Lang-8 - Multi-lingual language learning and language exchange. What is Extensive Reading? - Toshuō. In my last article, I talked about intensive reading.
Hopefully, I’ve convinced some of you that languages are too complex to learn properly by memorizing new vocabulary and grammar structures. Now, I’ll describe extensive reading. What is extensive reading? In short, extensive reading is everything that intensive reading is not. It is not “hard” material. What kind of materials are suitable? The most important thing about choosing materials for extensive reading is that they are at least 98% comprehensible to the students. When choosing books for your students, one good test is to take a page from the text you are considering, give it to your students for a few minutes, and ask how many words they don’t know.
How much should they read? Assuming, as I did in my last article, that they have an hour a day, they should read at least 25 pages a day. ). What are the benefits? How can these benefits be maximized? Remember that newly acquired vocabulary is fragile. What are the difficulties? Extensive reading vs. intensive reading. Quark wrote:As for reading a book that's been translated to Japanese, what you're saying definitely has a ring of truth to it.
This is why I've been leery of reading Harry Potter in Japanese (that, and the different names and terms would be strange to read) However, whenever I try to read some of my kids novels like 魔法少女が通る I understand very little, even after looking up words, so I end up being discouraged. That was why I was looking at my copy of Anne of Green Gables - I would have the English has a back-up to let me know that I'm on the right track.
But what you've said has got me thinking - I could go through a native Japanese kids novel, write out any parts I don't understand, and ask my Japanese friends for help. After all, they do the same with English novels. I have a possible solution to this. As for intensive reading, it's definitely not 100% necessary to do at all. What is Intensive Reading? - Toshuō. This piece is about ways in which Intensive Reading can be employed in the EFL classroom as well as in children’s native language classes.
One way to understand Intensive Reading is by contrasting it with extensive reading. The goal of one exercise is to push oneself to build specific skills by taking on difficult material in a focused session, while the goal of the other is to spend as much time as possible reading and building a strong language base. Intensive Reading Nearly anyone who has taken a foreign language class in North America is familiar with intensive reading. Maybe you have to read a paragraph, or maybe you have to make your way through Le Petit Prince, like I once did.
Advantages Intensive reading has two key advantages. Reading Strategies When deciphering a difficult text, readers are forced to use a variety of strategies that they wouldn’t need while engaging in extensive reading. Drawbacks In Japanese, the word 鼻 (はな), means nose… sort of. Sentence Mining. For a moment, forget all about language classrooms and textbooks and teachers.
How does a person naturally learn a language? By exposure, exposure, exposure. We learn language by being immersed in the culture where it is spoken. We hear millions of sentences spoken, and each time, our subconscious mind associates something to the sentence. The powerful subconscious mind works constantly to find patterns in everything, and so it discovers the hidden patterns in the sentences we’ve heard, and thus the first fruits of language begin to blossom within us. If you want to learn a language naturally, with the kind of learning that produces perfect native fluency, why would you do anything other than soak up millions of sentences? Sentence Mining makes use of a fairly recent technological innovation, the spaced repetition system, or SRS.
Sentence Mining is the process of making flashcards, where the “Question” side of the card is a sentence in the target language. This is interesting. American Sign Langauge.
Japanese.