Reading and Vocabulary Acquisition: Supporting Evidence and Some Objections

A R T I C L E S U M M A R Y Content list available at www.urmia. ac.ir/ijltr Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 28 Stephen Krashen/Reading & vocabulary acquisition: supporting . Before starting in, I present what I find the most disturbing argument presented in support of conscious learning and direct instruction. The Brain versus Society's Expectations A common practice is to describe some aspect of language that first or second language acquirers have not yet acquired or fully acquired, but one that people think the students must know to meet society's demands. It is then declared that the items or rules must be taught directly. Evans and Green (2007), for example, present evidence that students and faculty in higher education in Hong Kong agree that students have deficits in understanding academic English vocabulary. They then recommend classes in English for Academic Purposes as well as more testing in these areas (See also Hyland, 2000). What is not considered is the possibility that these aspects of language are lateacquired and will be acquired if the student gets more comprehensible input. If it is an aspect of academic language, it will be acquired by reading. The method of finding out if an item is late-acquired and can be acquired by the acquirer from comprehensible input is simple: Look at more advanced acquirers and see if they have acquired the item. If the results are variable, if some have acquired it and some have not, we can determine why by asking about their experiences, specifically how much reading they have done. This kind of investigation will not only inform us whether the item will be acquired, but will also give us some expectations as to what it takes. This is never done. Instead, it is assumed that these items should be taught, an approach that has never worked. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1(1), (Jan., 2013) 27-43 29 THE CASE FOR READING In this section, I briefly review the arguments supporting the view that vocabulary is acquired as a result of receiving comprehensible input, adding some recent research as well as older studies I missed. For academic vocabulary, this means reading. Read and test studies In these studies, subjects read a passage that contains words unfamiliar to them, are not focused on the new words while reading, and are given a surprise test on the words after reading the passage. In both first and second language studies, readers show clear evidence of increasing their knowledge of these unfamiliar words after having encountered them in print (reviewed in Krashen, 2004). Read and test studies not only tell us that it is possible to gain vocabulary knowledge from reading, they also tell us that the process is gradual and that quite a bit of reading is required to build a sizable vocabulary. Nagy, Herman, and Anderson (1985) and Nagy, Anderson, and Herman (1987) used measures that were sensitive to whether subjects had acquired just part of the meaning of a target word. Nagy and colleagues concluded from their data that when an unfamiliar word was seen in print, ‘a small but reliable increase of word knowledge’ typically occurred (Nagy & Herman 1987, p. 26), but this increase was enough to account for vocabulary acquisition given enough reading, about a million words a year for fifth graders. Second language research reaches a similar conclusion, based on findings showing that read and test experiences can produce transient results. Waring and Takaki (2003) did not use real words, but substituted nonsense spellings for real words in a text (e.g., ‘yes’ became yoot’). Subjects did well on tests given immediately after the reading, but scores dropped on a test given three months later. The low scores on the delayed test were not enough to account for vocabulary growth. One reason for this is the fact that subjects did not encounter any of the target words during the interval 30 Stephen Krashen/Reading & vocabulary acquisition: supporting . between the treatment and the delayed tests, because the words were artificial and do not occur in normal English. Waring and Takaki conclude that vocabulary growth requires many encounters with unfamiliar words – in other words, a great deal of reading (see also Brown, Waring & Donkaewbua, 2008). An objection: Medina, Snedeker, Trueswell and Gleitman, (2011) claim that vocabulary acquisition is ‘all or nothing,’ each word acquired all at once rather than gradually. In their study, adults observed brief scenes of parent-child interaction. The target words were replaced by beeps or nonsense words, and subjects were asked to guess the meanings of the target words. It was first determined that in only 7% of the scenes was it obvious what the target word meant, that is, only 7% were ‘transparent. ’ If subjects saw a transparent scene early, they often guessed the meaning correctly and did not change their mind with subsequent scenes. But if the first scene was not transparent, subjects did not discover the meaning of the missing word, did not get closer from seeing more nontransparent scenes, and, in fact, did not remember their guesses a few days later. My interpretation is that this study did not probe real vocabulary acquisition, but probed conscious learning. The subjects were well-educated college students. During the study, it was clear that the subjects were aware that they were trying to guess the meanings of the missing words and were trying to remember them. The missing words were not presented as part of highly interesting, comprehensible input; rather, subjects observed short, random scenes of parent-child interaction. Most of the input was, most likely, incoherent and boring. Thus, Medina et al. really found that for educated adults, transparent input results in conscious learning and that non-transparent input or less transparent input does not contribute to conscious learning. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1(1), (Jan., 2013) 27-43 31 Sustained Silent Reading In Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), students are given some time each day to do selfselected reading with no or minimal accountability. SSR students typically do better than comparisons in vocabulary development (Krashen, 1989, 2004), and this has been confirmed in a number of second language studies (Lee, 2007; Lee & Hsu, 2009; Rodrigo, Krashen & Gribbons, 2004).