Legend Series #3 - Rob Waring (Notre Dame Seishin University)

For our third Legend Series interview, we turn to Todd Beuckens’s first interview with Professor Rob Waring. Professor Waring achieved legend status in the vocabulary and ESL reading learning field way before Lost in Citations was a twinkle in Jonathan Shachter’s steely eye. His papers have been cited thousands of times and read many tens of thousands of times more. Pairing him with the OG online graded learning master, Todd Beuckens, was a great idea, and all the credit must go to Todd and his network of knowing everyone and having connections to almost everything ELT in Japan and beyond. 

Their discussion was about Professor Waring’s 2019 paper, “Teaching extensive reading in another language,” which was very recent at the time of the 2020 interview. It is indicative of Dr. Waring’s enduring relevance that his work in the field has been required reading for ELT and ELF post-grads since the late 1990s.

Dr. Waring begins by following Todd’s prompt to explain how graded reading courses are usually designed and why they don’t often lead to the learning of new vocabulary:

(02:54)One thing that we typically hear when people talk about research into extensive reading, is they talk about the question how many new words are learned or how much vocabulary is learned from reading. And when this is operationalized into research, this typically means that a researcher or teacher would test the students on their vocabulary before the study, they would then give them some reading to do or they would test the students again on the vocab read probably the same vocabulary or the vocabulary in their reading. And the idea is to measure the difference between before and after the reading was done. And typically, the test would have be either a multiple choice test, or sometimes a translation test from the English into the mother tongue. This sounds from the outside like a very logical thing to do. 

Indeed, it does sound like a very logical thing to do. It is also the approach that is expected by both students and top-down administrators of a course so that the students can demonstrate to themselves that some learning activity has been undertaken and the administrators can see some demonstration of either diagnosis of a lack of progress or actual progress. What Dr. Waring goes on to explain is how this does not necessarily match with the concept of extensive reading:

(03:48) The problem with that is that if you think about the way that extensive reading works, is that in order to read extensively, you already need to know quite a lot of the words already. So 98, 99% of the words should already be known. The idea of extensive reading is to build fluency and automaticity when reading. So what that means is if students are reading extensively, let's say 100,000, or 200,000 words, most of these words they know already. What that means is, of course, they're not going to pick up many new words because they're not meeting many new words. And therefore the data show that not a lot of learning was done from graded reading. And that's an outcome of the way that the research was structured … we have quite a lot of confusion about people saying, well, we don't learn much from extensive reading. That's what the studies say, well, that's true, because you're looking at only new words. And as we know, it takes maybe 15 or 20 times that student has to meet the word before it's available. receptively. So we just have to be very careful about how we structure the research question. And we wanted to try to make sure that that confusion was, was clarified.

Essentially, the point is that extensive reading has a credibility problem because what is actually being taught is not vocabulary but systematicity and reading confidence. However, this is very rarely communicated well to either of the other stakeholders in the learning system, namely the administrators and the students themselves. What remains is whether the process of extensive reading is relevant to the overall intended outcomes of the course, which is to say, if the intention is to teach systematicity, then that is what should be demonstrated in any testing so as to reduce confusion as to why an extensive reading element of the ESL course is being recommended or implemented.

When learning a new language, we often hear that seeing, reading, saying, and using words leads to improved receptive abilities and, in time, productive abilities. And, this is generally true: more often generally means better retention and confidence in use. The problem with this approach is the sheer amount of time it takes to encounter new words through reading, as in order to understand the overall meaning of the text and therefore situate any new words in a context that makes them comprehensible, we need about 99% comprehensibility. 

This interview goes into great detail on the methodological prescription that addresses the shortcomings of extensive reading courses that focus mainly on reading a lot:

(14:33) What needs to happen in any program is to have balance. And Paul Nation has put forward the idea of four strands and the four strands involve deliberate learning of the grammar, the vocabulary, the phonics, and all those aspects of language which you can pay attention to deliberately learn, probably be deliberately tested on and you can check your knowledge, whether you've got it right or wrong, we also need to make sure that students have access to materials that they that they meet in volume. So lots and lots and lots of access to language. So the conscious learning that deliberate learning that Paul talks about in his four strands is something that I was talking about before, about training students how to guess words from context, making sure they know their morphological knowledge, making sure that they've got the phonics. So this is really important to have that. But they also need to see words in context and see how words are joined together with collocations, or in collocations, how the patterns fit, and just get a sense of what words go with what grammar and get a feeling for how the grammar works. But on top of that, they also need to have fluency. 

There is also discussion of what this means in practice, not just in conceptual methodology:

(16:03) So a dream reading program, probably, I think, is not the way I would look at it, I would say what's the dream language learning program, because it has to be seen as a whole, the reading component should involve some deliberate learning of safe phonics or maybe some intentional word learning some for some phonics if necessary, if you're if your students at the really low level, and quite a lot of building on vocabulary, skills and strategies, but also we need to have the intensive work where we're teaching students usually as a class, about particular strategies, reading strategies, obviously skimming, scanning, how to guess from paragraph, how to see the the structure of the text, and so on, all of this work needs to be done.

I’ll leave this blog here because you will get a lot more value from hearing the words of Dr. Waring on your own, considering them carefully, and then deciding how this approach to reading learning maps onto the time you have available in your courses and the intended outcomes of the courses themselves. As Professor Waring points out, most language learning courses are intended to improve fluency, with the aim of helping learners feel more confident using the language when it is most productive for them, be it in a personal or professional context. Extensive reading, intensive reading, or vocabulary study for specific purposes are, beyond a certain age, learner-defined routes of study, so, while you listen, consider which routes are best for either you or your students. Go on, have a listen…