Hey, Steve. I just wanted to add another perspective. I used to teach English as a second language in Taiwan for years. And for the final four years, I was running my own school and had complete control over the curriculum and teaching methodologies.
There were two pieces of my curriculum that were fairly innovative and unusual for the Taiwan buxiban scene. One was a aural phonics training system for beginning level students and the other was a strong emphasis on extensive reading, using the Oxford Bookworms series mentioned in the presentation, in fact. My primary inspiration for this decision was Krashen’s research as well as the “book flood” experiment Beniko Mason did in Japan.
The benefits I saw my students gain from the graded readers were dramatic. I realize it wasn’t a well controlled experiment like those of the linguists mentioned above, but I saw clear improvements pretty much across the board—not only in skills but in terms of affect towards and interest in English. High quality graded readers give students a window into the target culture, exposure at an easy comfortable level, reinforcement of previously learned material and at least for most adults, more interesting material than children’s books (which I also like learning from). Most importantly, when using graded readers, students are actually reading at a reasonable rate instead of picking through unfamiliar words and struggling to understand. In general, I saw students struggle with the first couple of level one readers (partially because of how early I gave it to them), but then read them pretty comfortably after that. After about 10 readers of a level, most students were not only ready but wanted to move up to a harder level.
And this brings us back to the question of what you can do with only 400 words. You can talk with a sympathetic native speaker, such as a teacher or conversation partner and you can read an Oxford bookworm such as The Coldest Place on Earth, Pocahontas, or The Monkey’s Paw! Get hooked on that and you won’t be stuck with only 400 words for long.
I’m interested in the idea of Lingq, and tried it at one point. I think the inclusion of high quality premium content such as extensive readers and children’s books would be a huge asset. I remember asking you on youtube a few months ago for good Spanish reading resources for a beginner. Now I have a good answer to my question—Blaine Ray Novels, the Read It! graded readers, the Lola Lago detective series and maybe the Penguin Parallel Texts. Get that kind of content, start working on integrations so that users know when they’re ready for a given level of text and Lingq will be much stronger for beginning students. I know this is a huge amount of work. Until very recently I was one of just two engineers working at Verbling and I have experienced on a deep level just how much work it takes to push new features.
Another, more philosophical problem is how to handle phrasal verbs and other multi-word semantic chunks. When does a learner actually “know” a word like go? I had to explicitly mention to my students as we were reading, that “go on” was 繼續, “go over” was 重溫 or maybe 受歡迎, while “go through with” was 實行, etc… These multi-word chunks are every bit as important as many medium frequency words and they make binary counting of words being known or not very difficult. Ideally, I think they should be treated as separate vocabulary items and included in any sort of collection of high-medium frequency words for learners who are trying to get to a basic level of competence in a language. Letting Lingq users see what items are remaining before they have covered the high or high+medium frequency words in a language would probably be a useful feature, too.
I intend these comments to be friendly and constructive to the discussion and am in no way complaining about what you’ve made so far. Thanks again for all the videos and content you’ve shared over the years!
