How to Do Extensive Reading in English: Dictionaries, Difficulty and How Much to Read

The Extensive Reading Foundation, a non-profit, publishes a free Guide to Extensive Reading. It describes extensive reading as reading “very easy, enjoyable books to build their reading speed and reading fluency.” The target speed it gives is at least 150 to 200 words per minute, or a little lower for beginners. And for that to happen, it says, the reading must be easy enough that you don’t need a dictionary.

As a definition, that is enough. Once you actually start, though, practical questions come up quickly. Am I not allowed to look up a word I don’t know? How hard should the book be? Should I finish a book I’m not enjoying? How much should I read each day? This post takes those four questions in order.

Extensive reading and intensive reading are different exercises

The first thing worth separating is that reading an English text can serve two different purposes.

One is careful reading: checking each unknown word and structure until you understand the text exactly. Most people learned English this way at school. It is usually called intensive reading.

The other is extensive reading. Its purpose is to build the ability to read English as English, without stopping. Learning new words is not the main goal. The Foundation’s guide separates the two by how hard the text is. When you know between 90% and 98% of the words on a page, the text is at an “instructional” level: you understand it, but you would need to look up many words to understand it well. When you know 98% or more, you are in the extensive reading “sweet spot,” where you can read quickly and with enjoyment. Below 90%, one unknown word in ten, reading becomes frustrating and slow, and comprehension “suffers badly.”

Both kinds of reading are useful. The trouble starts when they get mixed up. If you read an instructional-level book as if it were extensive reading, every look-up breaks the story and you are tired after a few pages. If you look up every word in a sweet-spot book, you lose the practice in reading fast.

To look up, or not

Richard Day and Julian Bamford’s Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive Reading (2002) is the list most often quoted as a definition of the method. The first principle is short: “The reading material is easy.” Others say that learners choose what they want to read, that they read as much as possible, and that reading speed is usually faster rather than slower.

None of them says “never use a dictionary.” The Foundation’s guide answers the dictionary question directly instead. When reading to build fluency, you should be reading easy, enjoyable books, and if you are looking up words too often, the book is probably too hard and you should read something easier. So the advice is less a ban on dictionaries than a rule for choosing books that don’t need one.

I think this is the most practical way to see it, because the urge to look something up becomes a gauge of difficulty. If your hand keeps reaching for the dictionary on every page, that book is, for now, study material and not extensive reading. You can then switch to an easier book, or keep the book and read it intensively, with a dictionary, on purpose. Neither choice is wrong. They are just different exercises.

The 98% figure itself is debated. It comes mainly from a 2000 study by Hu and Nation. A later study by Schmitt, Jiang and Grabe (2011), with 661 participants from 8 countries, found “a relatively linear relationship” between the share of words known and comprehension, and “no indication of a vocabulary threshold” where understanding suddenly jumps. So 98% is a useful target, not a cliff. Falling to 97% does not make a book unreadable.

Checking a book on the first page

98% means about one unknown word in fifty. 90% means one in ten. Since percentages are hard to feel, here is a simple check.

Read the first page without a dictionary. Each time you meet a word you don’t know, fold down a finger. If fingers go down every few lines, the book is too hard for extensive reading. If you fold one or two on the page and can still follow what is happening, it is about right.

What matters more than the count is whether you are following the story. A few unknown words are fine as long as you know who is doing what. For extensive reading, that is enough.

From graded readers to real books

The Foundation’s guide says that books written for native speakers are usually very difficult for learners, and that until learners can read them “without too much trouble,” they should use graded readers, books written or rewritten for learners at controlled vocabulary levels. English-speaking children already know thousands of words and most of the grammar before they start reading. A learner doesn’t.

So the first few books are best taken from a graded reader series. When you move to unabridged books, starting with stories you already know, or with short fables and fairy tales, keeps the step small. I listed some candidates in 30 Free Classic Books for English Learners.

How far to read

On when to stop a book, the method’s answer is simple: if it stops being enjoyable, move to another one. The aim of extensive reading is volume, and you read more by changing books than by spending a week stuck in one you don’t want to open. A book you abandon now can feel surprisingly easy six months later.

On amount, the Foundation’s guide says that schools typically ask students to read about one book a week or more. For classes, it suggests starting with a short period, for example 20 minutes a week, and slowly increasing it until students are reading a book a week.

At 150 words per minute, 20 minutes is about 3,000 words. Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit is about 1,000 words, a few minutes of reading. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, at about 40,000 words, takes around four and a half hours at the same speed, or about two weeks at 20 minutes a day. I think deciding on a daily time you can keep is more important than any total word target.

Keeping the two kinds of reading apart

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that lets you read whole English books from Project Gutenberg inside the app. It has a built-in dictionary: long-press a word, tap Look up, and a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses appear over the page.

For the two kinds of reading in this post, it can be used both ways. For a book you read intensively, each word you look up is saved to a word book together with the sentence you met it in, and comes back later in a quiz. The gap before it returns grows each time you answer correctly, on a Leitner schedule. For a book you read extensively, you can switch off Save every lookup in Settings and look words up without saving them. If you find yourself looking up a lot, take that as the sign to change books.

The Start here shelf holds 30 short, plainly written classics. There are no ads and no account, and once a book is downloaded it reads offline. How it compares with other ways of reading is in ABC George vs Other Ways to Read English Books, and the steps to your first book are in Getting Started with ABC George.

Whichever way you read, I think the place to start is one book you can read almost without a dictionary, finished to the last page.