"Our school is the entire society, nature itself, in one word... the world." Joaquín Costa, Spanish lawyer and politician (1846 - 1911)
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When English is learnt as a foreign language in their home countries, EFL students need extensive reading (ER) and extensive listening (EL) to expand their passive and active vocabulary, to break down the flow of speech into comprehensible units (speech segmentation) and even to improve their oral fluency.
The English Lexicon, the CEFR Levels and the Classification of the Entries in this Blog
A study by Harvard University and Google estimated that English has 1,022,000 words, including technical terms, foreign loans and old, archaic words, whereas, in its current edition, the Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 600,000 words in its pages.
Some studies show that a native speaker who has reached university may know around 15-20,000 word families (a word family includes headwords, inflections and derivations together, so "accept", "accepts", "acceptable" and "unacceptable" would be counted as a single item), Gleitman & Landau (1994) estimate that an adult stores and manipulates 100,000 words in their mental lexicon. but many EFL learners never manage to learn the 2,000 most frequent word families (Webb & Nation, 2017, pp. 44 and 47), while other researchers argue that learners should aim to reach the threshold of the 3,000 most frequent word families, because that will cover 95% of the written language, including the vocabulary of dictionary entries and academic texts (Horst, 2019, p. 12-13).
This blog is a compilation of authentic listening and reading materials which can provide ER and EL practice for advanced learners of English at the top three levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages of the Council of Europe (CEFR): B2 (Independent User 2 or Upper-Intermediate), C1 (Proficient User 1 or Advanced) and C2 (Proficient User 2 or Proficiency) to complement the work they do in the classroom with a textbook, or to use autonomously or collaboratively in groups. This blog also uses two other categories to classify the posts, B1 level (Independent User 1 or Intermediate), and a brand new level beyond C2, which I have called Ex (for "Experts"). "Ex" materials are those recordings or texts that due to their complexity (number of speakers, lack of subtitles or script, density of information, technical language, accent, vagueness or obscurity of expression, humour etc.) are more suitable for teachers, native speakers or language experts in general, whose language skills are clearly above C2 level of the Council of Europe.
The entries are organized by Topic (Music, Health, Business & Work, Environment, Cinema TV & Theatre, Humour, Politics, Feelings, Women etc), type of medium (Audio, Text or Video, basically), Country & Region (UK, USA, Spain etc), and type of post, which divides the entries into two categories: Links, which take you to the raw source, with the only pedagogic addition of a glossary with the less frequent words (beginning on June 5th, 2020) and Lessons, which include listening, speaking and reading task, and, sometimes, a full lesson plan. Both "links" and "lessons are classified by the CEFR levels. (Warning: to see the tag column on a mobile phone, you need to click on the web version at the very bottom of the front page).
According to Cutler (1994) in Gleitman (ed.), The Acquisition of the Lexicon, MIT, 1994: p. 99), "children learning English use stress rhythm in segmentation" [...] and he proposes the hypothesis that "language rhythm is also what allows infants to accomplish their very first speech segmentation. An ability to process rhythm is inborn. By using this ability, infants are enabled to overcome the segmentation problem and hence take their first step towards compilation of their own lexicon". The relevance of prosody and the practice with stress patterns to raise awareness of this unnoticed language feature in the adult mind is discussed in Bermejo's "Speaking English with your Feet", English Teaching Professional (28), July 2003.
But, in the age of new technologies, old technologies can still play a crucial role in lexicon consolidation: a simple vocabulary notebook, where learners keep record -and number- the new words and phrases that come up in these documents, can be an excellent complement to keep track of the progress learners are making during a period of time. In the school year 2019-20 my students at B2.1 level reported taking down from 480 to 1,070 new words in their vocabulary notebook in one group, and from 180 to 420 words in the second group. In 2020-21 the C1.1 students reported writing from 125 to 750 new words in their notebook, and in 2021-22, Rosa L., a regular, hard-working student, recorded 545 new words, expressions, phrasal verbs, collocations, connectors and false friends in C1.1 (variation in vocabulary growth is discussed in Webb & Nation, p. 46- 48 (2017) My students also admitted that, they might as well remember only about 10% of the recorded words at the end of the course, but, of course, you must forget and recall a word several times until you (finally?) fix it in your mental lexicon (Webb & Nation (2017), p. 61- 76).
Reading and listening to English can be a lot of fun at advanced levels if you can find something that is meaningful and motivating for you. I just hope you can enjoy this blog and come back again with your friends, classmates or colleagues.
J. Ignacio Bermejo
A study by Harvard University and Google estimated that English has 1,022,000 words, including technical terms, foreign loans and old, archaic words, whereas, in its current edition, the Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 600,000 words in its pages.
Learning the English lexicon is a daunting task if you cannot find some fun and some support along the way. Digital media have dramatically increased the availability of language input around the world, but students can get lost in this vast ocean, they need guidance to find a variety of reliable sources, in Vygotsky's words, they need scaffolding -expert guidance- to understand the level of difficulty of the authentic documents they find on the internet, and in terms of Krashen's theory of Second Language Acquisition, they need direction to maximize their exposure to comprehensible input + 1, to minimize their affective filter and to reduce the frustration of not understanding anything.
This blog is a compilation of authentic listening and reading materials which can provide ER and EL practice for advanced learners of English at the top three levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages of the Council of Europe (CEFR): B2 (Independent User 2 or Upper-Intermediate), C1 (Proficient User 1 or Advanced) and C2 (Proficient User 2 or Proficiency) to complement the work they do in the classroom with a textbook, or to use autonomously or collaboratively in groups. This blog also uses two other categories to classify the posts, B1 level (Independent User 1 or Intermediate), and a brand new level beyond C2, which I have called Ex (for "Experts"). "Ex" materials are those recordings or texts that due to their complexity (number of speakers, lack of subtitles or script, density of information, technical language, accent, vagueness or obscurity of expression, humour etc.) are more suitable for teachers, native speakers or language experts in general, whose language skills are clearly above C2 level of the Council of Europe.
The entries are organized by Topic (Music, Health, Business & Work, Environment, Cinema TV & Theatre, Humour, Politics, Feelings, Women etc), type of medium (Audio, Text or Video, basically), Country & Region (UK, USA, Spain etc), and type of post, which divides the entries into two categories: Links, which take you to the raw source, with the only pedagogic addition of a glossary with the less frequent words (beginning on June 5th, 2020) and Lessons, which include listening, speaking and reading task, and, sometimes, a full lesson plan. Both "links" and "lessons are classified by the CEFR levels. (Warning: to see the tag column on a mobile phone, you need to click on the web version at the very bottom of the front page).
Extensive Listening, Speech Segmentation and Vocabulary Activation Tasks
Some of the audios are long radio interviews (over 30 minutes long), so busy English learners may download them from their original website and listen to them while doing some other activities, like gardening, ironing, cooking, commuting, or walking. This "background noise" will still expose their minds to the strong and weak syllables that conform English rhythmic patterns and might help adult learners to pick up the prosody of English unconsciously, which is the first linguistic feature that babies use to break down the flow of human speech into comprehensible chunks and start learning their first words (speech segmentation).
Some of the audios are long radio interviews (over 30 minutes long), so busy English learners may download them from their original website and listen to them while doing some other activities, like gardening, ironing, cooking, commuting, or walking. This "background noise" will still expose their minds to the strong and weak syllables that conform English rhythmic patterns and might help adult learners to pick up the prosody of English unconsciously, which is the first linguistic feature that babies use to break down the flow of human speech into comprehensible chunks and start learning their first words (speech segmentation).
After reading or listening to the documents, students need to activate words and expressions in order to consolidate their learning. Articulation of English phonemes, consonant clusters and prosodic features -like sentence stress and intonation patterns- can be a real challenge for many EFL learners, so they can use the materials in this blog to record an oral summary of the text and to practice speaking with their mobile phones, if they are studying independently. Then, they can listen to themselves to become aware of the pronunciation and fluency difficulties they have encountered, and try a second recorded summary to improve both pronunciation and fluency.
The contents of this blog can also be used by teachers to set multi-skill homework tasks for their students in regular classes. Students can browse the blog by topic, find one story that they like, take notes to tell their fellow classmates next day in class, and discuss interesting vocabulary they have found in the text. This way, foreign learners of English can practise listening, reading and even speaking at home as well as in class, and they can activate the passive vocabulary they are picking up when reading and listening extensively. If the teacher encourages the students to find a speaking partner in the group -a classmate to talk to, over the phone or by video conference in online or hybrid courses or during school holidays- interaction will be added to the menu of multi-skill homework tasks and out-of-school speaking practice will be more fun. In the "Lessons" section of the blog you can find some examples of full lesson plans ready made for the classroom, and the conclusion of Bermejo (2000), presents a standard lesson plan to tackle the challenges of journalistic style in Time and Newsweek stories for C2 learners and Experts. For a comprehensive review of vocabulary learning activities you should check Webb & Nation (2017) p. 77- 129.
Extensive Listening and Oral Fluency
Extensive listening can even help students to improve their oral fluency. A study by Stephana de Wolf, Nienke Smit and Wander Lowie published in the ELT Journal 71/3 (2017) has found that exposure to English outside the school has a greater impact on oral fluency than an earlier start with the L2 on Dutch primary school children. The study analysed speech samples with a computer software, PRAAT, on 11 temporal measures of oral fluency (speech and articulation rate, mean length of utterances, number and duration of pauses, filled pauses, disfluencies etc.), and it was found that early school instruction had an impact on 2 of the 11 variables, whereas exposure outside school had an impact on 8 of the 11 measures of oral fluency. The authors recommend education planners "to design instructed early foreign language programmes in which students are motivated to experience out-of-school exposure to English, for instance by encouraging students to watch television or videos with English subtitles, or to play online games and explore websites, and to use this as input for classroom activities", and they recommend teachers to provide structure and guidance "in order to make sure out-of-school input is comprehensible", and to let students self-select topics of interest. Then. teachers could revise that input to find "salient language, lexicalized sentences and formulaic language", and use classroom activities to reinforce and activate that vocabulary. The glossary of this blog is another step in that direction.
How Many Words Can an EFL Student Learn in a School Year?
This blog also includes a list of news websites and digital radio stations that can be used by the most advanced learners of English and "experts" to do immersion in their home countries and another list with my favourite language teaching blogs to help teachers find refreshing ideas for their lessons.
Reading and listening to English can be a lot of fun at advanced levels if you can find something that is meaningful and motivating for you. I just hope you can enjoy this blog and come back again with your friends, classmates or colleagues.
J. Ignacio Bermejo
Zaragoza and Fitero
January 2019
January 2019
Contact: englishnewsandculture@gmail.com
