Tag Archives: reading

A Tale of Three Three Musketeers and Another One or Two

7 November, 2025Reviewsalexandre dumas, books, education, extensive reading, fiction, FLE, français facile, français langue étrangère, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, mousquetaires, musketeers, reading, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

No, that is not a typo in my title. Thanks to my recent obsession with this novel, leading to the Bootstrapping the Three Musketeers book, with a second on the way, I thought I’d look at three different abridged versions of Les Trois Mousquetaires. I have one published by CLE International, who, in the copy I have, state that it is for a vocabulary of 700 words, at the top level of the Niveau 1. New editions call that CEFR level A1. I also borrowed the CIDEB version, which is aimed at B1, with no mention of vocabulary size, as is common in current publications. When looking online at Mousquetaires books, I found another one adapted by Frédéric de Lavenne de Choulot (FLC).

One thing I’ve noticed with these, as with the recent movies, is that writers select different scenes to include in their version. CLE and FLC both include d’Artagnan’s anger at being ridiculed for riding an old nag. Both the recent movies and CIDEB chose to exclude that scene. The movies also took many more liberties with the story.

OK, now to details…

The CLE version

The CLE version, which aims for a vocabulary of 700 words, has a text length of about 10,000 words of story. It is written in present tense, and the volume includes a brief biography of Dumas, vocabulary support, and some short questions at the end of the book, with solutions. The books of this series provide two types of vocabulary support: general vocabulary is defined in French in a footnote, whereas words that are specific to the story, such as épée, are listed at the back. There are several ink illustrations throughout the 64-page book. (I notice the new edition has new greyscale images.)

On my simple readability score, based on a sample of the first 115 words, it gets 13.15, due to long sentences in the introduction. The expected vocabulary size for 95% coverage is estimated to be 7,427 (based on types, not word families).

The CIDEB version

CIDEB always include lots of additional material, such as many exercises, images, and additional articles to read that are related to the story. The book is 128 pages long, with less than half of that being for the story. I estimate it to have about 13,000 words of story. In addition there is an imaginary interview with Dumas, historical information about the period, and information about movies made of the story. The vocabulary support is provided as footnotes in French.

The story itself is written in passé simple. Based on a sample of 125 words at the start of the story, it gets a score of 8.71, also having a vocabulary size score of 7,427 and an average sentence length of 12.1.

The FLC version

The caveat for this review is that I have only looked at the sample. Therefore I do not know what additional material may be found in the book. There appears to be some vocabulary support, though I cannot say what form it takes, since I have only looked at the sample, which doesn’t allow the links to be followed. I am uncertain why certain words were selected for vocabulary support. Given the target audience appearing to be English-speakers, I would think it pointless to define “armes” and “crient”, but perhaps some nuance was discussed about these words. I noted one minor typo, a missing circumflex on the “i” of “boîte”. That’s not a big issue, given that I’ve seen many errors in books published by major publishing houses (and have been guilty of a couple in my published papers and comics).

The text is in present tense and received 8.18 on my readability measure, with a lower sentence length in the sample of 113 words analysed. The expected vocabulary size at 95% is 5,010.

Summary and Another Mousquetaire

Based on my simple measure, the FLC book comes out in front as the easiest, but there’s not much in it. I might add that the original only scored 12.3 in a short sample from the introduction, due to many low frequency cognates giving it an expected vocabulary size of only 5,543. All three books are simpler than the original in some way, and based on my reading, they are all engaging. All are a similar length in terms of story at 10-16 thousand words. The readability score of the original does highlight a potential problem that happens in graded readers that are not catering for a specific language pair. A different, higher general frequency word may replace a low frequency French-English cognate, making the resulting text harder, not easier for someone with an English-speaking background (although it can help an English-speaker get more experience of those higher frequency words). I have noticed in the past that some vocabulary support is more difficult than the word being defined, due to its similarity to an English word.

Both the CLE and FLC are very much reading-focused, whereas CIDEB tends to turn each story into a bunch of lessons, which, while often interesting and useful, get in the way of reading the story. Depending on my mood, I’ll either skip all the extra material and read the story, potentially going back to read the extra things later, or I’ll look through the extra material as I go. The one activity that I do find useful and make use of in CIDEB books is the pre-chapter vocabulary activities. My favourites are the mix and match vocabulary to images. This is great for people with different vocabulary backgrounds, as there will be some words you know, and others that you can puzzle through, based on the images and the other words to be matched. The activities help increase familiarity with the words, which appear in the chapter to follow.

I have another musketeer story in my collection, not written by Dumas. It is L’autre mousquetaire by Rupert Besley, illustrated by Bob Moulder. This is from the Mary Glasgow Bibliobus set of books, which are no longer in print. It is a short comic about Pathos, a musketeer wannabe. I’ve noticed several phrases in it that come up frequently in the original book, as determined by my bootstrapping algorithm: parbleu! bah! diable ! morbleu ! pardieu ! These words don’t come up so much in the adapted versions, since they are not “useful” language and are mostly dated, but they are an essential part of the character of the original novel. Something to look forward to if you decide to tackle it.

Publishers of Graded Readers in French

28 June, 2025Uncategorizedbook-review, books, easy french, extensive reading, fiction, French, french for beginners, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, readingSandra Bogerd

I thought I would put links to the publishers I’m aware of who sell graded readers in French. As usual, some have disappeared, but some still exist.

Wayside Publishing have some beginner readers that work well for those with an English speaking background. They have strict vocabulary control, using a very small vocabulary, lots of French-English cognates, and repetition. The smallest vocabulary, in Édi l’elephant, is 55 words in a text of 2100 words.

TPRS Books also has a range of books that follow the same approach of small vocabularies and much repetition, with some using base vocabularies below 100 in size.

CLE International have over 300 graded readers, some targeting specific age groups, and covering levels from A1 to B2. Their rebranded Lectures Découverte series (was Collection Découverte) are generally easier than A2 readers from other publishers (and other series) in my experience and their A1.1 stories are very easy compared to those typically labelled A1. I’m slightly frustrated that vocabulary sizes are no longer published, since they are quite relevant to the person reading, if not for the person assessing language level.

CIDEB also have a good range of graded readers (in multiple languages).

Editions Maison des Langues have a small range of graded readers. I get the feeling that they used to have more, since I’m sure I have read some that are not listed on this page. I have read and enjoyed the Alex Leroc series and various other books. From memory the A2 offerings felt more difficult than the CIDEB ones of the same level.

ELI have materials in multiple languages, and publish some beginner books that claim to be based on 100 words of vocabulary. I have a few of their books. The children’s A1 books are much easier than their adult A1 books, which I found quite challenging (in German). Note that if you are learning multiple languages, some of these stories are published in additional languages.

Hachette have their LFF range of graded readers, going from A1 to B2. It looks that they currently sell via specific distributors in different countries. I’ve read some of their A1 Albert et Folio books, which are easy A1 stories. I think the adolescent A1 stories are slightly harder. I’ve also read some of the A2 stories for adolescents. The B1 stories start to use passé simple.

Didier have a small collection of graded readers from A1 to B2. I’ve read Victor Hugo habite chez moi, which was pretty cute from memory. The Didier website is pretty horrible to navigate though.

Egmont has their Easy Readers, which are stories that have been adapted to learners. They are available via Languages Direct, who also sell readers from other publishers.

Teen Readers was a Danish publishing house that published graded readers in several languages. They seem to have disappeared since I last looked. You can buy some books online at Amazon and elsewhere. Similarly for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. They used to have graded reader series suited to those with an English-speaking background. Some may be findable in the secondhand market.

National Textbook Company also seems to have disappeared, sadly. They had some beginner and intermediate level readers that were quite good.

In addition to these major publishing houses, there are independent authors publishing stories for people learning French. I have links to representative works in my list of French graded readers.

Comic Books versus Text-Only Books for Language Learning

1 March, 2025Research, Resources, Reviewsbook-review, books, comic books, comics, extensive reading, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, readability, reading, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

Recently I have been reading a few comics in French, mainly by French-Canadian authors, or translated by them. The target audience for most of them is children and young adults. It had me thinking again about how best to grade comics in terms of difficulty.

My experience in attempting to read various Japanese books for children or learners showed me that it is possible to read a picture book that is really just an illustrated vocabulary without knowing any of the words beforehand. At the other extreme, it is theoretically possible to read everything in a parallel text, since the translation is right there to refer to, just very slow if every sentence needs to be analysed. That is known as “intensive reading”, which has been shown to be less useful than “extensive reading” for language acquisition. Complete glosses similarly make it possible to read a text without prior knowledge of the language, albeit with lots of interruptions to look things up.

Translations and glosses aside, a comic book will be easier than its text presented without illustration, since the illustrations provide clues to what is happening. It is also easier than text describing the same scenes provided by illustrations – a point that was made elsewhere in favour of learning language from comic books. In other words, “a picture paints a thousand words”.

In general, there is more dialogue and less descriptive text in comics, compared to novels, so the sentences are shorter on average. (This also applies to scripts of plays.) In addition, the pictures give clues as to what the text is about. A further benefit is that it often provides more examples of speech than would be found in a novel – or at least, as a proportion of the text read. This can be useful for absorbing speech patterns, particularly for people who are not exposed to much speech directly.

While the shorter average sentence length means that comic book text will generally be scored as easier than text from novels by readability measures, I think that a measure of difficulty of a comic may need to consider whether concrete nouns are illustrated when used. For example, a picture containing a wild boar with the text clearly indicating that it is “un sanglier” could be almost as easy as reading a French-English cognate, such as “village”. Or perhaps it is roughly equivalent to having a gloss entry, albeit introduced in the story instead of in a footnote.

Either way, comic books should be easier to read than books that have no illustrations. See my list of easy comic books in French for some that are a good starting point for beginners.

Review: Kill the French

21 April, 2024Reviewsextensive reading, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, learning, reading, vocabularySandra Bogerd

Today I came across the book Kill the French by Vincent Serrano Guerra in a list of recommendations on Amazon and thought I would have a look. It appears to follow similar principles to others that do strict vocabulary control, pioneered by Michael West in the early years of the 20th century: restrict to cognates, introduce frequently occurring words first, include repetition, and slowly build up the assumed vocabulary. The author has also followed the principle of spaced repetition with the goal that readers will retain vocabulary at optimum levels. So how does it compare to other books and comics that do the same thing? Let’s have a look.

I have analysed approximately the first 100 words, which covers the Day 1 text and the title of the Day 2 text. According to Style, it has an average sentence length of 8.8 words and an average word length of 4.3. Word lengths don’t really tell us much for French, since longer words tend to often be easy for those with an English-speaking background. Sentence lengths do, however, have a stronger impact on readability.

Other stats on the sample: vocabulary is 45 words out of 95 words of text, making a vocabulary density (type-token ratio) of 0.47. Naturally the author has made heavy use of cognates. Some of these are exact cognates, such as “lion”, and in other cases they are more challenging without context, such as “musée”. If we assume that all cognates are known, then the assumed vocabulary size for 95% coverage is 41 (when words are ranked in general frequency order), which is an excellent achievement. The only books in my collection that achieve that level or better are:

Rank	Title	Required Vocabulary Size for 95% Coverage
1	Gnomeville 2: Les pythons et les potions	16
2	Gnomeville 1: Introductions	25
3	Longman’s Modern French Course Part 1	35
4	Gnomeville 3: Les six protections de la potion	40
5	Kill the French	41

So from the perspective of readability in French for people with an English-speaking background, I put it at the same level as Gnomeville 3 initially, as they both have similar sentence lengths as well as vocabulary coverage.

Unfortunately, like many graded readers out there, the text of Kill the French is quite dull. I checked the 18th day in the sample to see if it was more interesting, having gained extra vocabulary. Sadly, no. I can’t comment on the final stories in the book, which may be more interesting, since I have only examined the sample.

So, here is my conclusion. If you are an absolute beginner in French and are a huge fan of spaced repetition-based learning and willing to put up with texts that are mildly interesting at best, then this is an excellent graded reader for getting you to become familiar with the 500 most frequent French words efficiently. It certainly beats just memorising vocabulary in isolation. The Gnomeville comics may be more exciting and fun, but unfortunately they currently only take you to a frequent vocabulary of about 30, until the author gets cracking with the rest of the series. Perhaps the best approach at this stage is to use both together.

The first day of Kill the French uses frequent words that are introduced in Gnomeville Episodes 1 to 3. All except “avec” are introduced in the first two episodes. Day 2 introduces two words occurring in Episode 1, one from Episode 2, and one that doesn’t feature in the Gnomeville series yet, since it is far less frequent in text. Gnomeville‘s first two episodes introduce the twenty most frequent words occurring in French newspapers, which is a slightly different frequency profile to spoken language, and somewhat different to other text corpora. Kill the French introduces words in an order that doesn’t resemble any specific corpus frequency list but they are still frequent words. For example, the second day includes the word “aussi”, which in movie vocabulary ranks about 91, in books at 78, and in the Minnesota spoken corpus, at 79. But, it is still a frequent word, and I know from personal experience that being a bit flexible about the order of introduced words makes it easier to produce a coherent story.

Given that the order of word introduction varies enough that words will be introduced in one book and not the other, it doesn’t really matter too much which you read first. You could, for example, read Day 1, then reward yourself with Episode 1, then after Day 2, do the same with Episode 2. Day 3 is where the two texts diverge the most in terms of vocabulary, but there is still overlap. After that, you are stuck with Kill the French. But at some point you might be able to switch to Première Étape: Basic French Readings: Alternate Series by Otto Bond (published 1937), if you can locate a copy. According to my stats the expected vocabulary works out to 316, but it is another principled graded reader, using cognates, frequent words, and slowly adding new words as you read. It’s also an entertaining read. However, from memory, it does use more difficult tenses typically found in French literature right from the start, so can be challenging grammatically. The average sentence length is also quite long, making it potentially daunting.

In summary, I recommend using Kill the French in the following manner: for the first three days, read the day’s material and follow it with an episode of Gnomeville. After that, if you can keep going with the spaced repetition from Kill the French for about 100 days, you then might be able to start reading Première Étape: Basic French Readings: Alternate Series, which is interesting right from the start with an initial vocabulary of 97 frequent words and Si Nous Lisions, which starts being interesting from Chapter 6 with a vocabulary of about 100 words. Best of luck!

Musing about Ratings

5 September, 2023Writingfeedback, ratings, reading, Reviews, writingSandra Bogerd

My comics get the full range of ratings and that’s ok. Sure, the first time I got a 1-star rating it hurt, and I did some soul searching to try to figure out why someone would do that. But it is a reader’s right to rate as they will.

A year or two ago I read a BookBub blog written by a successful independent author. He was very passionate in his belief that nobody should give low ratings to books, even if that is a sincere rating. It can have a negative impact on the author, both in their ability and motivation to create, and on their income. In my experience, my motivation to follow my creative spark is easily impacted by both negative and positive comments that I receive. Fortunately the positive comments can counteract the negative ones.

Having gone through the academic life of submitting research papers to be reviewed, I have developed a more philosophical stance regarding ratings. As long as someone is given feedback that they can act on in order to improve, a negative review is ok. Therefore my preference is this. Give a 1-star rating if you honestly feel that way and want to express that for whatever reason, but please give a review with it, so the author has some idea about why you feel that way. It can be just one or two words. Here are some one-word examples:

boring
dated
unoriginal
clichéed
inconsistent
blokey
girly
kid-lit
misleading
plotless
characterless
suspenseless
unedited
illiterate
ungrammatical

Given one of these one-word reviews, the author will know whether to work on plot, characterisation, writing, or factual content. If the review is “blokey”, “girly”, “kid-lit” or similar, the story may still be ok. Perhaps its nature wasn’t clearly indicated in the blurb for the story, leading to the wrong audience finding the work. The better the blurb gives clues as to the type of work, the greater the chance that reviews received will be higher, since those who are not the intended audience will give it a miss, and its intended audience will be more likely to find it.

Reading books for beginners

6 November, 2022Reviews, Writingearly reading, graded readers, phonics, readingSandra Bogerd

I’ve been looking at (and writing) phonics and other beginner books for learning to read and wanted to make a few notes here.

Most systematic controlled beginner reading books are based on phonics, slowly introducing the different letter-sound combinations in the English language. (I say English, as I haven’t looked thoroughly or found books for other languages). There is more than one systematic phonics system out there, starting with slightly different sets of letters and words, but they all achieve a similar goal of gently and methodically introducing children (and sometimes illiterate adults) to the skill of reading.

Amongst some interesting innovations I have seen are the book Cat and Rat by Doug Oglesby, Melinda Thompson, and Melissa Ferrell. This book tells the story, which is well indicated by the illustrations, first with pictures only (where the child tells the story in their own words), then by gradually adding more words each read. Designed by the authors to help a child with reading difficulties, it is no doubt useful for many in the same situation.

A second innovative book series I have seen are published by Usborne. I read Pirate Pat by Mairi Mackinnon, which is a book that allows a child to read with an adult, with each taking a page in turn. The child would be able to handle their pages after only two weeks of Phase 2 in the Letters & Sounds phonics system plus the word “I”. The alternating pages approach allows a more complicated story to be told than possible with the letters s a t p i n m d constrained to words of up to three letters in length.

Most other phonics readers start with stories that are told via the illustrations, but with captions or short sentences that are possible with the highly constrained set of words and letters. As a result, one ends up with variations on “The cat sat on the mat” (for which the earliest reference I have found is 1863), many stories being OK, but some being clever. Stories get a bit easier to write by the end of Phase 3. The constraints tend to continue in that authors try to ensure enough repetition of the target letter-sounds (grapheme-phonemes) of the stage, such as “A win at the well”, a story written to introduce “w”.

For all these beginner readers, it is crucial to have attractive illustrations and some narrative. After all, we want beginners to be motivated to read more.

Personal Experiments in Extensive Reading

28 March, 2020Personal, Researchextensive reading, games, japanese, Japanese language, language, language acquisition, reading, stories, writingSandra Bogerd

As mentioned in my previous post about learning Japanese, I’ve been applying extensive reading principles to improving my Japanese language skills. At best, in Japanese, I can be described as a “false beginner”, as I don’t have the skills yet to pass the lowest level Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I have dabbled in learning the language whenever I have found a fun resource (Let’s Learn Japanese TV series, Kimono text books); completed a half-semester beginner course, which taught Hiragana and some introductory phrases; and visited Japan briefly three times, each trip providing immersive language learning experiences.

I don’t recall exactly when I started, but it was either from December or early January, I attempted to read something in Japanese for ten minutes per day. I keep a database of my language books, and used data in that to produce an approximate order of difficulty for attempting the books, and probably read through about 80 booklets, plus the chapters of Kimono level 1, and the starting chapters of Kimono level 2. I stopped about a week ago, as it was frustratingly difficult, and I had other things occupying my mind. For the moment I am filling the gap by playing Kana Quest, which is keeping my kana recognition alive.

So in a way, this has been an experiment in seeing how well extensive reading goes in a language where you are still at the beginning stages. In a couple of readability studies I’ve led, I’ve used a 5-point scale to indicate how easy something is to read:

Very easy, understood everything
Easy, a few words were not known, but it didn’t impact reading comprehension
Not easy, but it was possible to follow the story
Difficult, a dictionary is needed to make sense of it
Very difficult, a dictionary won’t help

Number 5 is rarely chosen by anyone, and it has been argued that maybe it doesn’t happen. However, if I were to attempt to read something in Chinese, a dictionary won’t help me, as I don’t know how to look up hanzu characters based on stroke count. Sure I might get there if I persist, but life is too short for that. So I guess Number 5 is more about lacking willpower when encountering very difficult text.

In terms of optimal language learning, ratings of 2-3 are ideal, since new language is being encountered, but the reading is not at the frustration level.

I “extensively read” in a few languages. In Dutch, my mother tongue (but not my best language, which is English), I can comfortably read novels written for children. I would need a dictionary for anything technical if it was important for me to understand the nuances of meaning, but I would still be able to “follow the story” for most texts I come across.

In French, a language I have studied both in courses and on my own, I am also at the stage where most texts would not be classed as difficult. For German, I read graded readers up to B1 level, giving me texts in the target zone. Thanks to my Dutch background and some study of the language, it would not take too much for me to be able to read texts for native German speakers and be able to “follow the story”.

Now we come to Japanese. The booklets I read went from rating 1 to rating 4. Naturally, the rating 4 ones led to frustration and reduced willpower to continue. My approach to reading them was to read straight through, and then afterward, allow myself to look up a word or two that seemed to be important for understanding, or that had occurred a few times in my reading. I will make the following observations of my experience.

My vocabulary definitely improved, but I think that stopping will lead to much of it being forgotten again
My ability to recognize kanji improved, and I think that this may actually last a bit longer in my memory than the pronunciation, particularly where there is some obvious logical connection between the ideogram and the meaning, eg. the words for “above” and “below”.
Illustrated books that are basically an illustrated vocabulary are very easy to read, even if you don’t know any of the words beforehand and forget most of them afterwards. However, it can be challenging to make them interesting.
Booklets with illustrations and repeated sentences can be easy. For example, where the concrete noun, such as a type of animal, is substituted into a template sentence, and the sentence has an illustration of the concrete noun on the page. Even if the sentence isn’t fully understood, the substituted noun will be.
Where it is clear from the illustrations what is being said, the meaning of the text can be deduced.
In languages that I can read reasonably well I don’t like to read stories that I already know, but I was grateful for the known stories presented in Japanese, to allow me to deduce what the text meant. While the text may have been just as difficult as other stories, the fact that the story was already known meant that the text was better understood and learnt from.
What also fascinated me was how focused and absorbed I was in the reading and sense-making task – much as I have observed young children when they are following a story in a book that is being read to them. It was as though my entire brain was switched on – until I got to that frustration point recently.
Attractive illustrations make the experience much more enjoyable.

A take home lesson for me is: once an alphabet is known, it is possible to read something, such as illustrated vocabulary books. My Japanese collection includes colour+object combinations, transport, trains, illustrated loanwords in katakana, cities and countries. The difficulty is perhaps learning the alphabet in an absence of known vocabulary. In our first languages we have clues from words we know, such as B for banana. For languages we haven’t learnt yet, authors would need to resort to other tricks such as loanwords, cognates, international words and names and place names.This is one of the tricks I use in my comic book series for French.

The Kimono series simplifies the reading a little by rendering all words that would be in katakana in romaji (our regular western latin alphabet), but spelt as it would be when rendered in katakana. I like this idea for slowly ramping up the difficulty. Books for Japanese native speakers also slowly ramp things up. Children’s books might be in hiragana, hiragana plus katakana with hiragana support, or kana and kanji with support, depending on the target age group.

One study I read about extensive reading and vocabulary acquisition examined what happened if you re-read stories. Each time you re-read you pick up more of the vocabulary. I think I will explore this next, and see how many re-readings of the easier books will make it easier for me to advance to the more difficult ones. Stay tuned for the answer!

Function word frustrations

9 September, 2019My Comic Books, Personal, Research, Reviews, Writingcomics, extensive reading, French, French language, language, language acquisition, language learning, movies, reading, research, stories, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

I recently re-watched Dilili in Paris, which is a fabulous animation movie for children, with French dialogue that is slow enough for French language learners to follow. I originally watched the movie during the Melbourne French Film Festival and considered buying the movie later so I could try watching it without English subtitles.

Frustration 1: Memory

There is a frequently repeated phrase when Dilili meets new people: “Je suis heureuse de vous rencontrer”. It was semi-humorous, and certainly designed to be remembered, to teach how to be polite when meeting someone new. However, what I actually remembered after a week or two was: “Je suis heureuse __ vous rencontrer.” Despite being exposed to many occurrences, the function word was lost. Function words don’t provide semantic content and therefore appear to be harder to retain. There is certainly research evidence that concrete nouns are easier to remember than various other types of words. This movie brought that home to me in a big way.

Frustration 2: Resources

(Not really about function words…)

I bought the DVD of the movie, and then when viewing it, discovered that the subtitles could not be switch off, and that the only subtitles were in English. I don’t know who makes these decisions when preparing DVDs for sale, but perhaps they don’t really consider their audience carefully enough. A French movie sold in Australia would have various audience segments: French ex-pats – possibly including some French people who are hard of hearing, Australian francophiles, Australians learning French. To me, movies and TV episodes are highly useful for practising comprehension of the spoken language. Ideally it can be done at three levels of difficulty (with the example given for L2 referring to the language being learnt and L1 referring to the native language):

L2 audio with L1 subtitles,
L2 audio with L2 subtitles,
L2 audio without subtitles

I even do this with DVDs that were originally in English. I’ve watched two entire series of Perry Mason with French audio, which was quite illuminating. If you are short of practice material, check your DVD collection for audio in your target language. You may be pleasantly surprised to find a good selection amongst your favourite shows.

Frustration 3: Vocabulary Size

(Function words are frequent words…)

One of the excellent things about some graded readers was that they were designed for a specific vocabulary size. For me, vocabulary makes all the difference between a readable text and an unreadable one. CLE International used to publish books targeting a specific vocabulary size. For example, Niveau 1 had vocabularies of 400-700 words. Through extensive reading, I have successfully moved from 300-word vocabulary books to 700-1000 word ones, and I hope to continue to progress through further reading. However, as with other publishers, the publications have now been converted to CEFR levels: A1, A2 etc. and as far as I can tell, the subtleties of vocabulary size have been removed from the book information.

I have completed a CEFR B1 in French, yet I’m most comfortable reading A1 texts (and texts with less than 1000 word vocabularies) and with few exceptions they are not easy apart from the grammar, which is too easy for me, but the books are still sometimes challenging vocabulary-wise. What frustrates me is that A2 covers such a wide range of vocabularies, depending on the source material, from readable to incomprehensible. Published vocabulary sizes for A2, where they occur at all, vary from 400 to >1200 words. The level of frustration with some of these graded readers is the same as for texts written for native speakers. I oscillate between A1, A2, native texts and back again. The original memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan are as easy and more exciting than many A2 texts.

CEFR is designed, as far as I can tell, to describe a person’s practical skill in a language, and for that it is useful. However, the jumps between levels are quite large, so that the defined levels are not very useful for the learner themselves. Some publishers solve this by dividing up levels. ELI uses A0, A1, A1.1. The Danish Teen Readers/Easy Readers also divide up the levels, and still appear to quote target vocabulary sizes. Indie publishers tend to ignore vocabulary size in their writing. However, writers and publishers should remember that:

Extensive reading is at its best if learners are reading at a comfortable level while not being familiar with all vocabulary. Ideally learners should know 98% of the words in text they are reading.
Readability of text largely consists of grammar and vocabulary components.
The more readable AND interesting reading material is, the more learners will read, the better their vocabularies will become, and the better their skill in a language will be.
Publishing vocabulary levels required for 95-98% coverage of the text will assist learners in finding materials of the right level for them at any point. Vocabulary levels should be (loosely) based on general word frequency.

This is why I write my comic books for language learners. This is why I research extensive reading, readability and language acquisition.

Si Nous Lisions review

6 February, 2019Resources, Reviewsextensive reading, French graded reader, French language, graded readers, language acquisition, readability, reading, storiesSandra Bogerd

I finally finished Si Nous Lisions the other day, so here is my review.

This classic graded reader was published in 1930. It gradually adds vocabulary as the story progresses.
The first 5 chapters are a bit dull, being the usual themes of the classroom, families and French tourism. From chapter 6, once you have encountered about 130 words of vocabulary, there are stories, starting with the three bears, then proceeding to various interesting stories, including “la pièce de cinq francs”, which I quite enjoyed, since it matches my personal quirks.
By the end of the book you have a vocabulary of about 500 words.
If you already have at least the top 100 frequent words in French under your belt, I suggest skipping or skimming the first few chapters and starting with Chapter 6.

In terms of the amount of text, there are 15 chapters, each containing a story, plus exercises. The first page of the first chapter has ~56 words on it, Chapter 2’s first page has 88 words, and from Chapter 3 onwards there are 5-13 mostly full pages of text with one or two illustrations per chapter. Full pages have about 300 words, so quite a bit more reading than a typical CIDEB or Easy Reader offering, which at the A1 level, can often be read within a half hour. The large amount of text doesn’t need to be daunting though, as each chapter is self-contained as a story.

Overall I rate it as “enjoyable”. Some of the later chapters I wouldn’t mind reading again in the future, if short of reading material, but I wouldn’t call any of the stories favourites.

Next up I’ll finish reading Contes Dramatiques by Hills-Dondo.

Readability Zones

19 January, 2019My Comic Books, Research, Resources, Reviewsextensive reading, French, French easy reader, French graded reader, French language, French reader, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, languages, readability, reading, stories, vocabulary, word frequenciesSandra Bogerd

I’ve just been updating my database of French readers and observing the types of books or stories in the different ranges of my current preferred readability measure.

Scores under 4 are ridiculously easy for people with an English speaking background. Currently this consists only of episodes 1 and 2 of my Gnomeville comics. Sentences are short and vocabulary is highly constrained, exploiting French-English cognates.

Scores in the 4-4.99 range are very easy: Bonjour Luc, A First French Reader by Whitmarsh, and Histoires pour les grands. They tend to be conversation-based.

Scores in 5-5.99 tend to be the short illustrated graded readers such as Bibliobus, as well as La Spiga’s Zazar for grands débutants (target vocabulary of 150). Gnomeville Episode 3 sits here due to having longer sentences compared to the first two episodes.

Scores in 6-6.99 tend to have longer sentences, including some classic graded readers such as Si nous lisions and Contes Dramatiques, as well as the 300 word vocabulary Teen Reader Catastrophe au Camping des Roses.

Scores 7-7.99 also have the more text-like graded readers, including Sept-d’un-Coup by Otto Bond, which tends to have long sentences but well-controlled vocabulary.

In the 8-8.99 range I find the first story for native speaking children, as well as more graded readers, including one with a target vocabulary of 1000 words.

The first books for adult native speakers occur with scores between 10 and 12.

Looking at the stories in the list, my own level seems to be from 7 to 10, suggesting I should continue reading more challenging graded readers in addition to stories written for French children. That is pretty much what I have been doing for a while, as well as incidental reading on the web and elsewhere.

A quick look at the relationship between stated vocabulary sizes and the 95 percentile that I have been using indicates that the required vocabulary is roughly 1.5x + 2600. However, I am using a token-based vocabulary whereas most would use a word family one. If I assume token vocabulary sizes are 5 times word family sizes, then the equivalence point for this model is when the vocabulary is about 770, meaning that the vocabulary load will be excessive for stated vocabulary sizes less than 770 but be ok for sizes greater than 770. That’s reasonably reassuring. Mind you this is an extremely rough estimate.

This work was based on about 100 words from the start of the text of 40 stories, but it does seem to sort things fairly usefully. The outlier based on my experience of reading the stories is Aventure en Normandie, with a score of 9.49. I don’t recall it being a difficult read.

Meanwhile I am making more progress on Episode 3 of my comic book. I decided to divide one page into three pages, as it had a lot of text and too many new language concepts for a single page. So Episode 3 will probably be 32 pages long, breaking the standard Gnomeville pattern of 28 page episodes. Hopefully it will be ready within a month.