The Super Power of Reading to Learn Another Language (like German…)

Let us start by talking about children. Children can already speak the language. They already know the words they just have not yet seen them written down.

First the child is taught the alphabet, and what letters make what sounds. (In German this is easy because letters make consistent sounds where in English, letters make different sounds and in French lots of letters are not pronounced at all. So here German is the easiest.)

The first step is to learn the alphabet and the default sounds they make.

After learning individual letters, learning how letters sound when they are put together (st, ed, ei, ie, ate) is called phonics. Phonics used to be the way children were taught to read. It is how I was taught. But phonics fell out of fashion. Instead another system was introduced that is effectively described as:

• memorising basic words
• use context to guess words
• skipping words you don’t know

The theory is known as “three cueing.” The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or “cues” — to identify words as they are reading. The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

In the paper, Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

• graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)
• syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)
• semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

Beginner books use pictures. The first books are structured with predictable sentence structures that introduce new words page by page. The child is taught what sound each letter of the alphabet makes but not phonics. Simplistically phonics is knowing the sounds letters make when put together.

Here is the effect of this strategy as described by one student

Strategy 1: Memorise as many words as possible. “Words were like pictures to me,” she said. “I had a really good memory.”

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn’t have in her visual memory bank, she’d look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she’d skip the words she didn’t know.

How does it feel when the reader confronts a word they don’t know? There is often a kind of panic. It does not feel good. If this experience continues over time the learner develops a negative attitude to reading and they will never be a comfortable or enthusiastic reader. Reading for pleasure becomes a minority pass time.

The approach of the three cue system does not work well. Using this method has resulted in many people being weak readers.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

‘First language learning’ is better with phonics, but second language learning is better with three cueing.

Using Three Cueing to learn a second language

Given that you can already read well in your first language, the question becomes ‘how can reading using three cueing be used to learn a second language?’

The learner of a new language does not have the benefit of already knowing how to speak the language. Everything is new. (let us assume the alphabet is the same for the new language).

Before a learner can read a second language they need to acquire a basic vocabulary. This is never going to be equal to your first language, but it is possible to acquire the first 1000 nouns and 100 verbs by using timed repetition with a tool such as Quizlet in a short space of time.

Once the learner has a basic vocabulary, they can begin reading.

Of course, the text needs to be appropriate. It needs to be achievable, using largely the vocabulary the learner knows. The text also needs to be interesting. An adult is not going to be interested in a story that would satisfy a child. (i.e. no stories about bunny rabbits or foxes)

The proposal here is that you take a text, and work paragraph by paragraph.

Rather than reading in the first instance with the purpose of understanding, you first skim the text identifying the verbs and colour them with a highlighter pen (here I use bold font — but with a book of your own you can use a highligher). In this German example, some verbs separate, so I’m looking out for prefixes at the end of sentences/clauses. (Don’t bother with very common verbs, and once you have identified a verb, you don’t need to identify it twice)

Ich bereite die Landung vor, beuge mich nach vorne. Der Schirm stürzt in die Tiefe. Mit großer Geschwindigkeit rase ich hinab. Ich fliege dreitausend Meter hoch. Zweitausend. Ich habe alles unter Kontrolle.

Make a list with the verbs in the infinitive. Break the verbs down based on what you already know. Then predict what they mean. Don’t yet look them up.

• vorbereiten (bereiten > bereit > ich bin bereit > ie. ready > vor > before > before ready > prepare)
• beugen: ?
• stürzen: ?
• hinabrasen (rasen: race, hinab > hin (away from me) ab: down > race down)
• fliegen: fly

Identify everything else that is not a verb and which is unknown in italics and make another list.

Ich bereite die Landung vor, beuge mich nach vorne. Der Schirm stürzt in die Tiefe. Mit großer Geschwindigkeit rase ich hinab. Ich fliege dreitausend Meter hoch. Zweitausend. Ich habe alles unter Kontrolle.

• Landung: landing
• vorne: vor: in front / before > forward
• Schirm: Regenschirm > umbrella > ?
• Tiefe: tief: deep: noun: depth
• Geschwindigkeit: ?

If you have no idea, look back at the text and add any other information in the sentence to see if you can predict. This is called a ‘Guesslation’.

Ich bereite die Landung vor, beuge mich nach vorne
I prepare the landing, ? myself towards the front (forwards)

Guess what it means. Don’t be dogmatic and literal. Trust yourself. What makes sense in this context? i.e. using the Three Cueing method.

beugen: lean: I lean myself towards the front.

Instead do a ‘Guesslation’. Type out under the paragraph what you think it means. Mark the Guesslation in another colour.

Ich bereite die Landung vor, beuge mich nach vorne. Der Schirm stürzt in die Tiefe. Mit großer Geschwindigkeit rase ich hinab. Ich fliege dreitausend Meter hoch. Zweitausend. Ich habe alles unter Kontrolle.

I prepare to land, bending forward. The wing drops into the deep. With bigger ??? I race down. I fly three thousand high. Two thousand. I have everything under control

Now translate the text and see how well you did and find out what the words are that you could not predict. (use deepL)

I prepare to land, bending forward. The glider plunges into the depths. I race down at great speed. I fly three thousand metres high. Two thousand. I have everything under control

• Schirm: glider
• stürzen: plunge
• Geschwindigkeit: speed

Conclusion: the Three Cueing system may not be very good for learning children to learn their mother tongue, but it is very good for adults learning a new language.

Quizlet of basic verbs in German: https://quizlet.com/538215353/essential-day-in-your-life-verbs-engde-flash-cards/

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Languagepool offers two programs — Hammer the Grammar and Scenario Learning.

Hammer the Grammar — uses patterns to explain German grammar fast in English. Scenario Learning is a program to get you thinking in German. Both prepare you for an immersion experience in an all German speaking environment.