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Transcript

Intro  

Hi, and welcome to E2Talks. In this episode Jay chats with Dr. Charlie Brown, who is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Meiji Gakuin University’s English department, a top-ranked private university in Tokyo, Japan. He is a well known expert in online language learning, especially as it applies to second language vocabulary acquisition and reading skills development, and publishes widely on the topics of English education in Japan, second language vocabulary acquisition and online learning. In this episode, Jay and Charlie discuss high frequency vocabulary, especially the new general service word list or NGSL co-created with Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips. The NGSL of core high frequency vocabulary for students of English as a second language is a major update of Michael West’s 1953 General Service list. The NGSL provides over 92% coverage for most general English texts, the highest of any corpus derived General English word list to date. It’s a fascinating conversation on the wonders of vocabulary and how it applies to English teaching and learning. Enjoy.

Jay  

Hello, Charlie, how’s it going?

Charlie  

Well, doing great. Thanks for inviting me.

Jay  

Whereabouts are you? 

Charlie  

Tokyo, Japan, so, yeah, same timezone, I think as here.

Jay  

Yeah, pretty, pretty close actually.

Charlie  

Pretty close anyway hour or two difference that’s all.

Jay  

How long have you been in Japan for?

Charlie  

Oh, scared to say, I’ve been here since 1985. So it’s going on 35-36 years, actually.

Jay  

Wow. There you go.

Charlie  

Came right out of college.

Jay  

Fantastic. So you started off teaching English in Japan. And you’ve basically stayed there ever since.

Charlie  

Yeah, I came over on what’s called a JET Programme, the Japan exchange and teaching programme. It’s a large teaching programme run by the government. And I was actually the first national chairman of that programme. So I was working very closely with all of the prefectural boards of education, the Ministry of Education, that, you know, at the national level, and, you know, at a young age, I came here at 23. And I was really getting a deep glimpse into, you know, very different parts of the English education system that most foreigners really hadn’t had access to. And I was just so interested by it and felt like I could, you know, maybe make a difference by staying here that I just never went home. And so I’ve just been trying to help improve English education here for more than three decades now.

Jay  

Wow. That’s really impressive. I was really impressed when I watched your TED Talk, actually. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you.

Charlie  

Oh, okay. Oh, good. I’m glad you saw that.

Jay  

Yeah. Yeah. And of course, your work in corpus linguistics, which I want to talk to you about because I’m interested in that. Can I just ask you, how do you feel about your influence on English language teaching in Japan? Do you feel like you’ve made a dent? 

Charlie  

Well, I mean, it’s a very hard place to make a dent, there are so many forces that are, you know, sort of inertial forces that resist change, that it’s very hard to, you know, to really push things forward dramatically. But that said, I mean, I’ve done pretty much everything possible. So whether it’s, you know, writing textbooks or writing research books, or writing newspaper columns, or giving presentations, or, you know, teaching or teacher training, or, you know, research, um, you know, literally, I’ve done, just, you know, and I’ve worked for the government, as well, and I work for boards of education as well. So, I just, every couple of years, I, you know, I tried to do something new and attack it from a different direction. And, you know, among all of those things, I mean, I think technology and language learning was something I came to later, you know, so about, you know, just starting about 20-25 years ago, but I realised that technology offers sort of a way around some of those obstacles. So, you know, I think, you know, that’s just, you know, but technology and language learning is just one of the many tools that I’ve tried to try and improve things here.

Jay  

Interesting. So, having worked in the industry for so long, is it still interesting? Is language still interesting to you?

Charlie  

Oh, gosh, yeah. No, and I love my job. I love what I’m doing. And, you know, I wouldn’t do anything else. I’m running you know, one of the things that’s that I noticed really early on, is that there’s a lack of teacher education here, teachers of English become certified majoring in English literature. So they study Shakespeare, and then suddenly, you know, they’re supposed to teach English communicatively. And they don’t have a clue. And so I realised that you know, rather than only giving one-off speeches or writing books, that if I got into teacher training, I’d have a chance to affect more people. So I, you know, I love you know, it’s something that I love doing, I’ve been in every prefecture in Japan, worked with every board of education in Japan, trained, you know, maybe 10s of 1000s, by now, of teachers, and that I actually now run a teacher training programme at my university. So, you know, I’ve got students now for three or four years, and these kids are coming out of the programme with, you know, absolutely confident in their English ability in their knowledge of Communicative Language Teaching, and their ability to use technology. So I know that we’re producing some people who are going to change English education. So you know, as a teacher trainer, and as a researcher, you’re sort of, you know, planting the seeds, you know, so I’m not only, you know, trying to directly change, I’m also trying to indirectly change by, you know, creating a situation where others will, will go on and do great things.

Jay  

Yeah, leveraging the networks. Yeah. Network effects. That’s, that’s, that’s a great idea. Fantastic. Okay, so your area of specialisation is corpus linguistics, vocabulary and reading, is that correct? As well as computer assisted language learning? 

Charlie  

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think those four things are actually pretty consistent and often interrelated. So a lot of the, you know, the free online resources that I make are, you know, one or more, sometimes several of those four areas, so yes.

Jay  

Fantastic. All right, I wouldn’t mind starting with corpus linguistics, and maybe if you can give everyone a little, just a brief overview of what that means and why it’s important as an English teacher and as a learner of English as well.

Charlie  

Ah well that’s kind of a actually a big question. But um, you know, starting point is, is what is a corpus and, you know, a corpus is simply put is just a large collection of texts. And what a corpus is supposed to be, you don’t just collect any text, the texts that you collect, and then later analyse. One of the keywords is, rep, they need to be representative of either the language or of the genre, that you are trying to teach to. So so, you know, I’ve made many, many corpora over the years, some for academic English, some for general English, some for spoken English, some for children’s English, but you know, the idea is to collect many, many, many texts that are representative of that genre, and in my case, representative of the kind of language that second language learners would be exposed to, and then you do an analysis of those texts, usually to try and find the most frequent words in that corpus. And the most frequent words in that corpus. If the corpus research is done, well, are the same words that students are most likely to encounter. And thus, they are the best targets for teachers to teach and students to learn. We usually, you know, other aspects of Corpus linguistics, you know, of course, you know, it should be representative. It’s used for linguistic analysis, but usually, we also look for the fact that, that the texts be naturally occurring,  that they are, they are likely to be things that learners would be exposed to. So when you’re creating a corpus, you need to have sort of an explicit design criteria, you have to really figure out exactly what you want on the other side, and then, you know, create design criteria and then collect texts, according to that design criteria. And then maybe the one last thing to mention is that any modern corpus, like the corpus work that I do, you know, also implies that the texts are usually machine readable. We use computers these days for a lot of our corpus work, which is not true of the early corpora. You know, my new general service list was published in 2013. But that replaces the original General Service list, which was published in 1953 by Michael West, but it was originally started 1936 And so in 1936 to 1953, there were no computers. So they were  hand collecting the text and then hand counting every word in those texts. So it  was a remarkable feat, it took them 17 years from 1936 to 1953 to do that research, and, you know, but and that was an amazing thing. I mean…

Jay  

How long does it take a computer to go through the corpus to derive a word list, for example? 

Charlie  

Well it’s not as simple as that. I mean, even with the help of computers, we still have to, you know, we have to create the design criteria, we have to collect the text, often, you know, what we’re doing is we’re buying books that are representative of what students are exposed to, we have to cut off the binders, we put them into, you know, put them into OCR machines.

Jay  

Wow, so you really do feed the machine like that?

Charlie  

Oh, absolutely. You have to, you know, so that’s part of it, you know, at least part of the corpus is done like that. And then, you know, cleaning up the corpus, you know, actually looking through it and analysing, you know, what you did, right, and what you did wrong, and then fixing what you did wrong. It, you know, it takes months. So, you know, you know, we have we have I think seven corpor right now, and I would I would say that, you know, the one that we did the quickest probably took us about three months, because we dropped everything we were doing to do that, the slowest was probably about two years, the original NGSL and original Academic Word List, and AWL, the two that were in my TED Talk, those probably took about two years of work.

Jay  

Okay, and so what does this..? Is the final output some big surprise to you? Or do you look at it? And you think, oh, that’s what I expected to see.

Charlie  

Honestly speaking, I often find that it’s what I expected. You know, so there are lots of books out there, you know, if you’re teaching business English, there’ll be somebody that says, I’ll hear some important words, you should study these, you know, a lot of those words will be in the corpus, but what the corpus, you know, you know, what the, the corpus generated list does, is, it weighs the relative importance of the words. So we know, in our business corpus, which is about 65 million words, we know what is the most important, you know, business word number one, number two, number three, number four, in order. And that’s actually very important, because, you know, if we move away from talking about corpus linguistics to talking about pedagogy and what goes on in the classroom, a lot of what I’m doing is trying to help learners to get to the point of independence, get to the point where they can read a text without a dictionary, or without the help of a teacher, or they can watch a TV show, you know, without subtitles, and for that to occur, they need to understand a minimum of 90% of the words on the page, preferably more like 95 to 98%. So we talked about reading and guessing from context is something that teachers often tell their students to do, please don’t use a dictionary reading guess from context for that to occur. Students need 95% of the words on the page, they need to know 95%. If there’s only 5%, or less unknown, they can read and guess for context, if they want to read for pleasure, that’s like 98 or 99%. So what does that have to do with corpus linguistics? Well, because what we are doing is we are ranking words in order of importance, and we know the percentage coverage that each individual word adds, we are creating very efficient learning paths, so that students can get to 90 or 95 or 98%, far faster than by any other means. So, you know, generally speaking, Paul Nation has written many, many different books. He’s one, you know, he’s, actually I did my masters and my PhD with him. That’s how I became a vocabulary specialist that talks about, you know, the need for knowing about 8000 words, if you want to, you know, get to 98, 90, you know, 97, 98% a lot of my word lists are, you know, 1000 to 1500 words. And when you combine in the general English, the NGSL list with one of my special purpose lists, you’re usually getting up to 96, 97, 98% with less than 4000 words. So about half of that. And why is that important? Well, when we look at research, that’s done on the vocabulary size of non native speakers versus native speakers, native speakers who have graduated from college will know somewhere between 25 and 30,000 words, non native speakers like here in Japan, even after 12 or 13 years of studying English only know about 2000 words. So getting to 8000 words, you know, this is after 12 years of study. So if it takes 12 years to learn 2000 words, how many more years to get to 8000? Ridiculous?

Jay  

Well, it’s almost an impossible task, isn’t it?

Charlie  

Basically, the new general service list project is about creating shortcuts for learners, you know, basically trying to make very, very tight lists of vocabulary words as short as possible to get maximum coverage. And then these, then what we do you know, the steps, the first step is actually creating the word lists, and I’ve got a website dedicated to those, they’re all open source, you know, free, you know, for download, free to use. But for the past 10 years, we’ve also been doing our best to create all kinds of free online resources for teaching, for learning, for text creation, for text analysis, for research, and so on. So that the word list can actually be used. Some of the word lists that are out there, you know, basically, they just sit in academic journals, and nobody ever really gets to use them, you know, I didn’t create these word lists, you know, just for the purpose of, you know, the expression used before ivory tower research, I’m not interested in that at all. I mean, we have research, there’s a good amount of research supporting our work and the validity and reliability of these lists and tools. But the main focus is meeting the needs of students and teachers and content developers. And so you know, I think that, you know, you asked about my impact on Japanese English education, I mean, think these, these word lists and these tools definitely are one of those things that are having at least some impact I hope.

Jay  

I look, I think it’s inspiring. Honestly, efficiency is such an important thing in language learning, because, as you say, it just takes years and if you can shave off years, from somebodies language learning journey, my God, and these word lists seem to just be these incredible ingredients. It’s like he is the ingredients of English, you know, here are the, the high frequency, vocabulary that you need. But then, as you say, then transforming that into something pedagogical, because you can’t just give a kid an Excel spreadsheet and say, here’s 2000 words, you know, what?  So those decisions, they’re fascinating. So on your new general service word list, which I think it should be part and parcel of every, well, it should be in the hands of every language learner to some degree somehow, whether it’s through an app or whatever, and it certainly should be a part of every teachers. You know, that’s what they should be looking at and working with in every lesson pretty much. Can you just talk to me about this particular word list about that sort of zipfian curve? And they’ve the frequency of those words? Like, what are those words?  What’s the ratio of content to function words? What’s the most frequent one, what are the less frequent ones and what’s going on with all of those words in that curve?

Charlie  

Well, I’m not sure if I can give you the exact percentages for you know, you know, content versus function and things like that, I mean, that somebody has done that analysis. But the list, I can give you some basic statistics about it, and an explanation of it. It’s a list of about 2800 words. And the new general service list is representative of general English, the kind of general English that second language learners are likely to be exposed to in their daily lives. So this list was not designed for the purpose of test preparation, which is, which is what many of the other word lists in Japan were developed for. So what I wanted to do is actually kind of fight that focus on test preparation. A lot of students in Japan will study English for 12 years, they get into college  by passing the exam, but they get into college, and they can’t speak any English, because all they’ve done is test English only. So what I wanted to do was, of course, help them also with test English, but the primary purpose was to help them with English in the real world. So the kind of reading materials, you know, books, magazines, newspapers, you know, what they would read on the internet, what they would see on TV, what they would hear on the radio. That’s the new general service list and these 2800 words, on average, give about 92% coverage, which is phenomenal. It’s the…

Jay  

Say that again, because that’s critical. 

Charlie  

Yeah it’s 92% coverage for general English texts, and even higher for general English listening materials. So one of my graduate students did created a corpus of the TV show for Friends, of the first, I think the first two seasons of friends and created a corpus out of it to find out what kind of coverage the NGSL would offer and is actually over 95%. So it gives an even higher coverage of listening materials of general English listening materials. So it’s, you know, this is, you know, incredible when you compare that to the fact that the native speaker knows about 30,000 words. So it’s less than 1/10 of the vocabulary size of a native speaker, but you’re 92% coverage for general texts. And there’s 600,000 words in the English language. So it’s less than, you know, it’s less than point oh, 5% of the English language. So it’s a very, very small number of words, but giving very high coverage. And the  zipfian curve, I mean, it’s hard. I usually have PowerPoints or graphs to explain what a zipfian curve is, but basically Zipf was a mathematician. And what he found, especially with regard to Corpus linguistics, and word frequencies is that there are certain small number of words that occur with insanely high frequency, almost all of the other words, students are never likely to meet at all, ever, you know, they might meet once in their life. So the problem is, is when you’re doing test preparation, when you’re doing you know, when a system when an English education system is focusing on exam preparation, the tendency is to focus on these very low frequency words that students are not going to meet outside of testing conditions. So what I did was I created as a step one, the new general service list, but then we created our other lists in a kind of a modular approach. So you know, for example, our TOEIC list TOEIC is a very high stakes exam in Japan, a very important one that almost everybody has to take. We made it so that we created a separate corpus of TOEIC English, that was all the TOEIC preparation materials, and all of the published official TOEIC tests. And what we were able to do is with only 1200 words, 1200 words, if you add that on top of the NGSL, you’ll get 99% coverage of the TOEIC exam, which is unbelievable. I mean, that that kind of number you almost never see in Corpus linguistics, but the reason for that is the reason we can get such high coverage with such a small number of words, is because the TOEIC is not really real English, it’s it’s a very narrow kinds of test English and because we’re scientists, we are able to analyse that narrow band, and because it’s narrow, we can find just a very small number of words that students are very likely to meet. So people are getting very high scores. And there are several companies that I’ve actually consulted for to help them to use our TOEIC list and our new General service list to help student you know, online, you know, online learning tools to get high scores on TOEIC. So this is, you know, you know, but the interesting thing here is to just keep the conversation on TOEIC and NgSL for a moment, is that the new general service list, even though the main purpose is to help prepare students for real English in the real world, it offers 94% coverage for the TOEIC exam 92% in general English, 94% TOEIC. So what it means is, even though I wasn’t focusing on test, exam preparation with NGSL, it actually offers very high coverage for at least one high stakes test that we know of.

Jay  

Yeah. Right. It makes me think of all of our IELTS students, for example, and they’re all trying to get these band scores of eight or whatever, and, and they just have core deficiencies in those high frequency words, you know, those those zero to 1000 words, they probably need to refresh their memory on that.

Charlie  

Not probably, that’s, that’s actually, yeah, that’s a huge problem. And it’s a huge problem here in Japan. And that’s one of the reasons why, you know, among our free resources, we’ve also not only created word lists and flashcard programmes to help learn the words, but we’ve also created diagnostic tests to help identify which bands of high frequency words students are deficient in and this comes back again to the zipfian principle we were talking about before, if students had any significant deficiency in the new gen service list words, it’s literally mathematically impossible to reach 95% We talked about 95% 98% as the Independence goals, you know, if there is even just two or 300 words you don’t know of the NGSL words, you can know you can have a vocabulary size of 5000 words. But if you’re missing two or three hundred of the first 1000, or first 2000, you’ll never hit 95%. They’re that important. So those, each of those, those high frequency words offers like, you know, a lot of coverage and the low frequency words, you can’t even, you know, like almost nothing. So, yeah, we have to, you have to fill in the gaps, and even my apps. I’ve created a bunch of free apps as well for flashcard apps to help students to learn these words. For the new general service list one, I think it’s called new NGSL builder. I, you know, put the words in 100 word bands by frequency. And it’s spaced repetition flashcards, which is, you know, known to be, you know, scientifically to be a very efficient way to not just learn words for a test, but sort of shift short term memory of words to long term permanent memory of words. And so I created a space repetition flashcard app, with NZGL words in 100 word bands, and that’s so that students could self select, you know, which you know, which words they don’t know and study only the words they don’t know, to fill in the gaps. So that’s just, you know, like, there are various tools that we’ve made. And each of them solves a different kind of pedagogic problem. But that’s, that’s a, that’s another one.

Jay

Yeah, your website is amazing. Actually, I’ll put a link to it in the description of this podcast. And, yeah, it’s all the resources on there, which I saw many, many of them are free, if not all, that, it’s quite incredible. 

Charlie

Yeah I think almost almost everything on the website is free. I mean, we have, you know, paid certain textbooks I’ve written and paid apps as well. But I generally don’t put, you know, I try to keep everything on the website to be limited to mostly the stuff that is free or open source. As a matter of fact, actually, on my company webpage, I have a I have a list of all of my free all of my free resources in one space, because I think the New General Services website doesn’t mention my extensive reading resources I have. I have a free extensive reading website, a free extensive listening website, and actually, you know, some other tools that are not on the you know, because it’s, you know, separating reading from vocabulary. So, yeah, we can talk about that later. Yeah,

Jay  

I’d love to talk about that. You mentioned diagnostic testing of vocabulary. I mean, as a teacher, you walk into a classroom, you really have no idea how many words the students know. And one student might be far more advanced in their vocabulary and one students knows far fewer words, how do these diagnostic vocabulary tests work? And how do you create those?

Charlie  

Well, the creation of these tools, actually, it’s a tough process. And it takes in some cases, years, I mean, the new general service list test and GSLT, and NAWLT, new Academic Word List test. I mean, they’ve taken years to develop, they were developed by two wonderful testing experts here in Japan, Phil Bennett and Tim Stoeckel. And, you know, in order to create a test that is both reliable and valid, which are the two most important things for a test to be, you have to do a lot of things in terms of how you create the test and how you make sure that the test is, is doing what it says it will do. So there’s actually quite a lot of research published on the development of these two tests. And both of them are very good at finding where students weaknesses are in those two word lists. And that’s the primary purpose of these two tests is diagnostic. You know, there’s four main different kinds of tests. This is a diagnostic test. The major tests that you’re probably preparing students for like like IELTS or TOEIC, or TOEFL, these are all proficiency tests, and and it’s a very different purpose and a very different kind of development process. Diagnostic tests are what are called a type of test known as a criterion referenced test to CRT, whereas proficiency tests and placement test or NRT  norm reference tests, but anyway among CRT’s among vocabulary tests,  the two tests developed for our NGSL, and NAWL are among the highest reliability and validity published, but what they do is they identify specifically what frequency band students have weaknesses in and then what we do is we’ve already created free flashcards on free websites like Quizlet or memorise that are banded exactly the same way the test is so students, so we don’t just give the students a score. Either the students get a score on NGSLT the test. And if they’re weak in band number two, which is the second 500, or a second set five or 600 words of NGSL, they can go directly to a Quizlet flashcard learning stack with exactly those 500 words, and then they just studied the ones that they don’t know.

Jay  

Gotcha. Amazing. Really, I think that diagnostic testing stuff is just so important. Because, I mean this is the problem with language. I mean, it’s the problem of education in general, in a classroom, everybody’s at a different level. And if you can determine where they are on their journey, it’s also just so good for learning motivation as well. If they if the resources that they’re given is a targeted to them, it just makes it so much richer for them.

Charlie  

Personalised learning. That’s what it should be. Yeah, what I want is for, you know, if you have a class of 30 students, for every one of those 30 students to be learning different words, the most high frequency words that they don’t yet know. Yeah, you know, that’s, you know, our other app, which is, I think it’s a paid app, but it’s very cheap. It’s called Word learner. And that actually has built in testing function, so that teachers, students can learn different stacks of words, according to which ones they don’t know. And then individualise, the testing of the students. So every student gets a different test. And then there’s a learner management system so that the teacher can kind of track that.

Jay  

Oh, nice. Love it.  I really love technology, language learning, like, how it can unlock all of these possibilities, which were otherwise,  really quite impossible for a teacher to do with pen and paper in the classroom.

Charlie  

It’s very, it’s not impossible, it’s very, very hard. And I’ve, you know, people who, you know, are just determined, you know, to sort of do a pedagogically sound approach to vocabulary development, didn’t have access to online tools, do it, you know, an amazing job of teaching, but it just requires a lot more effort and a lot more structure. So this, that’s one of the reasons for me trying to develop a lot of these tools, is to try and make the job of teachers and learners a little bit easier.

Jay  

Yeah, good one. Absolutely. Okay, so, a couple more questions. Before I want to shift to talking to about reading actually, one of the questions is, okay, so there’s 2800 words in the NGSL, which bring up to 92%. And then if you wack on another 1200, words, for the TOEIC word list, for example, what is in the TOEIC word list? Are they all nouns and verbs related to business stuff, like, what accounts for the other 87%?

Charlie  

I know, I’ve done an analysis of it. I mean, you know, we, you know, it’s freely downloadable from my website, but you know, what they are what they are, they represent the 1200 most frequent words that occur on the TOEIC exam outside of NGSL, and what you do see is, you know, you know, in general, you know, the TOEIC test is said to be a test of business English. That’s what that, you know, that’s what, ETS, English testing services states. And, and to a certain extent, that’s true. You know, when you look at the TOEIC service list, those 1200 words, you do see an awful lot of businessy, you know, if that’s a word, businessy type words. So that’s, that’s true. But, you know, we published the TOEIC service list in 2015. And I’m actually, I actually, you know, have seen a lot of research that, you know, that showed that the TOEIC was not actually a very good measure of student’s ability to function in, in real business settings. The most famous example is Rakuten. You know, one of the largest companies in the world, it’s certainly the largest one in Japan. The president of Rakuten, Mikitani, is very good at English. And he required every employee to get a high score on the TOEIC exam, because he wanted to promote English, use of English in the company. And he spent years and years and, you know, I want to say millions of dollars, you know, training students and training employees to get high scores on the TOEIC exam, and he promoted people to positions of management, promoted people overseas based on their TOEIC scores. And in most cases, they weren’t able to function. So knowing that, knowing that, what we did is the same year and 2015 that we published TOEIC service list we also side by side, on the exact same day published the business service list and the business service list is basically it’s a 65 million word corpus of what we tried to create, we tried to create a very representative sample of business English as it’s used in the real world. So business newspapers, business magazines, business websites, top selling business textbooks, and so on. And we were able to, the list is a bit longer than, the TOEIC service list is 1200 words, with our business service list, we had to go up to 1700 words. But with those 1700 words, we cover about 97% of most business English setting, real business English settings. So it’s only an extra 500 words, and only 2% less coverage, but it’s actually Business English for the real world. So, you know, basically what I wanted is, you know, for my students, at my university, I knew, you know, TOEIC was a high stakes exam, and they needed it to, you know, to, you know, to test out of certain courses or to put on their resume or to get a job, you know, I wanted to make sure that I was doing what I could to help them to get a high score on that exam. But at the same time, for people who wanted to actually work in the business world, I wanted to have another option. And so the business service list is actually being used, you know, all over the world, because it’s a very representative sample and gives very high coverage.

Jay  

Fantastic. Wow. Yeah, great research. It’s really. I’m a bit of a geek, but I’m totally excited to have a look at that BSL now. Cool. All right, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about moving from vocabulary to sort of a larger application of vocab, which is reading so like, how much of reading is just how many words you know?

Charlie  

I think a large part of it. I mean, it’s not just that, I mean, obviously, there are many other skills involved in reading. But, you know, what we do know, you know, what research clearly shows us is that if you don’t have enough vocabulary, you can’t read.  So, you know, a core vocabulary a core bank of high frequency words, if, you know, until you achieve that, until you achieve that kind of Nexus, all of the other learning strategies that you’re studying, you know, top down, bottom up, you know, schema building, all you know, you know, you know, skimming, scanning all of those things, they’re very good, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t help you to be a fluent reader. Because unless you hit that 95, you know, 90%, 95%, 98%, those barriers are really important thresholds that we, you know, to, to get over, if you want to be able to read fluently.

Jay  

Yeah, yeah, the analogy would be sort of like a musical instrument, like, the vocab would be learning all the chords, but you cannot play a song yet until you’ve you know, I guess the song comes with the grammar, or what are the other elements to reading there?

Charlie  

Well, for you know, for me right now, um, you know, what, again, this comes back to my experience here in Japan. But one of the first things I noticed, you know, when I was came over, and you know, 35 years ago, was, you know, and I wasn’t a trained teacher or a trained researcher at that point that came later in my career. But even for an untrained, you know, native speaker coming over and working in junior High’s and senior High’s. And, you know, as I looked at their English textbooks, you know, I thought to myself, how can they possibly be understanding this? It’s so far, you know, I can hardly understand it. And I’m a native speaker. They’re non native speakers, how could they understand it? And I could really see that the vocabulary load  was a big factor. And it’s actually one of the reasons I went back and became a vocabulary researcher, I was so concerned about that particular issue. So what, you know, what I can see here in Japan, the, you know, on the one hand, you have this sort of what’s called a backwash effect, because the entrance exams are so difficult. You have a backwash effect to junior high schools and senior high schools, where the textbooks and the vocabulary and the grammar are very, very difficult. I’ve done research that shows that Japanese high school EFL textbooks are actually more difficult to read than reading in English newspaper, Time magazine or even Harry Potter. So native speaker materials are easier than you know Japanese high school textbooks. And so because of that, and this is just sort of background to come back and answer your question. I you know, I’m very concerned about the difficulty of texts that EFL students are exposed to in Japan. I can see that having a very negative effect on their confidence and their motivation. And that’s combined with the fact that Communicative Language Teaching is very, very far behind in Japan, but it’s still very strong focus on teacher fronted lessons, lecture oriented lessons, error correction is primary. So students are, you know, they translate and they’re corrected, and they translate and they’re corrected and the materials are too hard for them to read so it’s this negative spiral, they start out loving English and have confidence and motivation, and the more they study, the lower that confidence and motivation gets. And so for me, you know, one of the tools I wanted to create for Japan was these high frequency word lists to help them to, you know, to be able to get, you know, into that positive spiral. But the other thing I really felt was necessary was the importance of extensive graded reading. Reading, getting exposed to reading materials that they can actually read, you know, one page of text, one page of Japanese high school text, students are translating an average of 20 or more words. So that means that their understanding of the text is only about 60%. And it’s 60% reading is impossible at every, almost every research study shows that below 80%, it’s impossible to read. So what I’m, you know, you know, on the one hand, I’m trying to build their vocabulary to get them up to 90%. But on the other hand, they can’t wait that long. So the graded reading materials, helps to give them exposure to materials that they can read at that 95% level right away. So, you know, I’ve created, you know, free graded reading websites, free tools to create graded reading materials, you know, the corpus based tools to create the graded reading materials. But all of this is sort of,  to focus on this, this really huge problem in Japan, where the materials they’re exposed to are way above their head. And it’s, it’s decreasing their motivation and confidence and love of English. And so the schools that, you know, there is, you know, probably some of the best teachers and proponents of graded reading of extensive reading in the world are here in Japan, there’s a lot of us and and you see a lot of good research being done here. And some of the schools that are doing the best in Japan, are the ones that are doing, requiring students to do extensive graded reading. And in fact, that’s what we do in my own department, all freshmen and sophomores, you know, are required to do quite a lot of graded reading, and graded listening. And that’s, you know, because we want to give you them to get that comprehensible input, lots and lots of input, which also develops vocabulary, but also develops many other skills as well.

Jay  

Wonderful, so interesting. Do you have a particular text analyzer that you would recommend to people listening. 

Charlie  

I mean, certainly ours is a good one, we created one called the online graded text editor OGTE for short. And that one utilises, of course, all of my word lists, but also many, many other word lists, the Oxford list, the Cambridge lists and so on. But that tool we created to help teachers and content developers to easily be able to grade, you know, assess the difficulty of existing content, but also modify that content to a lower level, or create new content to a certain level. There are a lot of other tools out there, but many of them are made by friends of mine, Tom Cobb has got a great tool called vocab profile. Laurence Anthony here in Japan, another good friend has antwoord profiler, there’s a lot of tools out there, all of them are good, we created this tool, this OGTE because many of the other tools were sort of originally created for researchers. Bit difficult bit clunky, you know, the learning curve is a bit high. And so what we tried to do was to create a more intuitive, you know, easy to use tool, you know, with a target being teachers and content developers rather than researchers. So, you know, I would say our tool is a good starting place. And but the other tool, you know, there are many other tools. But, you know, the other two that I mentioned, you know, ant word profiler, and vocab profiler also, you know, two I would definitely recommend,

Jay  

Yeah, they sort of become a good text analyser and I’ll certainly check out the OGTE, once you start to use that in your content creation, I mean, there’s no looking back because your intuition sometimes about where a word sits in a frequency list can just be completely wrong.

Charlie  

I’m gonna, I’m gonna put in the chat, just a link. This is a link to my free resources. And that actually on that one page, you’ll get links to my vocabulary resources, my graded reading and listening resources, my vocabulary tests And corpus tools. So that’s like one page where almost everything is

Jay  

Great. I’ll put it in the description below this podcast. So if anyone’s listening do go ahead and click on that, because it could actually could transform your teaching career, I think.

Charlie  

Well, that’s that’s where we’re hoping, to help people to be able to do a better job at what they’re doing,

Jay  

Oh, look, I think any entry level teacher walking into the classroom should have, I wish they could have a bit of time with you and your free resources, it would make a big difference to the way they teach. That’s for sure. Cool. All right, I’m gonna shift gears yet again. And when I want to talk to you about computer assisted language learning, which is my area of interest, we sort of we develop software for this purpose. And I just want to talk sort of big picture with you, I just want to talk to you about sort of, what are your thoughts? Are we headed in the right direction? Is? Is this technology actually making language learning more efficient? Do we have a long way to go? Are we close to something, you know, being great or not? What do you think?

Charlie  

Oh, that’s, that’s you’re asking the wrong guy. Because I started, I started in computer assisted language learning, when I was director of Sony language labs, back in the late 80s, early 90s. And the technology of the day was language laboratories based on the audio lingual method. And, you know, they were selling that technology to, you know, to schools all around the country, you know, high schools, colleges, junior high schools. And that was the big push. But I came in not knowing a lot about technology when I started that job, but but actually through, you know, just just absolutely a massive exposure to that equipment, that approach and trying to work with students and teachers and schools came away with a very negative attitude towards, you know, towards early call. Because the focus in those days was really, it was a business model, it was on getting students schools to buy the most expensive equipment possible, promising that it would solve language learning problems. But in fact, it didn’t solve any of the problems. So one of the big problems with those language labs was that they were very, very complicated to use. Most teachers didn’t have confidence. To use the technology, there was very little training given there was, you know, and so it was an absolute failure. I years later, I, you know, after I did my masters, my doctoral degree, I became a professor at a university and, and the university said to me, Oh, Charlie, you, I see you had all this experience at Sony, well, we have to build a call lab, you know, in our university, and we’d like you to head up the project, and having all those bad experiences, I said to them, Well, okay. But, you know, here’s my condition. You know, here’s my condition, you know, you know, number one is that you don’t spend the entire budget on technology that at least half the budget, you know, needs to be, you know, for teacher training, and teacher support and student training and student support. And there needs to be full time staff in the lab. I mean, I actually wrote a book called new perspectives and call with Lawrence Erlbaum, about 15 years ago, and it was sort of based on some of these experiences. But the school astonishingly said to me, no, they said, No, you’re going to be in charge of the project, you have no choice. And we’re going to spend the whole budget on technology because you know, what it is doing video on demand, and we have to beat Waseda. And so you know, both of my, my early experiences were very negative, very negative, and, and both of them failed. And so when I, you know, when I got out of left that university and went on my own, I was still interested in the promise of technology. But I’ve seen very close handed in a close handed way, you know, how easily you can go awry. So for me, you know, and ever since then, ever since I’ve been doing stuff on my own, the starting point is not technology, it never is. For me, the starting point is pedagogy. It always is. And, and so, you know, I think about what I want to accomplish in the classroom. And then, you know, apply technology in a way that accomplishes you know, some kind of ped…, you know, addresses some kind of pedagogic need or problem and usually going for the lowest-tech solution that’s possible. Because the higher the tech, the more things that can go wrong and the more difficult it is for teachers and students to learn how to do it. And so my you know, for the past 15 years, 10 past, 10 years or 15 years maybe you know, I really gone in a different direction. I still use you know, I obviously I’m doing a lot with technology, but you know, these are not the most advanced tools out there, but they’re all scientific and pedagogically, you know, grounded. And I think there because of that, they’re able to help a lot more people.

Jay  

Yeah, that’s, that’s yep, I agree with you. I think the technology has to fit your pedagogy and not the other way around. Yeah, very interesting. Cool. All right. Well, I might, that might be enough for our conversation. I really enjoyed that. And um, it’s really nice to hear from somebody who’s done so much for the industry, and probably have you, I think you probably have had a big effect. And if not now, certainly, certainly will, will, at some point, I’m sure, as people more and more people get into your resources.

Charlie  

The old gen service list was published in 53. And I published my list on the 60th anniversary in 2013. So that old list lasted for 60 years and helped teachers for 60. So my kind of hope, is that all of these tools, and all of these lists and all of these things that we’re building, you know, hope, hopefully, you know, we’ll be helping people for at least another sixty years. That’s, that’s, that would be kind of a nice goal.

Jay  

Brilliant, and I’ll put your link in the description below, it is if anybody’s just listening, it’s charlie-browne.com And you’ll be able to find all your resources there. Cool. Is there anything else you want to say, Charlie?

Charlie  

Oh, just a delight to talk with you. And you know, absolutely happy to, you know, if you want to put uh, you know, my, my university or company, email, you know, below the, you know, the, the podcast, if people have questions, you know, things they want to ask, I’m always happy to try and help if I can. That’s, that’s, you know, basically, you know, the whole reason I’m doing this.

Jay  

Terrific, good stuff. Thanks so much for talking to me.

Charlie  

Absolutely. Thanks a lot.

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