Category Archives: Writing

Posts about writing, mostly related to writing easy readers for language learning.

Children’s Books

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In my French reading, partly to continue using extensive reading, and also partly research for my writing of comic books in French, I’ve started reading more children’s books.  The J’Aime Lire series from Bayard was an excellent place to start.  They publish for specific ages: 6, 7, 8, 9, etc.  While the difficulty for a foreign language learner varies sometimes, the books for 6-8 year-olds mostly work for me, and seem to match a ~1000 word vocabulary or A2/B1 level.

One thing I found with reading children’s fantasy novels is that they are very vivid, and it is easy to become engrossed in this fantasy world, with a feeling of wonder.  I had the same experience when reading the first volume of Harry Potter (and as a child when reading Enid Blyton).  My comic book also has this vividness about it – partly because it is a brightly-coloured comic book.  I’m not sure if it is the fantasy element, the illustrations or a property of the writing that makes it so.  In the case of Harry Potter it can only have been created via the text, as I read it before seeing any movies of it.

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Thoughts on Up Goer Five and Constrained Vocabulary Writing

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When I first saw the Up Goer Five comic by xkcd, I loved it.  It epitomised what I do with my comic book and my research, and is a convenient example to show people, when explaining the idea of constrained vocabulary writing.

Fans figured out that the 1,000 words used by xkcd for it were the contemporary fiction list, shown in Wiktionary.  This frequency list is based on over 9 million words of on-line contemporary fiction.  It combines plurals and simple verb forms into one listed word (lemmas), which is a good choice, since if the root word is known, then the plurals with s, and simple verb forms are usually also understood.

As someone who writes using lists generated based on frequency, I’ve noticed that several problems arise.  One is that, typically, male pronouns and nouns occur at higher frequencies than female ones.  The Wiktionary list is not overly biased in this way, possibly because it is based on contemporary fiction.  “he” is ranked at 8, “her” and “she” at 12 and 13 respectively, and “his” at 16.  However, we find “man” at 163 and “woman” at 452, but “girl” is at 133 and “boy” at 217.  This hints at what has been termed the systemic “infantilization” of women in society.  The figures are probably quite different due to the common pairing of “guy” (at 178) with “girl” in colloquial speech.  Google’s auto-suggest, which is also based on frequency, has occasionally come up with phrases that are considered racist, sexist or otherwise problematic – and it is purely a reflection of what we as a society tend to write.  When writing in a principled manner for language learners, it may be important to balance what word frequency lists tell us, with what is a more equitable representation.  I didn’t really think very much about this when I started writing Gnomeville years ago, but have become more aware of these issues thanks to some of my friends who are more knowledgeable in them.

Another issue that needs to be considered is what is culturally appropriate to write for the target audience.  For example, I have recently been made aware that it is inappropriate to use words referring to alcoholic beverages when the audience is Islamic.  Obviously for work intended for children (or for experimental subjects) it is customary to exclude expletives.  For this reason, several words on the list would need to be excluded.  There seems to be an expressive set of expletives in the list.

For the method of writing I employ in the Gnomeville story, I  introduce one new high frequency word per page of story, and somewhat less frequently I introduce a grammatical pattern.  Sometimes I’ve changed the order in which I add words due to the story.  This happened in episode one, in which I introduced “se” very early instead of after about a dozen other words.  Also, I recall that “le” was added before “de”, even though their ranks are reversed.  Having said that, my first 20 words were based on a corpus of newspaper articles.  Every corpus gives a different ranking of words.  There are some similarities across corpora however.  For example, if the corpus is large enough, the frequency of the word “the” is likely to be about 7% for English text.

Anyway, back to Up Goer Five.  The upcoming book “Thing Explainer”, as well as the text uploaded to the up goer five text editor provide some good practice at reading for people still consolidating their first 1000 words of the English language.  If going beyond that, the writing should have less than 5% of words outside the vocabulary set to be suitable for improving language skill while fluently reading for comprehension.  A text editor with more flexibility is the OGTE Editor, designed for writing English text for different language learner levels.

Children’s books

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While searching for books that are simple enough for me to read in Japanese, I’ve been musing about the attributes that make these suitable for language learners.
If starting from scratch you need repetitious text with obviously illustrated nouns. This describes some of the books I purchased. The downside of the simplest books is that they become an illustrated list of nouns (or adjectives like colours), and therefore have no narrative.
In Japanese you have the added complication of the writing system. Beginner books use hiragana only. Then there are some that have katakana with hiragana transliterations. Then there are a few that use both the alphabets without guides. At the next level kanji are included with hiragana guides. The level of support for kanji varies.

Constrained Writing

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In 1996 I first heard about a book written without the letter E (Gadsby, by Wright, published 1939). Then a couple of years later I met a French colleague and was telling him about my comic book in French that exclusively uses French-English cognates and one new French word per page. It reminded him of constrained writing, particularly “lipograms”, and he introduced me to the work of Georges Perec, who wrote various works with or without certain vowels. We exchanged DNA poetry. More recently I dabbled in pilish, adding the constraint of writing in haiku verses.

A recent blog post about OULIPO reminded me about my fascination with such things.

The experience of writing my comic in French is quite different to my dabblings in German and Dutch, due to the differences in cognates (similar looking words with similar meaning) in the different languages.  In French it is hard to generate much text initially, but there is soon an abundance of identically spelt nouns, adjectives and verbs (albeit with slightly different endings).  In Dutch and to a lesser extent in German it is possible to write 20-odd words of meaningful text entirely using exact cognates.  But eventually you hit a wall where there are not many verbs to work with.  I’m still figuring out how to get past that wall before I commit to drawing the (publishable) artwork for and publishing a first episode in those languages.

 

Writing Easy Readers

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There has been a lot of research over the past few decades on the use of extensive reading for language learning, with Paul Nation being a prominent name in the research community.  Out of all this research has come some general guidelines on how to use extensive reading to improve your language learning skills, but also how to write or adapt stories to suit language learners.  Here’s my version of the basic requirements.

  1. Decide what your core vocabulary will be, for example 1,000 word families.  You may also want to decide what grammatical repertoire you are going to include – at least for lower levels of language skill.
  2. Decide whether you want to teach a particular set of vocabulary in the story (eg. colours).
  3. Ensure that at least 95% of the text consists of words from your core vocabulary or proper nouns.
  4. For words in your original draft that are outside of the core vocabulary, consider changing them to ones that are within the core vocabulary.
  5. For the remaining out of vocabulary words that occur less than 5 times (say) in your story, provide a gloss.  (Also for any idiomatic expressions.)
  6. For words that you want to teach, ensure they occur at least 5 times in the story, but in a way that doesn’t ruin the story.  It would be better to have fewer occurrences than to make the story less entertaining.
  7. Use illustrations, as they help the learner retain meaning.

Here’s a vocabulary checker for stories in English.

Easy Reader Hall of Shame

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Having finished reading yet another boring German easy reader, I thought I’d dedicate today’s post to easy readers that should never have existed.

Authors of easy readers are trying to trick language learners into learning target language while being entertained with a story.  However, some authors don’t do enough entertaining, and it is transparently obvious that the story (or part of it) is just a vehicle for exposure to vocabulary or, in the case of CEFR-based books, practising common scenarios required for surviving in the target language.

So here is my list of the worst easy readers I’ve read:

  1. “Sur les Routes de France” by G. Colquhoun and E. Guergady, published by John Murray, (French).
    Not only was this boring but it was long: 137 pages of tedium.  It is basically a story of a family going on holiday in France, following their trek through different locations.  I read this over a number of weeks as it took enormous willpower to finish it.  Happily this is out of print.  I thought that I must have the last copy in the world, but a quick Google search reveals that there are second-hand copies on the market.  What amazes me is that this work, that was first published in 1959, got reprinted several times.  I have a second edition copy from 1964, but I see on-line that there was a 1973 3rd edition .  That means that at least 14 years of students had to suffer this text!  Steer clear of this one.  There are many better stories to read.
  2. “Lustige Dialoge” by Harry A. Walbruck, published by National Textbook Company in 1985 (German).
    This contains 30 short dialogues that are “humorous”.  My Goodreads review states it succinctly: “Full of annoying anecdotes involving dated stereotypes passed off as humour. I really struggled to finish the book.“
    To be fair, some of the dialogues were somewhat humorous, but for the purpose of providing extensive reading material it fails, as the individual dialogues are too short, and there is no motivating reason to read the next one.
  3. “Deuxième Acte” by O.M. Fordham and V.L.R.Lewis, published by Harrap in 1965 (French).
    This book is a sequence of letters written between members of two families.  The content of the letters, as well as the dialogues in the back of the book are very mundane.  It was another book that was difficult to finish, but was mercifully short (compared to no. 1) at 76 pages, including exercises that I tend to skip over.  One thing that I have found too many of is stories of typical traditional nuclear families doing ordinary things, such as the mother in the kitchen or doing the shopping, the father coming home from work, blah blah.  Admittedly some of these books are old, the authors of the various books probably didn’t know of each others work, and the average student wouldn’t have been exposed to more than one of these, but I’m rather sick of the genre.
  4. “Glück gehabt” by Theo Scherling and Elke Burger, published by Langenscheidt in 2010 (German).
    There are many other books I could list that are like no. 3 in their irksomeness, but I’ve decided to go for variety rather than comprehensiveness.  Langenscheidt do a good job at making their text and their audio easy.  They also do well in avoiding stereotypes for their characters.  For example, in Leo & Co, one of the regular characters is a single mother who is a car mechanic, working with her dad, while Leo himself is an artist who runs a pub/eatery.  On the down side, the stories are a bit on the mundane side, with this particular one being the worst I’ve read so far.  The story mostly follows the lead character in the act of getting a new apartment.  While listening to it I kept waiting for the plot to start, but nothing really happens other than finding out about an apartment, getting it, then moving into it, with a small side story of a colleague hurting their back.  Skip this one unless you’re desperate for the practice.
  5. “Technik und Natur” by Mike Lynch, published by Heinemann 1996.
    I’ve chosen this reading booklet as an example of another problem that often occurs with supposedly easy readers.  Some authors control the grammar but use far too much difficult vocabulary.  This particular booklet has interesting subject matter for those interested in science and technology, but the percentage of difficult words is too high.  There is vocabulary support, but text should really be written in a way that less than 5% of the words require it, since it interrupts the flow of reading.

I think that will do for now.  So the moral of the story is, when writing for language language learners:

  • Don’t be boring,
  • Optimise the length of the text to allow a good reading session,
  • Don’t inundate with vocabulary.

It is possible to do the above.  There are many examples.  I love some of the stories in the Découverte series, such as “Dans la Maison Bleue”, which are full of imagination, and have illustrations that complement the stories.  Here’s hoping there are more interesting books in the future.  I hope mine will also be enjoyed.  I’ve had good feedback so far.