Extensive reading and comprehensible input, explained

If you've spent any time in language-learning forums, you've seen people argue about “comprehensible input”. Some treat it as the only thing that works; others dismiss it as a fad. The research sits somewhere more useful than either camp, and it explains why reading is such an efficient way to learn.

What comprehensible input means

The linguist Stephen Krashen set out his Input Hypothesis in the early 1980s, most fully in Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (1982) and The Input Hypothesis (1985). His central claim: we acquire a language by understanding messages in it. Input has to be comprehensible, meaning you get the meaning even if you don't know every word, and ideally a little beyond what you already know. He wrote this as i+1.

Krashen separated acquisition, the unconscious process that comes from understanding, from learning, the conscious knowledge of rules. In his view only acquisition leads to fluent use. Later, in The Power of Reading (1993, second edition 2004), he argued that free voluntary reading is one of the most effective sources of comprehensible input there is.

What the critics say

Krashen's ideas were influential and heavily criticised. Barry McLaughlin's Theories of Second-Language Learning (1987) argued that key terms such as acquisition, learning and i+1 were too vague to test. Merrill Swain's research on French immersion students in Canada (1985) found that after years of rich input their comprehension was close to native speakers', while their speaking and writing still had persistent errors. She concluded that learners also need output: having to produce language makes you notice what you can't yet say.

Today most researchers would say that lots of comprehensible input is necessary, and that speaking, writing and some attention to form help as well. That's a weaker claim than Krashen's, and still a strong argument for reading.

What extensive reading is

Extensive reading is comprehensible input put into practice. Richard Day and Julian Bamford's book Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom (1998) made the approach widely known among teachers, and in 2002 they summarised it in ten principles in the journal Reading in a Foreign Language. Among them:

• The reading material is easy.
• Learners choose what they want to read, from a wide variety.
• Learners read as much as possible.
• The purpose is pleasure, information and general understanding.
• Reading is its own reward, so there are few or no exercises afterwards.
• Reading speed is usually faster rather than slower.

What the evidence shows

Reading volume matters

One of the best-known studies is Warwick Elley and Francis Mangubhai's “book flood” in Fiji, published in Reading Research Quarterly in 1983. Primary-school pupils learning English were given a large supply of illustrated storybooks. After about eight months, the classes that read the books made clearly larger gains in reading and listening comprehension than classes that followed the usual programme, and the advantage grew in the second year.

You need to understand almost everything on the page

Marcella Hu and Paul Nation's 2000 study found that readers need to know about 98% of the words in a fiction text to understand it comfortably without help. That's why extensive reading insists on easy books: below that coverage, reading becomes slow decoding. We go into the numbers in how many words you need to read a novel.

Words need many meetings

Studies of learning vocabulary from reading, such as Rob Waring and Misako Takaki's 2003 study of a graded reader, find that a single encounter with a new word rarely makes it stick. Words that come up many times across a book have a much better chance. This is the strongest argument for volume: the more you read, the more often the useful words come round again.

How to use this as a learner

1. Read a lot of easy text. Pick books where you rarely stop. Graded readers and classics written for children are ideal; see graded readers vs real books.
2. Choose what interests you. Day and Bamford put learner choice near the top of their list for a reason: you'll read more of something you like.
3. Keep some intensive work. A page or two of close reading, looking at structures you keep tripping over, fills in what easy reading skips.
4. Add output. Write a few lines about what you read, or talk about it. Swain's findings are a good reason not to skip this.
5. Review the words that matter. Spaced review gives important words the repeat meetings that reading alone might take months to provide.

Where Passage fits

Reading a classic at your level in Passage is extensive reading. Tapping a sentence for its translation and grammar is a small dose of intensive reading, and you choose when. That mix lets you read books a little above the 98% line without turning every page into a study session, which is close to what i+1 was meant to describe.

What Passage can't do is the output part. For that, talk to people.

Start with an easy book: Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Turkish or English.

Sources

• Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon.
• Krashen, S. (1985). The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Longman.
• Krashen, S. (2004). The Power of Reading (2nd ed.). Libraries Unlimited.
• McLaughlin, B. (1987). Theories of Second-Language Learning. Edward Arnold.
• Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass & C. Madden (Eds.), Input in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House.
• Elley, W. B., & Mangubhai, F. (1983). The impact of reading on second language learning. Reading Research Quarterly, 19(1).
• Day, R. R., & Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.
• Day, R. R., & Bamford, J. (2002). Top ten principles for teaching extensive reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 14(2).
• Hu, M., & Nation, I. S. P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1).
• Waring, R., & Takaki, M. (2003). At what rate do learners learn and retain new vocabulary from reading a graded reader? Reading in a Foreign Language, 15(2).

Questions