The gap between graded readers and unsimplified text
13 August 2008 - 3:51pm — Paul Nation
This is a current research interest of mine. By my best calcualtions there is a gap of around 5,000-6,000 words between the demands of unsimplified text and the endpoint of graded readers. Graded readers end around the 3,000 word level and unsimplified text requires a vocabulary size of around 8,000 words to get 98% coverage.
I would love to see something like the old Longman Bridge series revitalised where words beyond the 3,000 level but inside the 7,000 word level were glossed in the text, and words beyond the 7,000 level were replaced etc.
All we need is an adventurous publisher?
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Comments
Glosses good enough?
Wouldn't glossing of unsimplified texts be "good enough" for most purposes? In Japan, there are periodicals for English learners that supply footnotes (usually in Japanese) to explain the more difficult points. The Kodansha "Ruby Books" series has Japanese glosses printed in tiny characters below the harder English words. Online, there are services that will supply bilingual dictionary entries for most words in a web page's text if you just hover the cursor over each word of interest. Even my own company has an old website featuring clickable pop-up notes with simplified English re-expressions and explanations. One nice thing about footnotes is that they can be ignored if they aren't needed, so readers are slowed down only when they feel uncomfortable enough to stop and check.
Then we always have comics for adults, such as translated Japanese manga, and easier periodicals such as Reader's Digest. Teachers just need to make these things available or point their students toward the right sources.
There may be a shortage of annotated or glossed materials in some countries. However, I would think a publisher might be more attracted to a concept like that than to books such as a "Level 7" that would involve rewriting.
Gordon R. Luster
VP, Language Education and Research Network, Inc.
The gap between graded readers and unsimplified text
As a convinced proponent of graded reading for language learners even when it was out of fashion (as it happens, I once published a very readable graded reader co-written by Paul!), I was interested to see his comment on the gap between the top end of graded reader series and what learners encounter in unsimplified material. If it's true that a learner's heuristic capabilities can only operate effectively when a high proportion of the vocabulary in what is being read is already known (and personally I find that hypothesis persuasive), it does seem that the old Bridge approach had a lot of merit. Whether a modern equivalent should not only pay attention to lexis but also have some kind of limited formal syntactic control to avoid excessive complexity - or whether that would simply require interaction between the intuitions of author, advisers and editor - is a separate question which perhaps might be worth discussing!
I think Scott Miles is right that this is a level at which marketing would need some careful, and perhaps some innovative, thinking. In many countries we are probably talking of a level of language achievement higher than most secondary learners will reach, and arguably even beyond what is needed in initial intensive courses at tertiary level.
The institutional market for class sets, book boxes and even library copies may therefore be limited, and it may be necessary to think also of a bookshop market for a paperback imprint where the English is a little simpler than in titles written for native speakers. Around the world there must surely be an enormous potential demand for good quality books like that, both fiction and non-fiction. Part of the problem is, I guess, that general book publishers don't understand the educational and linguistic dimensions, and EFL publishers, even where a general book publishing arm exists within the group, don't have much contact with their general publishing colleagues.
Bookshops, too, like clear simple classifications for their various sections, and might initially be confused by what they would see as a hybrid. However, if demand could be unlocked by good publicity work in the media, accompanied by word of mouth recommendation (much more effective now in a world of blogs, newsgroups and online forums), I think they would quite quickly sit up and take notice!
Once such an imprint existed, there would certainly be interest from educational institutions too. The books would need to have a price and discount structure appropriate to the bookshop market (not least Amazon!), and this might lead to a higher recommended cover price than educational users are used to; but this could probably be offset by good educational bulk discounts for single-title or mixed sets.
One further thought: so far as I know, no publisher has yet produced first-year undergraduate textbooks following the same principle. In view of the number of EFL speakers now studying in English at tertiary level around the world, this seems to be another unfulfilled market need. I guess one would need to gloss not just the 3,000 to 7,000 level words, but also those from Paul's academic word list, as well as subject-specific technical terms; but I would suspect that the basic idea of not otherwise going beyond a 7,000 word level would be quite achievable.
Once again, I think perhaps the non-appearance of such books has quite a lot to do with a lack of communication between EFL publishers and their colleagues in academic publishing.
The gap between graded readers and unsimplified text
I think there might be a gap in an academic / mathematical sense but I don't think there's much of a gap for the learners.
The top end Graded readers are at the 3700 level (CUP) and 3700 and 5000 (OUP Progressives). Sure there aren't many of them but there are a few. If we look at coverage for the 3700 headword level, it covers 96.49% of the language. In other words even with a 3700 vocab the learner still has most of a general native text covered. The 8000th word covers 99.19% which is above the 98% level for fluent reading. The 98% level cuts in at the 5262th most frequent word. (Data from a lemmatized BNC range x frequency rankings).
From my experience learners at this level usually want to wean themselves off GRs and try native texts even if they are actually hard and even if the coverage rate isn't perfect for fluent reading. Sure this means that they'd be reading more intensively, but at the same time they'd be getting the huge motivation of being able to read native texts. Moreover, they would most likely choose 'easier' native texts - ones they feel the could cope with.
The other issue is, even if we did write bridge level books, which words would be select? The words are pretty random in terms of frequency and not as clearly 'useful as words up to the 2000 level. For example, the 10,000th most frequent word in English appears only .000001% of the time in native text whereas the 3700th appears .000014% of the time. Not much difference in my book.
Large gap
I knew there was a gap, but didn't realize it would be this large. A 'level 7' line of graded readers would be nice, but I doubt the market at this time is big enough for publishers to take a chance on it. I encourage my advanced students to read authentic books for teenage native speakers (Sweet Valley High, Goosebumps, etc.) but these may still be a bit tough for them and may not match their interests.
Online reading is one possibility. I've taken some texts from the Project Gutenberg site (short stories like The Cask of Amontillado and Country of the Blind) and modified them more or less as Nation recommends above. Seems to work well.