Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing by I.S.P. Nation

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          I read this book because of my commitment to try and read 10 pages a day of something related to TESOL or linguistics for the purposes of professional development.

            This book was in the teacher’s resource center at my school, and moreover it was recommended to me by a co-worker, who said that this book had good advice on how to run an extensive reading program (something we are both interested in) and that it was one of the few books in our teacher’s resource center that was published within the last few years (published in 2009) and so presumably contains up-to-date research.

The Review

            Obviously this book is not pleasure reading.  (There’s no reason for anyone who’s not involved in teaching English to pick this book up.)

            However, for those of us involved in the field, it’s a great resource. 

            For one thing, the book is very readable.  The author states in the preface: “I have attempted to write the book using clear and simple language. Wherever possible, technical terms have been avoided.”  I’m pleased to report that he succeeds in this attempt.

            Secondly, there are a number of really great ideas in this short little book.  “Around one hundred teaching techniques are described in this book” (from the preface).  Given that this book is only 150 pages long, that’s a lot of techniques gained in a very short amount of time.

            Of course, as with all teaching methodology books, the reader should never uncritically accept all of the suggestions.  I have reservations about a couple of the techniques suggested in this book.  (I’ll get around to nitpicking it more below).  But there were a number of techniques from this book that really appealed to me, and that I’ve already started trying out in the classroom.

            Even assuming you only agree with 50% of what the author has to say, that’s still about 50 new techniques you can gain in a short amount of time.

            I’ll start by talking about:

Some Useful Ideas I Gained from this Book

* As mentioned above, this book was recommended to me because it contained good advice about running an extensive reading program.  And there is a lot of useful information on that topic.

            Nation gives a lot of information on graded readers—reading materials specifically designed for ESL students which are carefully controlled for vocabulary and are divided into several levels.

            For example, Nation says that in order to maximize learning new vocabulary, the learners need to read at least one graded reader every week.  Any less than that, and they won’t encounter new words frequently enough to learn them.  (Unfortunately I don’t have enough class time to do a graded reader every week, but perhaps I can encourage my students to read more on their own.) 

            Also, another good piece of practical advice, Nation says that when learners are using graded readers, says they should read at least 5 books in each level before moving onto the next level.

            And I think the best piece of information I gained from this book is that extensive reading can only occur if the readers already know 95 to 98% of the vocabulary in the book.  (Possibly even 99% is preferable). 

            If the learner knows about 98% of the vocabulary, it is possible for them to guess the meaning of the remaining 1 or 2%.  But if much more than 2% of the vocabulary is unknown, then this causes comprehension to break-down.

            I hadn’t previously realized the threshold for unknown vocabulary was so high. After reading this book, it has caused me to rethink a lot of the reading materials I’ve been using for extensive reading.  In retrospect, I may have been giving my students books that were too difficult for them.

* There were some very good ideas in this book about intensive reading as well.

            Traditionally in intensive reading classes, students read a short passage, and then answer comprehension questions about it.

            I was, therefore, somewhat surprised to read Nation’s opinion that comprehension questions don’t actually teach reading skills.  They can help students practice their reading, but they don’t teach students how to comprehend a text. 

            Instead, Nation says, “When learners study a reading text, we want them to gain knowledge that will help them to understand tomorrow’s reading text.  We want them to learn things that apply to all texts. We want them to gain knowledge of the language and ways of dealing with the language rather than an understanding of a particular message” (p. 28)

            To do this, Nation has several interesting ideas for designing questions about a text that will focus the learner’s attention on the mechanics of language.  For example, questions that ask the student what the reference words (he, she, his, her, this, that, these, those, it, its) in a text refer to.

            Or getting students to identify what is the main noun in a noun phrase, or which verbs go with which subjects and objects.

            I really liked this idea.

             For one thing, as Nation points out, these types of questions are really easy to write, so the teacher won’t have to spend a lot of time preparing.

            But more importantly, I’ve noticed in my own classes that it’s often exactly these types of features that trip students up during reading comprehension.  Students will misinterpret a reading passage sometimes because they are unclear about what a reference word refers to.  Or in a complex sentence with subordinate clauses, students will sometimes be unclear about what the main subject of the sentence is.

            Until now, I’ve only been dealing with these types of issues when problems come up.  But after having read Nations ideas, I think I should design more intensive reading lessons focused around these types of language issues.

* There is also some very good information on teaching writing.

            For example, I’m currently teaching academic English in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program.  Some of the students in my class have difficulty writing the academic style papers required of them in this program.

            Up until now, I’ve not really done anything to address this problem except for complaining in the staff room that the administration is enrolling students who have no business being in an English for Academic Purposes program.  But this hasn’t really helped anyone.

            Nation, however, gives a number of ideas for “dealing with the gap between the learners’ knowledge and the knowledge required to do the task” (p. 110).  There are a number of guided task ideas, in which many of the aspects of writing are already completed for the learner, so that the learner only has to focus on one or two aspects of writing. For example, I could give the students a paper with the sentences already written but in the wrong order, and only task for the students would be to correct the order.

            I’m also very attracted to the idea of shared tasks, in which students write compositions in groups, so that the stronger students can help the weaker students.  (In fact, as a direct result of this book, I’m experimenting with doing shared writing for the final academic paper in my EAP classes this term.)

*Nation gives several ideas for encouraging learners in their writing.  One idea I really liked, and that I am also experimenting with this term, is helping learners to publish their work—for example putting all the papers together in a printed collection (from page 138.)

*On another note, in my young learner classes I have up until now been very reluctant to assign writing, because I know the young learners can’t accurately control many of the grammatical forms yet, and I didn’t want to discourage them by marking all their mistakes.

            It never really occurred to me that I could assign writing practice and not correct it.  The whole point of a writing exercise is so the students can get feedback on their mistakes, I thought.

            However, after reading this book, I understand the importance of practicing writing just for the sake of building up writing fluency.  (It may not help the student learn new grammatical forms, but it can help them gain better control over the grammatical forms they already have.)

            Nation gives the advice that, particularly for young learners, the teacher should write comments that don’t focus on the grammar, but instead focus on the message.

            After reading this book, I’ve started to do a lot more writing in my young learner classes.  And then, as Nation suggests, when I give feedback on the writing I respond to the message.

          ….And there were actually several more ideas in this book I liked.  But if I were to list every good idea in the book, I’d probably end up copying out over half the book on this blog.  The above list is the things that particularly caught my attention, but there were all sorts of other good ideas in the book.

            There were also a couple ideas that I found problematic, and I’ll deal with those next:

Ideas I Didn’t Like

          The first idea is about teaching reading.

            One of the problems with teaching reading to a non-native speaker is that they have a much smaller vocabulary than a native speaker.  A native speaker only has to learn the written form of words they already know, but a non-native speaker has a much more difficult time learning to read because of their limited vocabulary.  Nation suggests a way around it.  It’s a good idea, but I have one problem with it.   I’ll start by copying out the passage, and then afterwards respond to it.

            From page 12-13:

            Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s (1963) approach to teaching young native speakers to read is an excellent example of this [bringing learner’s knowledge and experience to their reading]. Here are the steps in her approach.

            1. Each learner draws a picture illustrating something that recently happened to them or something that they are very interested in.

            2. One by one the learners take their picture to the teacher who asks them what it is about.

            3. The teacher then writes the learner’s description below the picture exactly as the learner said it using the same words the learner said, even if it is non-standard English.

            4. This then becomes the learner’s reading text for that day. The learner reads it back to the teacher and then takes it away to practice reading it, and to read it to classmates, friends and family.

            5. These pictures and texts all written by the same learner are gathered together to be a personal reading book for that learner.

            The core principle is actually very appealing, but my problem is with step number 3: even if it is non-standard English.

            My concern comes from something I read recently in SLA Research and Language Teaching by Rod Ellis.  On page 129, Ellis writes:

            Output can also help in another way. The language learners produce constitutes a kind of auto-input (Schmidt and Frota 1986). As Sharwood Smith (1981) has pointed out, this means that utterances that have been constructed with the help of explicit knowledge can provide feedback into the system responsible for processing implicit knowledge.  It also means, however, that learners are exposed to their own errors, a fact that may account for why some errors are so persistent and why learners often feel that their errors are not really errors.  Auto-input, therefore, has the potential to both facilitate and impede acquisition.

            Ellis is writing on a slightly different topic, but I think the principle is the same.  The idea that learners can fossilize by repeatedly practicing their own errors makes me worry about this suggestion. 

            As Nation notes, the procedure was apparently originally designed for teaching native speaking children how to read, and it probably works well for that purpose.  But the psycholinguistic procedures of second language learners are different, and to avoid fossilization or internalizing errors I don’t think they should learn to read off of a grammatically incorrect reader.

            And by the same token, if the grammar of the practice reader is correct, then this will result in positive input that will aid the learner in acquiring those grammar structures.  (Especially if this reader is going to be something the learner practices with over and over and over again.)

            Assuming only minor surgery is needed to make the sentences grammatically correct, why not just slightly adjust the sentences for grammar?  That way the vocabulary can still be kept within the learner’s field of experience, but the learner is still getting grammatically correct input.

* On page 122, Nation gives suggestion for how to mark student’s writing compositions using a graph:

            When the learners have finished writing a composition, they should count the number of words they have written. To avoid miscounting, they should count up to 50, make a line like this / after the 50th word and then begin at one again. At the end of their composition they write the number of words they have written, e.g. 236 words. When the teacher marks the composition, she counts the number of mistakes, and calculates the average number of the mistakes in every one hundred words. This is done by dividing the number of mistakes by the number of words with the result expressed as a percentage.

            By having this average mark for each composition, the learners can see if they are improving. They should put their mark on a graph. This makes the learners eager to improve. Their aim is to make their graph go down. Usually there is fast improvement at the beginning which slows down as the average number of mistakes becomes less.

            As Lourdes Ortega points out in Understanding Second Language Acquisition, language improvement should not be marked by measuring a decrease in errors, because as the students’ interlanguage evolves they will sometimes make more errors because they are attempting more complex grammatical forms.  If students are penalized for the number of errors they make, they will then avoid the more complex grammatical forms, and this will hurt their grammatical development.

            I think it’s a good idea to give students feedback on their mistake, but I don’t like the idea of getting students so focused on the number of mistakes.

* Nation includes a whole chapter on speed reading, which I’m very ambivalent about.

            This may just be a reflection of my own personality.  I’m a very slow reader myself, and I hate to read anything under pressure. 

            Also I often have difficulty focusing on what I’m reading, and any amount of pressure increases the difficulty I have in focusing.

            Perhaps other people would react better to speed reading practice than I would.

            I like Nation’s idea that reading fluency needs attention as its own separate skill, and that this should be achieved by having students practice with texts that are easy for them to read.

            I just hate to put them under any sort of time pressure while they do it.

            Also, I’m not sure it’s possible to simultaneously encourage students to develop a love of reading while at the same time putting them under time pressure during speed reading.  I know ideally speed reading is supposed to be in a different part of the course than extensive reading, and that the two activities are supposed to be kept completely separate, but if reading becomes associated with stress or negative experiences in the learner’s mind, I think there’s a danger that these feelings could spill over into extensive reading as well.

            Also, although Nation describes a couple different techniques for speed reading programs, these techniques usually just boil down to timing the learner while they read, and then encouraging the learner to read faster.  It was unclear to me how simply putting a learner under time pressure actually increases their reading speed.  I can see how putting a student under time pressure would encourage their motivation to read faster, but I’m not clear on how it’s actually increasing their speed reading abilities.

            (To be fair to Nation, he does briefly mention some of the disadvantages of a speed reading program on page 72.)

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