and to finish this with their personal comments about the topic. Again, in class, they use their notes and summaries to give mini-presentations in pairs as a basis for discussion and for explaining key vocabulary to each other.

In the initial few weeks of the third term, students can be trained in lexical analysis of text where the goal is to identify the lexical relationships of equivalence, opposition and inclusion (McCarthy:1988) across two pages of expository text. Equivalence here means phrases which in the discourse realise the same locally instantiated meaning value with each other; opposition refers to phrases in the discourse which realise the opposite locally instantiated meaning value with each other; inclusive alludes to phrases in the discourse that operate in a general-detail relationship towards each other. In such a lexical analysis, the reader becomes a discourse analyst; and since the relationships are operating across long stretches of discourse (multi-paragraph), the analysis is simultaneously operating at both specific-local and general-global levels. (See Hoey (1993) for detailed analysis of how text operates lexically.)

In the final phase of the third term, students then apply everything that has gone before when they are asked to choose books from their own major; to read twenty non-consecutive pages; to prepare mind maps; to perform lexical analysis; to write a response summary; to present and discuss the contents of the book in pairs; to write a final self-assessment.

10.0 Conclusion

This paper has discussed options, problems and solutions in the organisation of a first-year extensive reading course. First, this analysis has argued that graded readers should form the initial core of a first-year reading course in order to raise reading confidence and fluency in students so that they can be prepared both to tackle higher level text and to develop more effective reading strategies later in the year. Research in the field supports this argument both in terms of reading development (Hill:1992; Huckin et al: 1993), and in terms of core vocabulary development (Nation: 1990). Second, this analysis has argued that an exclusive focus on the extensive reading of narrative text, though necessary and effective as a primary base, is however insufficient through the rest of the year. Attention also needs to be paid to the optimal simultaneous development of extensive reading and vocabulary with general readership expository text. Here, this paper has identified strategic lexical analysis and idea mapping as the key entry points. Further work remains, though, in investigating more finely the critical interface between extensive reading and 'sub-technical' core vocabulary - and the interesting choices that learners can make in moving from graded to authentic text.

Notes

1. Extensive reading library used specifically with Art and Design B 1993, Art and Design A 1994, 1995, 1996. Whole-class graded readers used as core content with Medical B 1996 (Love Story) for oral communication; with Bio-Resources A 1996 (Frankenstein) for writing; with International Studies A 1996 for writing (Cry Freedom). Variations on the lexical analysis approach mentioned later in this paper used with International Relations C 1995 for writing, and other classes in previous years, and being employed with 1996 reading and writing classes in second and third terms.

2. Until 1996, I used the library ticket system, but found this administratively cumbersome. The reading record sheet is more individualised, and provides an easily accessible update each week for both students and teacher.

3. Since I was off sick for three weeks in April/May 1996, and the students were unable to use the class library during this period, the total was reduced to 600 for the 1996 summer term. See Robb and Susser (1989), Kitao et al. (1990) and Day et al. (1991) for different extensive reading targets used at the university level in Japan.

4. This also provides a quick and unobtrusive means to check attendance. As regards loss of books, which is sometimes cited as a problem with extensive reading libraries, I've only lost one or two titles a year with each class. However, if you have a number of repeating students at the start of the year, some of them are more likely to 'disappear' - along with the books that they have checked out.

5.I came across this idea on the Fluency First internet discussion list run on TESL-L from the City University of New York where the emphasis was on writing skills. Simple and elegant, it lends itself to flexible variations according to local needs and context.

6. See note 3 for reasons why the reading total is lower than 750 pages.

7. Of some interest here is the fact that Weinstein's Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), a standardised psychological test that assesses learners' thought processes, behaviours and study techniques, includes time management as one of its ten subscales (Weinstein et al.: 1988). The other LASSI subscales are attitude, motivation, anxiety, concentration, information processing, selecting main ideas, study aids, self testing and test strategies. See Puntambekar (1995) for a description of how LASSI was used to help design an intelligent tutoring system that aimed to improve proficiency in metacognition for L1 teenagers.

8. See note 3 for reasons why there were no support tutorials for these students in the 1996 summer term. In contrast, support tutorials in the 1995 summer term enabled ten or so students to organise their reading so as to reach the term goal of 750 pages. Refer to 6.0 Student Documentation, Mid-term reports, for a brief explanation of such tutorials.

9. The focus would at this stage be on characteristic narrative structuring as a support for global prediction skills and for post-reading summary writing. See Carrell (1992) for using written recalls to assess formal and content schemata awareness.

10. Similar conclusions have been noted on the TESL-L Fluency First internet discussion list.

11.Vygotsky proposes five basic types of complexes, or concrete groupings of objects by 'factual' - as opposed to abstract-logical - connections: (i) associative complexes (ii) collections (iii) chain complexes (iv) diffuse complexes (v) pseudoconcepts; he argues that complexes act as one foundation of mature 'scientific' concept formation: 'The principal function of complexes is to establish bonds and relations. Complex thinking begins the unification of scattered impressions; by organizing discrete elements of experience into groups, it creates a basis for later generalizations. But the advanced concept presupposes more than unification. To form such a concept it is also necessary to abstract, to single out elements, and to view the abstracted elements apart from the totality of the concrete experience in which they are embedded. In genuine concept formation, it is equally important to unite and to separate... '(Vygotsky (1934): 135-136).

12. One problem, noted by Kyongho and Nation (1989), with one-off unrelated stories is the low repetition rate of vocabulary outside the 2,000 most frequent items. They recommend using running newspaper stories instead; this in turn raises the problem of students knowing which stories are going to run over more than one week if the emphasis is on (a) student selection of reading material and (b) practice of vocabulary learning skills, as it is here in the second term.


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