Word-Focused Extensive Reading with Guidance

A few years ago a reading method called “word-focused extensive reading” was proposed for adults learning the fine details of word usage (Cheng 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). In this mode of reading the computer retrieved from a large corpus and displayed the word in question in a sentence. In reading similar sentences the reader would hopefully gain the knowledge of the word usage. That is the idea of word-focused extensive reading. However, not every reader will easily see the significance of word collocation. An automated guidance can be added to this reading program. The guidance could take the form of pre-processed statistics of co-occurring words in various categories such as subject, object, preposition, modifier, etc. (Kilgarriff and Tugwell 2001). But in this way the reader does not participate in the construction of the lexical knowledge. With the guidance added to the program when a sentence is shown the computer tabulates the collocating words, displays them in relevant locations, and waits for the user to press a key for the next sentence. The significant collocating words of the next sentence are then added to the list. In this way the reader sees the step by step build up of collocating words and thus participates in the building of the knowledge of word usage.