Czytanie ekstensywne na zajęciach z uczniami na poziomie średnim

The present paper discusses extensive reading of non-adapted books as a tool to improve intermediate learners’ vocabulary range. Although original texts are inevitably far too difficult for detailed translation-based reading, they nonetheless offer important learning opportunities: indeed, incidental learning has been described even in the earliest stages of language acquisition, while research on intercomprehension shows that partial competences are often sufficient to understand the overall meaning of a text. A second-year student of L2 Polish agreed to read a whole non-adapted book with only a limited possibility of looking up words in a dictionary. The student also annotated reading times and kept a journal. Reading times exhibit a general tendency to decrease, while the qualitative annotations contain a wealth of information on the factors which determine task difficulty as well as spontaneously developed reading strategies. It is argued that extensive reading of non-adapted books may be a useful, albeit demanding task for motivated students.