How might such mastery be achieved? The slow pace of normal classroom learning - typically five new words per hour, according to Milton and Meara (1995) - suggests that unfashionable methods like requiring learners to memorize long lists of words and their L1 equivalents may be very valuable in helping beginning learners to achieve lexical autonomy quickly. Simplified readers may also be a useful resource for learners who need to acquire high frequency vocabulary.
For teachers of learners who can read unsimplified texts, the finding that frequent encounters are important means making classroom decisions that favor reading in volume. Bamford and Day (1998) point to the importance of creating and modeling a culture of reading in the L2 classroom. They mention that students should have easy access to a wide choice of interesting reading materials and they recommend using classroom time to do sustained silent reading. This sounds like good advice at a time when uninterrupted attention to a long stretch of text is an increasingly rare experience for many people. Indeed, devoting the ESL reading class hour to doing extensive reading may be a better use of a limited resource than using the time to discuss reading strategies or work on exercises to develop skills many learners already possess as a result of learning to read successfully in their L1s. Evidence for this perspective comes from a study of Japanese ESL learners by Robb and Susser (1989). They contrasted proficiency increases in two groups of learners, one group who completed a reading skills workbook and another group who used class time to read texts and answer comprehension questions. Results on a variety of measures including vocabulary tests clearly favored the reading condition.
2.3 The War on Poverty.
No one would disagree with the idea that reading a lot is a good thing and that reading more is even better. However, one of the problems that our research confronted is that a single book or story offers few opportunities to learn new words through multiple encounters because the needed repetitions simply do not occur.