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 learnA 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 withdiscovering 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-use-vs-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 1Artist/Band: Louis Armstrong Album: The Very Best Of Louis Armstrong Up a lazy river by the old mill streamThat lazy, hazy river where we both can dreamLiger in the shade of an old oak treeThrow away your troubles, dream a dream with me Up a lazy river where the robin's songWakes up in the mornin', as we roll alongBlue skies up above ....everyone's in loveUp a lazy river, how happy we will be, nowUp a lazy river with me (instrumental break) Up a lazy river by the old mill runThat lazy, lazy river in the noon day sunYou can linger in the shade of that fine ole treeThrow, away your troubles, baby, dream with me Up a lazy river where the robin's songWakes a brand new mornin' as we roll alongThere are blue skies up above...and as long as we're in loveUp a lazy river, how happy we could beIf you go up a lazy river with meAh 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.htmYoutube, 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/lazy-morning.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 ‘that-clause’, 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 patternsThey 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 carBulgarian: карам велосипед/кола•English: Make a cake/*make my homeworkBulgarian: 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.

ReferencesEllis, 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. 47- 69), 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, Bulgariatseizova@yahoo.com