Commentary: Can free reading take you all the way? A response to Cobb (2007)

Abstract

Cobb (2007) argues that free reading cannot provide L2 readers with sufficient opportunities for acquiring vocabulary in order to reach an adequate level of reading comprehension of English texts.In this paper, we argue that (1) Cobb severely underestimates the amount of reading even a very modest reading habit would afford L2 readers, and therefore underestimates the impact of free reading on L2 vocabulary development; and (2) Cobb's data show that free reading is in fact a very powerful tool in vocabulary acquisition.COBB'S CLAIM: FREE READING IS NOT SUFFICIENT Krashen (1989Krashen ( , 2004) ) and others have argued that free reading is a major contributor to vocabulary development among both first and second language readers (see also McQuillan, 1998).Free and extensive reading advocates have claimed that such reading can and does provide acquirers with sufficient resources to reach a high level of literacy development.Cobb (2007) claims, however, that free reading cannot possibly provide sufficient opportunities for L2 readers to reach high level of vocabulary acquisition, of going "all the way" to the state of a fluent adult L2 reader.Cobb cites evidence showing that vocabulary acquisition requires a minimum of six to ten exposures to a word family, and that the minimal number of word families required for comprehension of non-specialist materials in English is 3000 to 5000, depending on which estimate is used (2007, p. 41).For this study, Cobb used the low end of these estimates (six exposures to a word family, 3000 word family level).Cobb analyzed how frequently vocabulary occurred in three subsets of a corpus of academic, fiction, and newspaper texts, each subset containing between 163,000 and 179,000 words, in order to determine if words occur in sufficient frequency for acquisition (see Table 1).(Cobb explains that the newspaper sample is about 100 pages of newspaper reading, the academic sample about 17 scientific papers, and the fiction sample about six stories the size of Alice in Wonderland.)Cobb estimated that in a "year or two" of language study, a student could read the equivalent of one of these three subsets, or roughly 175,000 words (p.41).He considered this to be an "optimistic" estimate.

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