Extensive reading: the case for reading lots of easy books

There are two ways to read in a language you’re learning.

In the first, you take a short, demanding text, a newspaper article or a page of a novel, and work through it slowly: looking up words, untangling sentences, perhaps answering questions. That’s intensive reading, and it’s what most language classes mean by reading.

In the second, you read a lot of easy text, quickly, for the story or the information, the way you read in your own language. That’s extensive reading.

Most learners do plenty of the first and almost none of the second. This article makes the case that the second deserves much more of your time, explains what the research shows, and suggests how to start.

Intensive and extensive reading, side by side

	Intensive reading	Extensive reading
Goal	Understand this text in detail	Read a lot, for meaning and pleasure
Difficulty	Often above your level	Easy: you know almost every word
Amount	A page or two	Whole books
Speed	Slow	As fast as is comfortable
Dictionary	Often	Rarely
Who chooses	Usually a teacher	You

An analogy: intensive reading is a driving lesson in which an instructor talks you through a tricky junction. Extensive reading is driving, the thousands of ordinary miles that make the basics automatic. You need both. Most language learners take lesson after lesson and hardly ever drive.

The principles

The best-known description of extensive reading comes from Richard Day and Julian Bamford, in their book Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom (1998) and a short article, “Top ten principles for teaching extensive reading” (Day & Bamford 2002). In paraphrase, their principles are:

1. The reading material is easy.
2. There’s a wide variety of material on many topics.
3. Learners choose what they read, and can stop reading something they don’t like.
4. Learners read as much as possible.
5. The purpose is usually pleasure, information or general understanding.
6. Reading is its own reward, not a means to a test.
7. Reading is usually fast rather than slow.
8. Reading is individual and silent.
9. Teachers guide and orient their students.
10. The teacher is a role model of a reader.

The last two are about classrooms. If you’re learning on your own, you play both roles: you choose the books, keep yourself reading and notice when something isn’t working.

What the research shows

Extensive reading has been studied for decades, in schools and universities around the world. The overall picture is encouraging, with some important details.

Reading ability improves

In a study often cited in this field, Elley and Mangubhai (1983, “The impact of reading on second language learning”) flooded classrooms in eight rural Fijian schools with 250 high-interest storybooks in English each. After eight months, pupils in those classes had progressed in reading and listening comprehension at about twice the normal rate of matched pupils in the regular program, and after twenty months their gains had spread to other language skills.

Studies that pool many experiments point the same way. Nakanishi (2015, “A meta-analysis of extensive reading research”) combined 34 studies and found a medium-sized positive effect of extensive reading on reading proficiency. Jeon and Day (2016, “The effectiveness of ER on reading proficiency: A meta-analysis”) combined 49 studies and found positive effects of small to medium size, larger for adults than for children.

Reading gets faster

Reading quickly and without effort is a skill of its own, and extensive reading trains it directly. Beglar, Hunt and Kite (2012, “The effect of pleasure reading on Japanese university EFL learners’ reading rates”) followed Japanese university students for an academic year. Students who read for pleasure gained more reading speed than students in an intensive reading class, those who read the most gained the most, and simplified texts produced larger gains than unsimplified ones.

Attitudes change

Mason and Krashen (1997, “Extensive reading in English as a foreign language”) described a class of Japanese university students who had previously failed English. After a semester of reading graded readers, they had nearly caught up with a traditionally taught class on a cloze test, and their attitudes toward English had improved markedly. For many learners, finishing a whole book in a new language is the moment the language starts to feel like theirs.

Vocabulary grows, but slowly

Here the research is more sobering, and worth understanding. Waring and Takaki (2003, “At what rate do learners learn and retain new vocabulary from reading a graded reader?”) had 15 Japanese learners read one short graded reader in which 25 words had been replaced by made-up words, appearing anywhere from once to 18 times. Straight afterward, the learners could recognize about 15 of the 25 on average, but could translate only about 5. Three months later, they could translate about one. None of the words met fewer than eight times was remembered for meaning. The researchers estimated that their learners kept the meaning of about one new word per hour of reading.

Other studies show that reading teaches more than meanings. In a detailed case study, Pigada and Schmitt (2006, “Vocabulary acquisition from extensive reading: A case study”) followed a learner of French who read four graded readers of his choice, about 30,000 words, in a month. Of 133 target words, about two-thirds improved in at least one respect, whether spelling, meaning or grammatical behavior, though few improved in all three. Spelling improved most. And words met often were far more likely to have their meanings learned than words met once.

The conclusion is not that reading is a poor way to learn vocabulary. It’s that each book teaches a modest number of words, so the amount you read decides how much you learn. Calculations by Paul Nation (2014, “How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?”) suggest that meeting less frequent words often enough takes hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of words of reading. Volume is the whole point. A little deliberate vocabulary study alongside it speeds things up.

Why the books must be easy

Extensive reading only works if the text is easy enough to read quickly, with understanding. Research on known-word coverage suggests that most learners need to know about 98% of the words in a text to read it comfortably without help (Hu & Nation 2000, “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension”), and Paul Nation and Rob Waring, in Teaching Extensive Reading in Another Language (Nation & Waring 2020), define the right level for extensive reading in the same terms: no more than about 2% unknown words. See the 98% rule.

Easy also means more. Suppose you read 20 minutes a day at 100 words a minute. That’s 2,000 words a day and more than 700,000 words in a year, several novels’ worth. Reading text that’s too hard, stopping for every second line, you might cover a fraction of that, and enjoy none of it.

And easy doesn’t mean childish. Here’s how Jules Verne opened Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864):

Le 24 mai 1863, un dimanche, mon oncle, le professeur Lidenbrock, revint précipitamment vers sa petite maison située au numéro 19 de König-strasse, l’une des plus anciennes rues du vieux quartier de Hambourg.

And here is a version we wrote at about A2:

Un dimanche de mai, mon oncle rentre à la maison. Il marche très vite. Mon oncle s’appelle Otto Lidenbrock. Il est professeur, et nous habitons à Hambourg, dans une vieille rue.

(“One Sunday in May, my uncle comes home. He’s walking very fast. My uncle’s name is Otto Lidenbrock. He’s a professor, and we live in Hamburg, on an old street.”) Same scene, same characters, same sense that something is about to happen. An A2 reader can read the second version at speed, and read the whole book that way.

How to start

1. Choose your level honestly. Pick text where you know nearly every word. If in doubt, go lower. See how to choose your reading level.
2. Choose a story you want to read. Interest keeps you going. Familiar stories help, too; see why classic novels work so well.
3. Set a time, and aim for volume. Fifteen to thirty minutes a day is a good start. For short graded readers, Day and Bamford (2002) suggest that a book a week is probably the minimum to get the benefits and build a reading habit.
4. Keep lookups rare. Check a word only when the story depends on it or when it keeps coming back. See dictionary or context.
5. Stop books you don’t enjoy. Choosing, and un-choosing, is one of the principles. A dull book will quietly end your reading habit.
6. Add audio if you can. Reading along with a recording keeps you moving and links words to sounds. See reading while listening.
7. Keep a simple record. Books finished, or minutes read. Progress in reading is hard to feel day to day and easy to see over a month.
8. Move up gradually. When a level feels effortless for a few books, try the next one.

If you’d like a structure for the first month, try our 30-day reading plan.

Common mistakes

Reading text that’s too hard. By far the most common. It turns extensive reading back into intensive reading, slowly.

Looking up every word. It breaks the flow of the story, and the flow is what you’re practicing.

Pushing through a book you don’t like. Willpower runs out. Interest doesn’t, or not as fast.

Expecting quick results. The studies above measured progress over months. The first few weeks build the habit; the gains follow.

How Lexo helps

Lexo is an iPhone and iPad app designed for exactly this kind of reading. Its catalog of about 100 classic novels, from Journey to the Center of the Earth to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, is rewritten at CEFR levels A2 to C2 in the language you’re learning, so you can choose an edition where you know almost every word. You choose the level for each book.

Every book is narrated, with the words highlighted as they’re read, so you can read along. When a word does matter, tap it to see what it means in that sentence, hear it and save it to your Words list, then go straight back to the story. Books download to your device, so you can read offline.

Lexo is in beta and launching on the App Store soon. Get notified at launch.