Reading newspapers for the improvement of vocabulary and reading skills

Abstract

This study looked at how high school graduates in EFL can make the most efficient use of newspapers to improve their vocabulary knowledge and reading skills. Most high school graduates find it difficult to read newspaper stories in English. Many researchers have provided evidence that vocabulary is a major source of difficulty in comprehending texts. Laufer (1986) suggests that a vocabulary knowledge of 5,000 words is needed to comprehend unsimplified texts successfully. However, several studies have shown that most high school graduates have a smaller vocabulary knowledge than this. It is reported that most high school graduates know between 1,000 to 2,000 words. Such a big gap between the learners' vocabulary knowledge and the vocabulary knowledge needed to read authentic texts will prevent successful reading of newspaper stories. Therefore it would be useful to find ways of helping the learners with vocabulary. For the purpose of this study, we assumed that the learners have a vocabulary knowledge of the most frequent 2,000 words. In addition, all the proper nouns were counted as items known to the learners. In order to find out if a particular method of selecting stories has a significant effect on the reduction of the vocabulary load for the learners and on the repetitions of new words (i.e. words outside the 2,000 words), 20 sequences of 4 running stories (accounts of developments in the same event over 4 successive days) and 20 sets of 4 unrelated stories were analyzed by using a computer. In addition, several sections from the Brown Corpus and the LOB Corpus were analyzed to examine the lexical coverage of different word lists. The results showed that each newspaper story, on the average, contained 330-350 tokens. About 20.4% of the tokens were not in the first 2,000 words. 10% of the tokens were proper nouns and the remaining 10.4% were low frequency words. The 10.4% were made up of 18 to 20 word families (i.e. 33-35 tokens). This indicated that the learners could achieve about 90% lexical coverage of newspaper texts by knowing the most frequent 2,000 words and all proper nouns. The analysis of four types of text from the Brown Corpus and the LOB Corpus indicated that in order to reach 95% lexical coverage of newspaper texts and also of other unsimplified texts, 800-1,000 words of a specialized vocabulary in addition to the most frequent 2,000 words are needed. This study indicates that a smaller vocabulary than the one suggested by Laufer is needed to read unsimplified texts. However, the difference is mainly due to the different definitions of a word used for the studies so that in fact, both estimates are not far from each other. The analysis of running stories and unrelated stories indicated that a higher proportion of word families outside the 2,000 words recurred in stories from the same series, that is, running stories. Thus reading running stories would reduce the vocabulary load to a much greater extent than reading unrelated stories. In a series of running stories with 4 parts, there were about 5 to 12 word families outside the first 2,000 words occurring 3 times or more. These words accounted for 13.7% of the word families outside the 2,000 words. Since learners cannot learn all the new words in the story they read, it would be useful to learn those words with 3 or more occurrences. Learning 5 to 12 of those words would make it possible for the learners to read each story in a series without consulting a dictionary more than a few times. Running stories are more effective for the acquisition of new vocabulary because they provide more repetitions of more words outside the 2,000 words than unrelated stories. If we take 7 as the necessary repetitions for a word to be learned as suggested by Kachroo (1962), two words will be learned in a series of 4 running stories whereas only one word or none (0.8) will be learned in a set of 4 unrelated stories.