Reading is defined as a socio-cultural act negotiated between text and reader, and the act of reading is considered to be a cognitive process that involves knowledge not only of symbols/letters, vocabulary and structure, but also of culture. In other words, in order to understand the intentions of the author and to formulate meaning, the second…

In this article, the author considers some of the issues addressed in the 2007 MLA report. The 2007 MLA report argues that the two-tiered literature/language configuration in post-secondary foreign language departments "has outlived its usefulness and needs to evolve," and even needs to be replaced. When proclamations are made that foreign…

"I was grabbed early [by vocabulary] and never let go. That's why it's difficult to explain why I enjoy working in this area. I just love doing it," said Paul Nation (in Coxhead, 2005, p. 46). How many people get grabbed by an area of research, teaching, and learning that continues to engage interest and cause excitement after 30 years? In this…

We explore the relationship between second language (L2) learners' vocabulary size, lexical text coverage that their vocabulary provides and their reading comprehension. We also conceptualize "adequate reading comprehension" and look for the lexical threshold for such reading in terms of coverage and vocabulary size. Vocabulary size was measured…

Nation (2006) has calculated that second language (L2) learners require much more vocabulary than previously thought to be functional with language (e.g., 8,000-9,000 word families to read independently). This level is far beyond the highest graded reader, and would be difficult to explicitly teach. One way for learners to be exposed to…

This study investigates the vocabulary learning opportunities in an ELT course book designed for upper-intermediate learners. All the words appearing in the 12 chapters of the text were analyzed. The results suggest that the text would provide opportunities to deepen knowledge of the second 1,000 most frequent words in English, and would provide a…

Paul Nation's talents and interests extend well beyond vocabulary to include research on speaking, writing, classroom learning and teaching, reading, and fluency. In keeping with Nation's interests in fluency, extensive reading, and reading instruction, I outline current perspectives on reading fluency and its role as a key component of reading…

Is it possible to tell whether bilinguals are able to read simple text in their two languages equally fluently? Is it thus possible to distinguish balanced bilinguals from unbalanced bilinguals with respect to reading fluency in their first language (L1) and second language (L2)? In this study, we avoided making direct comparisons between L1 and…

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed…

This longitudinal case study tracks an adult second-language (L2) learner's quality and quantity of encounters with 20 vocabulary items in an English for Academic Purposes course over 3 months. The learner completed pretest and posttest vocabulary knowledge interviews, submitted course materials and notes for analysis, and was observed during…

This paper reports findings from a case study of the amount of explicit vocabulary focus (EVF) that occurred in a week of classes for one group of upper intermediate students in an intensive English program (IEP). To assess EVF, instruction from a total of 25 hours of classes was analyzed to see if the number of EVF events was more connected with…

Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the…

Making Nation's text analysis software accessible via the World Wide Web has opened up an exploration of how his learning principles can best be realized in practice. This paper discusses 3 representative episodes in the ongoing exploration. The first concerns an examination of the assumptions behind modeling what texts look like to learners with…

This study examined the extent to which glossaries may affect the percentage of known words (coverage) in television programs. The transcripts of 51 episodes of 2 television programs ("House" and "Grey's Anatomy") were analyzed using Range (Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002) to create glossaries consisting of the low-frequency (less frequent than…

This paper addresses the issue of how we might be able to assess productive vocabulary size in second language learners. It discusses some previous attempts to develop measures of this sort, and argues that a fresh approach is needed in order to overcome some persistent problems that dog research in this area. The paper argues that there might be…