THE FORUMTESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOLprofession. It also welcomes responses to rebuttals to any articles or remarkspublished here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

Comments on Stuart Webb and John Macalister’s“Is Text Written for Children Useful for L2Extensive Reading?”

BARRY LEE REYNOLDSNational Taipei University of TechnologyTaipei, Taiwan

doi: 10.1002/tesq.145

& Stuart Webb and John Macalister’s “Is Text Written for ChildrenUseful for L2 Extensive Reading” (2012) reports on corpus-derivedanalyses comparing texts written for children, language learners, andolder readers to make claims regarding their relative value in extensivereading programs and language pedagogy. Although I find theirresults sound and practical, their article still invites some further com-ment. In this forum entry I argue that (1) drawing parallels betweenfirst language (L1) and second language (L2) literature must be donein a direct manner; (2) before conducting future corpus-driven studieson vocabulary, the concept of word must be elucidated; and (3) futurevocabulary research should investigate whether variability exhibited bymorphologically related tokens in extensive reading texts affect acqui-sition outcomes.

First, Webb and Macalister cite three studies (Bertram, Laine, &Virkkala, 2000; Nagy, Anderson, Schommer, Scott, & Stallman, 1989;Wysocki & Jenkins, 1987) in support of the decision to use word fami-lies as the “unit of counting… [to] examine the appropriateness ofchildren’s stories for language learners… in an extensive readingprogram” (p. 10). Reviewing the literature found these three studieswere conducted with L1 and not L2 participants. Of course there isnothing wrong with drawing parallels between L1 and L2 research, butthis should be stated directly; not doing so may cause readers to assume

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“that knowledge of a word family facilitates recognition of other mem-bers of the word family” (p. 10) for both L1 and L2 speakers. Further-more, Wysocki and Jenkins used discrete tasks (i.e., stimulus plustransfer word) to measure participants’ recognition of the morphologi-cal relatedness of word forms. It may be a bit overconfident to likenresults from such a discrete task to a reader being “able to recognizethat safely, safer, safest, safety, and unsafe convey related meanings… [when]… encountered in a text” (p. 10). Likewise, Bertram, Laine,and Virkkala asked participants to read isolated words on cards and“give an oral definition of every single word presented” (p. 291). Thisalso is quite a different feat than being able to recognize and associate themeaning of all inflected and derived related forms of a word.

Secondly, Webb and Macalister, as well as other researchers (e.g.,Cobb, 2007; McQuillan & Krashen, 2008), use word family as the unitwhen calculating word frequencies for corpus-derived analyses. Indoing so, some assumptions about the process of reading in an L2have been left implicit. From the researcher’s point of view, the abilityto associate inflected and derived tokens of a root word and vice versais apparent; however, considering the point of view of L2 readers,researchers should first ask what work must be done by an L2 readerin order to associate one form of a word (e.g., create) with a relatedform of that word (e.g., creation). To the L2 reader, is this one or twowords? Until researchers start asking similar questions, countingtokens offers little insight into determining if particular text genres orextensive reading provides an adequate exposure to vocabulary to inci-dentally acquire a sufficient L2 lexicon.

Lastly, Webb and Macalister end their paper by reiterating “thevalue of examining the texts used for extensive reading” (p. 19). Iagree that more attention needs to be placed on texts provided to L2learners; for example, researchers and educators should begin a dis-cussion of how word characteristics and surrounding context couldincrease saliency and thus incidental vocabulary acquisition throughextensive reading. However, I must echo my previous comments(Reynolds, 2012) regarding a need of research into how L2 learnersperceive morphologically similar forms of a word. L2 researchers inves-tigating extensive reading and incidental vocabulary acquisition oftendo so without explicitly operationalizing the abstract concept of wordexcept by defining a word as a string of letters separated by whitespace on a page (or computer screen). A clearer definition from theperspective of the L2 learner is needed.

A short review of the psycholinguistic research investigating thedifference in processing of morphologically complex words by nativeand nonnative speakers will further help clarify this point. A majorityof the psycholinguistic research literature investigating morphological

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processing focuses on the difference in processing of inflectional mor-phology by native and nonnative speakers (see Gor, 2010, for areview); however, the process of morphological derivation is alsoreceiving attention (see Clahsen, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva, 2010 for areview). Silva and Clahsen (2008), for example, investigated the differ-ence in processing of regular past tense forms and deadjectival nomi-nalizations with the suffixes –ness and –ity in adult native andnonnative speakers (Chinese, German, and Japanese) of English. Thenative group showed priming effects for both inflected and derivedword forms but the nonnative groups did not. Likewise, Neubauer andClahsen (2009) showed that L1 and L2 speakers of German processedregular participle forms dissimilarly. Clahsen and Neubauer (2010)further showed how native and nonnative speakers of German processderived word forms differently. Clearly from this short review, a preli-minary conclusion can be drawn that native and nonnative speakersprocess morphologically complex word forms differently. In otherwords, during discrete psycholinguistic experiments native speakersgenerally show an advantage over nonnative speakers in recognizingmorphologically complex forms of a word as members of the sameword family. Hence, using word family as the unit for counting tokensmay not be representative of how L2 learners treat L2 vocabulary.

Although the psycholinguistic literature can provide evidence forprocessing differences between L1 and L2 speakers, little can be saidabout what these results could mean for vocabulary acquisition throughextensive reading. This leaves room for extensive reading researchersto investigate the acquisition of target words occurring in learner textswhose tokens exhibit morphological variation in form. I applaud Webband Macalister for asking the question “Is Text Written for ChildrenUseful for L2 Extensive Reading?” but in answering this question theyhave led me to ask my own question: “What is a word?”

THE AUTHOR

Barry Lee Reynolds is an assistant professor in the Department of English atNational Taipei University of Technology. He received his PhD in learning andinstruction and MA in teaching English to speakers of other languages. His mainresearch interests include incidental vocabulary acquisition, computer-assistedlanguage learning, and second language writing.

REFERENCES

Bertram, R., Laine, M., & Virkkala, M. M. (2000). The role of derivationalmorphology in vocabulary acquisition: Get by with a little help from my

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morpheme friends. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 4, 2–15. doi:10.1111/1467-9450.00201

Clahsen, H., & Neubauer, K. (2010). Morphology, frequency, and the processingof derived word forms in native and non-native speakers. Lingua, 120, 2627–2637. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.06.007

Clahsen, H., Neubauer, K., Sato, M., & Silva, R. (2010). Morphological structurein native and nonnative language processing. Language Learning, 60, 21–43.doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00550.x

Cobb, T. (2007). Computing the vocabulary demands of L2 reading. LanguageLearning and Technology, 11, 38–63. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol11-num3/cobb/

Gor, K. (2010). Introduction. Beyond the obvious: Do second language learnersprocess inflectional morphology? Language Learning, 60, 1–20. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00549.x

McQuillan, J., & Krashen, S. D. (2008). Commentary: Can free reading take youall the way? A response to Cobb (2007). Language Learning and Technology, 12,104–108. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num1/pdf/mcquillan.pdf

Nagy, W. E., Anderson, R., Schommer, M., Scott, J. A., & Stallman, A. (1989). Mor-phological families in the internal lexicon. Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 263–282. doi:10.2307/747770

Neubauer, K., & Clahsen, H. (2009). Decomposition of inflected words in a sec-ond language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31, 403–435. doi:10.1017/S0272263109090354

Reynolds, B. L. (2012). Comments on Anthony Bruton, Miguel Garc�ıa L�opez, andRaquel Esquiliche Mesa’s “Incidental L2 Vocabulary Learning: An Impractica-ble Term?” TESOL Quarterly, 46, 812–816. doi:10.1002/tesq.64

Silva, R., & Clahsen, H. (2008). Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 pro-cessing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English. Bilingualism:Language and Cognition, 11, 245–260. doi:10.1017/S1366728908003404

Webb, S., & Macalister, J. (2012). Is text written for children useful for L2 exten-sive reading? TESOL Quarterly, 47, 300–322. doi:10.1002/tesq.70

Wysocki, K., & Jenkins, J. R. (1987). Deriving word meanings through morphologi-cal generalization. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 66–81. doi:10.2307/747721

A Response

JOHN MACALISTER AND STUART WEBBVictoria University of WellingtonWellington, New Zealand

doi: 10.1002/tesq.142

& We certainly agree that the question “what is a word?” is an importantone, but would suggest that from the perspective of vocabulary researcha more important question is whether the unit of analysis chosen will

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