Read · Listen · Learn
2020-11-02
We believe that reading is the best way to acquire a foreign language. But what is the evidence for its usefulness for learning new words? Here are two interesting stories on that subject...
In 1962, the English author Anthony Burgess published a book about the future called A Clockwork Orange. It was a dystopian novel and Burgess’ future was a frightening one where young people were extremely violent.
The novel was unusual though for another reason. The young man telling the story, who wore a bowler hat, used English mixed with a dialect that Burgess invented for the story and was nonsensical to us. It was called Nadsat and Burgess’ dangerous young storyteller used 241 words from this imagined language to tell his story. On average, he used them fifteen times each.
But what has this notorious book got to do with reading and writing to improve English language skills?
In 1978, three academics, Saragi, Nation and Meister, did a study with native speakers of English. They asked them to read the short novel and said that, after a few days, they would get a multiple choice test on what the book was about. They were not told to learn the Nadsat words. But, in fact, the test was ninety questions on Nadsat.
Surprisingly, the average score on the test was 76%. In other words, the adults had learnt three quarters of the words just by reading.
In 2003, in another piece of research, Hermann compared two groups of students learning English on how many unknown words they could remember from George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’. One group learnt the words by memorising them. The other group did not know they were going to have a test, on the vocabulary. After one week, the students who memorised the words did better than the group which did not know they were going to be tested. After three weeks though, in a surprise test, the two groups scored the same.
You might think that the people who’d learnt the words by heart had forgotten some and this was true. But the interesting thing in Hermann’s test was that the students who had not made an attempt to learn the words did 40% better than in the original test.
What does this tell us? Reading is the best way to assimilate new vocabulary and also to become familiar with grammatical structures.
Stephen Krashen’s ‘The Power of Reading’ (2006) provides a wealth of evidence to show that reading outside the standard curriculum is a powerful way to learn a language. Sadly, it’s the linguistic skill that is most neglected by students but if teachers work to change that attitude their students will excel at learning English!