Reading and risk-taking:

a role for the computer

John Higgins
This article discusses the skills of prediction and hypothesis-formation
which are used by the expert reader, and the techniques which may be
used to develop these skills among EFL learners. It goes on to describe
a computer exercise which invites the learner to identify the source of a
piece of text from a randomly chosen fragment. Initially the fragment is
only one word long, but the student can open a ‘window’ on it to take in
more of the context, until he or she is ready to make a guess. The article
goes on to describe the scoring system, the relationship between the
language level of the learner and the selection of texts on which the
computer draws, and possible developments and extensions to the
program.

Reading, unlike listening, is not carried out in ‘real time’. While a listener
must listen to and decode speech at roughly the same pace, and following
the linguistic order in which the speaker produces it, no such limitations
affect the reader, who is completely at liberty to glance ahead or back, or to
make use of any graphic clues within the field of vision. The good reader
does this quite unthinkingly, without being aware of any departure from
the left-to-right order which is the (Roman alphabet) analogue of the one-
way passage of time.
Readers may ‘swim’ through a text in a linear way, but the technique of
good readers is more akin to crossing a river by leaping from floating log
to floating log, not always choosing to leap directly forward, but alwavs
conscious of the direction of the bank ahead. In the process, thev can
develop reading speeds well in excess of any normal speaking speed, just as
the runner can outstrip the swimmer. They may on occasion ‘fall in’ and
get wet, i.e. lose the sense and have to re-read a sentence or two to regain it.
The technique which I have described as ‘jumping from log to log’ is
labelled by Kenneth Goodman sampling, predicting, testing, and confirming
(Goodman 1967, 1971). Goodman points out that good readers accept a
certain amount of ‘disconfirmation’; in other words, they realize that some
of the guesses they make will be wrong, but are confident that they can
backtrack in order’ to make a better guess if necessary. They will normally
make it to the other side, i.e. extract meaning from the whole text, whereas
the less accomplished reader who starts out with the linguistic equivalent of
a dog-paddle is the one most in danger of drowning, of failing to make any
sense of the text.

Barriers to effective Developing better reading skills is, as Bright and McGregor (1970:97)
reading pointed out, often a matter of convincing a reader that more adventurous
reading is also likely to be more effective reading. Carrying conviction may
involve overcoming emotional as much as intellectual barriers: the
commonsense appeal of a linear reading strategy -one that says, ‘I must
understand word one before I can understand word two’ -is powerful.
Moreover, a background of learning experience in which accuracy and

192 ELT Journal Volume 38/3 July 1984

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 detail have been given high value, in which 90 per cent has been ‘better’
than 70 per cent, will have trained learners not to settle for fuzzy under-
standing of an item instead of the precise wording given in the glossary.

Techniques for For these reasons, persuading readers to take risks may involve rather stark
effective reading procedures. To persuade learners to read faster, it may be necessary to flash
texts up for impossibly short lengths of time, so as to convince them that
some information still gets through, and that the information derived from
that first rapid glance will be of great help if they return to the text in order
to fill in detail. To persuade them to rely more on prediction (or guess-
work), it may be necessary to invite them to speculate, in their first
language if necessary, about tiny amounts of data. As an example of the
kind of technique which can be used, a teacher can present the class with a
list of apparently unconnected words and ask them which ones they would
expect to see in a text on a given topic, say ‘Scotch Whisky’. The group will
begin by rejecting all the words except those with an obvious lexical
association with whisky (drink, alcohol, or distil, for instance), but can be led
to see possible associations with other words (stream, smoke, barley, or nose),
until finally they realize that the words in the list all occur in a coherent
paragraph on the topic. Another technique might be to give the learners a
title and to ask them to predict as much of the content of the text as thev
can. Or one can give them a tiny fragment of text, three or four words, and
ask them to infer the topic. It is these last two procedures which I have
combined in the form of a computer exercise I call Close- Up.
The name Close-Up derives from a style of television quiz game in which
participants are shown an enlarged detail from a picture of an everyday
object, possibly photographed from an unusual angle. The camera slowly
zooms out, showing more of the picture, and the participants must call out,
or press their buzzers, as soon as they are ready to guess what the object
might be. The element of competition forces the participants to develop a
strategy to balance wild guessing against over-caution, to keep in mind not
only the question ‘Is this the right answer?‘, but also another equally
important question, ‘How sure am I that this is the right answer?’ (A
related technique has been developed by Andrew Wright for the EFL class-
room: the teacher projects a badly out-of-focus slide, and the class guess
what the picture shows as the slide is very gradually brought back into
focus.)

The program In place of the photograph, Close-Up uses a text from which one word is
randomly selected and displayed. The learner’s task is to identify the topic
of the text by matching it to one of eight titles displayed on the screen. The
initial screen looks like the illustration in Figure 1. One word is usually,
though not always, insufficient, so the learner can press the M key to
enlarge the ‘window’ on the text to disclose the word before and the word
after, and this can be repeated as often as desired, until the whole text is on
display. After two calls for help and one wrong guess, the screen will look
like Figure 2. Two further calls for more words will produce significant new
evidence from the punctuation, showing that this is an extract from
dialogue. See Figure 3.
At any point, the learner can make a guess by typing the number of the
title chosen. If the choice is wrong, the word NO appears beside that title,
and the process continues as before. If it is right, the word YES appears
alongside the title, and the complete text is printed out below. The screen

Reading and risk-taking: a role for the computer 193

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 Figure 1

1 Winter Weather 5 Daffodils

2 Music Review 6 Language Puzzle
3 Medicine Now 7 Sherlock Holmes
4 Chess News 8 Travel Regulations

wish

M = more words 1-8 = guess Q= quit

Figure 2

1 Winter Weather 5 Daffodils

2 Music Review 6 Language Puzzle
3 Medicine Now 7 Sherlock Holmes
4 Chess News 8 Travel Regulations NO

YOUR SCORE 120 TARGET SCORE 1000

which you wish to draw

M = more words 1-8 = guess Q= quit

Figure 3

1 Winter Weather 5 Daffodils

2 Music Review 6 Language Puzzle
3 Medicine Now 7 Sherlock Holmes
4 Chess News 8 Travel Regulations NO

YOUR SCORE 100 TARGET SCORE 1000

point to which you wish to draw my attention?’

M = more words 1-8 = guess Q= quit

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 will now look like the illustration in Figure 4. I have found that learners
read the passage with close attention at this point, presumably to identify
the fragment they have worked on and to see where it fits in to the whole.

Figure 4

1 Winter Weather 5 Daffodils

2 Music Review 6 Language Puzzle
3 Medicine Now 7 Sherlock Holmes YES
4 Chess News 8 Travel Regulations NO

YOUR SCORE 200 TARGET SCORE 1000

‘Is there any point to which you wish to draw my attention?’ ‘To the curious incident of
the dog in the night time.’ ‘The dog did nothing in the night time.’ ‘That was the curious
incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Space = new text Q= quit

Two versions From this point on, the program can proceed in one of two ways. In the
more elementary version, another text is chosen randomly and one word is
selected from it.’ The same text will not occur twice consecutively, but may
recur during the game. Thus a student who does badly at the beginning is
almost bound to improve, simply because the texts become familiar and
small extracts are recognized.
In the more advanced version, each text which has been correctly
identified is replaced by another. The new title over-writes the current one
in the list of titles and has the same chance of being selected as an); of the
other seven. In a session of play the student may encounter quite a number
of different texts out of the hundred or so which would be available if the
whole of the machine’s internal memory were used. (Twenty-seven texts are
available in the version described in this article.)

Scoring The main function of the scoring system is to give a structure to the session,
to provide an attainable goal to be worked towards. The actual score values
in this version of the program are more or less arbitrary and still experi-
mental. Other values and procedures are being tried out.
Any scoring system, even in an examination, sets up a challenge to the
student to work out the optimum strategy for winning. The reward for
success will be the same whether achieved by luck or knowledge: that, after
all, is what happens in life. It must be balanced by penalties both for failure
(wild guessing) and for caution (asking for more help than is needed). In
Close-Up the student begins with a ‘stock’ of 200 points, and each extra bit
of context asked for is ‘bought’ at a cost of ten points. The penalty for a
wrong guess is one third of the stock of points, but the stock is never
allowed to drop below forty. The reward for a successful guess is double
the stock of points, up to a maximum of ZOO. At the beginning of the game,
the cost of help is relatively high and the penalty for mis-guessing rela-
tively cheap. As the game proceeds, these relationships reverse. With 900
points ‘in the bank’, one can afford quite a number of ten-point calls for
more words, but a single wrong guess now costs 300 points. In another
version of the program, points won on one text are not put at risk by a
wrong guess with the next. It remains to be seen which type of scoring leads
to more effective use of the program.

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 The gambling principle This system of scoring has some resemblance to those used in reading
programs by Tim Johns (Higgins and Johns, 1983), although Johns often
makes more overt use of a gambling format. Gambling is a realistic
metaphor of many decisions and procedures in life (not necessarily having
financial implications) including language use. Training somebody in a
harmless environment to assess risk can be of value. In Close-Up the
principle is limited to demonstrating that help must be paid for and that it
also diminishes potential rewards. The student must work out the strategy
which secures the highest reward, balancing the cost of the help against the
risk of doing without it. But gambling is a topic which has strong cultural
and emotional overtones, and I have encountered criticism for appearing
to encourage it.

Target setting Before the game begins, the student is asked to set a target, which must be
in the range 500 to 3,000 points. The main consequence of the choice will
be to fix the length of the session. A good student will need only three or
four texts to reach a score of over 500, and will soon learn to set a more
challenging target. Weaker students will find that 500 points occupy them
for fifteen minutes or more and let them see eight or ten texts, which is
probably about the right length of session at first. The principle of target
setting is part of a more general principle, that of consulting the student on
decisions which affect what he or she is doing. Such consultation is a
general advantage that the computer has over mass teaching; it is a pity
that it is not used more than it is.

The ‘quit’ option It is good practice in computer-assisted learning to provide an accessible

means of changing or abandoning an activity which is no longer being
enjoyed, and this has been done here by allowing the student to press ‘Q’ at
any time. This gives a choice of terminating the program, or else of making
a fresh start with a new group of texts.

Student level So far I have not commented on the level of student that the program is
aimed at. The level depends largely on the selection of text, and with
simplified texts the program could be used at any level at which one would
contemplate introducing a simplified reader for extensive reading. The
texts themselves are limited by the screen format to a maximum length of
about sixty words, which is of course much shorter than is required for
most types of reading practice but is long enough to show some features of
coherence. The form of the program which I have been using contains
unsimplified texts (largely pastiche in order to avoid copyright problems)
of enormous diversity. This, I find, suits the early and mid-intermediate
level learner. The activity is a challenge, but an attainable one. The students
at this level (judging only from a sample of three who have tried it exten-
sively) seem very willing to spend between forty-five and seventy-five
minutes per session with the program, have returned for further sessions,
and are sometimes reluctant to give up their place to another student. One
encouraging observation I have made is the way in which the program en-
courages the students to use dictionaries and other reference books, not as
props during the reading but as ways of following up what has intrigued
them. after the exercise is over.

Higher levels For upper-intermediate or advanced students, the program in its present
form is ridiculously easy, just as it is for native speakers. It can be turned

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 into a far more challenging activity by selecting texts which are not on a
variety of topics but which are, , for instance, successive extracts from a
single long text, divided into short chunks, each given a headline. Now the
lexis on its own provides much less help, and the student’s task is to iden-
tify features which will place each fragment in the structure of a larger piece
of discourse. To persuade academic colleagues of this, I prepared a version
in which the eight texts were extracted from a two-page summary of
Chomsky’s work, and they agreed that this was tough going.

Flexibility The power of a program of this type derives partly, from its potential
flexibility. Since any text which fits the length limitation can be entered,
one could create versions suitable for ESP students in a variety of
disciplines, as well as at different levels. The first extension of the program
that I plan is to create a text ‘loader’, i.e. a simple program which will allow
teachers to create new files of texts chosen to suit their own students.

Unpredictability In this type of program the computer is carrying out ‘unintelligent

analysis’, simply identifying word boundaries and matching text to title. It
has no understanding of the semantic content. Its selection of word or text
is quite random, which means that it will generate ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ tasks
in an unpredictable way, picking a revealing content word on one
occasion :

e.g. nuclear

or a word in the middle of a long sequence of structural words on another:

of
one of the
being one of the most
like being one of the most important
looks like being one of the most important environmental
Sizewell looks like being one of the most important environmental issues

I have been criticized for this unpredictability, and asked to ‘fix’ the
program so that it either always or never produces items which are very
easy or very difficult. This I decline to do. It seems right to have some
unpredictability in an activity of this kind.

Why use a computer? A paper-and-pencil equivalent of this activity could easily be used in a
class. The teacher could have a number of texts on the desk and could write
the titles or headlines on the board or overhead projector. He or she could
now write or say one word, invite the class to speculate on which text it
could be from, and then, as Close-Up does, could ‘widen the window’ by
reading out more of the text. Indeed, in an institution which can afford an
overhead transparency maker and the rather expensive materials it
requires, this could be done with direct reproduction of authentic text on
the OHP, so that the ‘window’ on the text is more literally a window, and
all the relevant graphic information is present.
This technique, however, would miss the element of commitment which
arises when an individual or small group works with a computer. It would
be difficult to reproduce the need to evolve a winning strategy, which comes
from making guesses and seeing at once how they are scored. It would be
difficult, too, to spare the time from other classroom commitments to fit in

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 enough practice. Early experiences suggest that this is an activity which
students enjoy so much that they wil1 make their own time for it if a
machine is available to them in free periods or in the evening. q
Received August 1983

References Goodman, Kenneth. 1971. ‘Psycholinguistic

Bright, J. and McGregor. 1970. Teaching English as a universals in the reading process’ in Pimsleur and
Second Language. London: Longman. Quinn (eds.). The Psychology of Second Language
Goodman, Kenneth. 1967. ‘Reading: a psycho- Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
linguistic guessing game’. Journal of the Reading Higgins, J. J. and T. F. Johns. 1983. Computers in
Specialist, Vol. 6. Language Learning. London : Collins.

198 John Higgins

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