I had a student when I taught in Korea who named himself Augustine. He was in his sixties, and didn't say anything for the first few weeks of my class. I began to wonder if he was understanding anything of what was going on. I asked him how long he had been studying English, and he told me he had been studying at our institute for a few years. I began thinking, "Oh... that's way too late to start. This explains why he is so quiet--he must not have very strong English skills." But after every class, he brought in a mystery novel and had a couple pages highlighted and he would ask me what a few words meant. I remember thinking, "Why are you trying to study something like a book, which is so far beyond your level?" Yet every week he would sit quietly through class and say little during discussion time, and at the end of class, he would quietly walk up to me with a mystery novel with more pages highlighted and ask me what a few idioms  or phrases meant.

Then one day he spoke.

We were having a discussion about the purpose and meaning of life, and out of nowhere, slowly, carefully, eloquently, and clearly... he spoke.

I was awestruck. He still had some pronunciation difficulties, but the complexity of his grammar and vocabulary stunned me. I couldn't believe it!

"What do you mean?" one of the twenty-something students asked him. I found myself stammering and grasping for words to explain the very deep and complex thoughts Augustine had just articulated in simpler English to the younger students. I felt like a skilled magician had replaced my student Augustine with an entirely different person. Everything I knew before was wrong.

I had to figure him out. I asked him more questions and he responded to each of them so thoughtfully. Clearly, I was mistaken about this one. I talked to him later and he said he had no English-speaking friends and hadn't studied English past high school, but that he really enjoyed reading mystery novels and crime dramas, and that he read them all the time.

This experience has taught me to question my assumptions about three things, 1) quiet students, 2) older students, and 3) the value of reading for personal enjoyment.

In my last blog post, I mentioned a 2007 article about the power of extensive reading by Willy A. Renandya. I thought it would be good to expand on that a bit:

Basically, there are two kinds of reading, intensive reading and extensive reading.

Intensive reading is the kind of reading we typically do in school: A teacher chooses a book, has a goal in mind that the students will gain from it, and then has the students read it. Naturally there is a test of some sort.

Extensive reading, on the other hand, is when students read a lot of different stuff and they read it for their own fun and enjoyment (usually they say "reading for pleasure" but I don't like that word for reading, personally). 

As you can imagine, extensive reading is very different from the kind of reading we typically do in school (which is intensive). There is something different going on in your brain when you are reading something you WANT to read, reading at your own pace, and just freely enjoying yourself.

It turns out, students who read extensively for enjoyment perform better on reading tests as seen in the figures below:

If you're a teacher, I hope you're encouraging your students to read for fun, and if you're a student, I hope you're reading for more than just class or the TOEFL or IELTS or whatever. Find something you enjoy reading about and do it! You will improve your English, and you might have some fun along the way.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

I was reading an article about lexical chunking by Ben Zimmer, and he mentioned the growing popularity of corpus linguistics in ESL language instruction to teach "chunks." Basically groups of words and collocations like "How's it going?" function like one word. I'm sure you've experienced someone walking by saying, "howzitgowin?" like it was one word (if not, listen closely next time someone greets you!). This is somewhat related to pragmatics, which is the field of linguistic study that focuses on language rituals and context. 

Being a corpus enthusiast myself, the article caught my attention when I saw the objections of Michael Swan to the bandwagon approach in using corpora in the ESL classroom:

“Native English speakers have tens or hundreds of thousands — estimates vary — of these formulae at their command... a student could learn 10 a day for years and still not approach native-speaker competence."

I appreciate Swan's realistic appraisal, but it wouldn't do much for my confidence as a second language learner. It reminds me of what my Japanese tutor told me when I was beginning to learn kanji (Chinese characters):

I like to tell my students that there is no such thing as difficult vocabulary--only unfamiliar vocabulary. If you know a word, then it's not difficult. But how do you know if a word is a word you should know?

Here is a text analyzer where you can input a text sample and it will categorize and color-code the words based on frequency. Here is a paragraph from an article on former president of Egypt, Mohamed Mursi:

You can enter this text into the analyzer and it will color-code it like this:

All words that show up in the top 500 are highlighted blue, and all words that occur from 501-3000 are green, and words that are not in the top 3000 are highlighted yellow. If you don't know some of the blue words, then you need to study more, because they are the top 500 English words (they are the most common, so you should know them)!

If you don't know a word that's highlighted yellow, on the other hand, then you shouldn't feel so bad since the word is not so common (when is the last time you heard someone use the words opponents, demonstrations, organizational, and supporters at the dinner table with Mom and Dad?).

If you click on the section marked ACAD, it will show words that are associated with academic writing:

I think this is a wonderful tool for non-native speakers to be able to compete with native speakers in writing, as well as measure their understanding of English vocabulary. It may take an ESL writer years to develop a native-like intuition about vocabulary usage, but I think this can serve as a good support in the meantime.

PLEASE NOTE: Some students seeing this tool for the first time have the mistaken impression that academic writing consists of 100% academic vocabulary. This is not the case! You still need common words to connect your sentences. In my experience, academic sources usually measure from 15-30% academic vocabulary (depending on the topic).

Play around with this. If you're brave, enter a sample from something you've written and report your results in the comments below: How academic are you?

-Bill

After seeing the results of the Zimmerman trial, I was curious about the top ten collocations with the word guilty in the COCA. This is what I found:

The word murder shows up more than any other crime (fraud is the next crime at #26 with 150 occurrences). It's also pretty clear that this word has courtroom connotations, with forms of plead, found, jury, charges, verdict, and proven making it in the top 15. Nevertheless, it still gets used in more common situations like feeling guilty. The first example is Governor Chris Christie being asked in an interview if he feels guilty for being so overweight. It's interesting that a word can be used to describe something so serious as well as something so innocuous.

-Bill

There are many versions of this expression, which first started out in Shakespeare's Hamlet when the protagonist pretends to be crazy. If you search the COCA, method is the second most popular word to collocate with madness (#1 is the month of March--thank you NCAA Basketball!).

I've posted a new grammar video in my Video section on the distinction between simple past versus present perfect. You can also view it here:

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

Since today is July 4th, I figured I would make a post about independent clauses... get it? Independent... like Independence Day?

Okay, I'm joking. I figured it would be more interesting to write some English expressions about independence, freedom, and opportunity--three things that make America great:

to stand on one's own two feet
I would like your help, but I want to be able to stand on my own two feet.
(I want to be independent.)

to be off the hook
I thought I would be in trouble for not reporting to work this Saturday, but there was a huge snowstorm so they closed the office. I guess I'm off the hook!

to get off Scott free
He really should have been punished, but he got off Scott free. 

I posted a new video in my videos section about how to pronounce the -ed at the end of past tense verbs.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

I made a new video about the difference between /p/ and /b/, which is usually pretty tough for Arabic speakers who are learning English. You can find it in my Videos section or view it below:

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill