Chapter 8 – Reading Skills
How Do We Know? Support for the Principles
Keli Yerian and Bibi Halima
There is plenty of evidence in research to support the reading principles we have introduced so far in this chapter. Let’s focus on the benefits of extensive reading first. Waring (2022) defines extensive reading as “[T]he reading of a large amount of material with high comprehension and minimal interruptions and is the type of reading we do in our daily life in our first language when we read novels, webpages, and emails” (p. 384).
Studies on extensive reading show that reading extensively at an appropriate level is more effective than only intensively reading or studying in a language (Nakanishi, 2015). As just one example, Suk (2017) designed a quasi-experimental study of 171 English learners in Korea who were divided among four classes for a period of 15 weeks. The two control groups did 100 minutes of intensive reading in their classes per week, while the two experimental groups did 70 minutes of intensive reading and 30 minutes of extensive reading. In other words, the experimental groups still engaged in intensive classroom reading instruction, but 30% less time, while the rest of their time was spent just silently reading for pleasure at their levels. The experimental groups strongly outperformed the control groups at the end of the term on comprehension, reading rate, and vocabulary tests. Extensive reading allowed these students to improve their reading and vocabulary skills implicitly (remember Chapter 2), promoting “the incremental growth of habitual associative knowledge, the tacit learning of co-occurrence patterns in the input we receive” (p. 74).
One reason learners are so successful in extensive reading programs is that they are generally able to choose content they are interested in. Considerable research on both L1 and L2 learners has shown that students who have a strong interest in the topics they are reading are more likely to engage and learn more effectively (Asgari et al., 2019). One study of 34 adult learners of English in Iran, for example, showed that the students who were able to read about topics that interested them scored higher on subsequent assessments than those who were reading topics of less interest to them (Ebrahimi & Javanbakht, 2015). These results show that learners will improve when reading topics they enjoy. We can infer from this that even if we can’t control the reading materials in a class or in an app, we can explore topics on our own that interest us. This will keep our motivation strong and will allow us to learn more with less effort.
For adult language learners, graded readers can be perfect for extensive reading on topics that interest us, especially at novice levels, because they are designed to include different levels of the most frequently used words in a language. Novice-level graded readers include only the first 500-1000 most frequent word families and are also controlled for more simple gra