Bringing Extensive Reading Into the Classroom
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ISBN: 978 0 19 442406 6
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The publishers would like to thank: Dan Stewart for supplying the photography of the book cart on page 99, and Oxford Design and Illustrators for resupplying the artwork on pages 42, 49, 59, 101, 102, 107, and 108.
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Notes on contributors
Richard Day is Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaii. He is co-editor of the journal, Reading in a Foreign Language, and chairman of the Extensive Reading Foundation. His recent publications include Cover to Cover 1–3 (OUP 2009). Dr Day is engaged in a study of the effects of timed-repeated reading on fluency and comprehension.
Jennifer Bassett is the series editor of the Oxford Bookworms Library. For over twenty years she has been writing, editing, and thinking about stories for English language learners. Her publications include about forty original and retold graded readers. Her abiding interests are storytelling within a reduced code, and searching for good stories from every corner of the world.
Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter are freelance ELT authors and teacher trainers based in Alicante, Spain. Since 2000 they have edited the Dominoes series for Oxford University Press. Their other publications include New Headway Pronunciation Pre-Intermediate (OUP 2002), and Happy Earth new edition (OUP 2009). Their current interests are reader-based drama activities and intensive skills work tasks using graded reader extracts.
Mark Furr has taught in Armenia, Japan, Palau, and the USA. He currently works in Hawaii as an ELT materials writer and editor. He has written journal articles on classroom-based reading groups, and has given presentations and seminars on Reading Circles throughout Japan, the Middle East, and the UK. He is also series editor for the Oxford Bookworms Club: Stories for Reading Circles series.
Nina Prentice is a teacher and teacher trainer with a particular interest in literacy and reading, working in the UK and other countries. She also writes graded readers for Oxford University Press and has just finished Saladin for the Dominoes series. She is currently doing research on problems in literary translation.
Minas Mahmood is a senior curriculum specialist in the Bahrain Ministry of Education. She is responsible for secondary-level EFL curriculum renewal. In addition to her interest in teacher development through teacher research, she has been involved with learning and language development in schools through Extensive Reading. She has also contributed to TESOL Arabia’s Journal, Perspectives.
Daniel Stewart is the Head Foreign Teacher at Kaisei Academy in Tokyo. He has been involved in Extensive Reading since 2002. He is also the editor of the Extensive Reading Journal in Japan. His current interests in research include ER, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), and Extensive Listening (EL).
Thomas Robb, PhD, teaches in the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan. He is a founding member and past president of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) and has been involved with the practice and theory of computer use for language learning for over thirty years.
Introduction
Extensive Reading (ER) is becoming an increasingly important component in English language education. Over recent years a wide range of programmes has developed across the world. This growth is no accident, for ER responds to a number of classroom needs.
First, it is an effective way of extending contact with English outside the classroom. Provided appropriately graded materials are used, it gives students the opportunity to see the language they learn in a classroom environment used in the context of communicating something – usually a story. And of all the language learning activities that students can do outside the classroom, ER is perhaps the one they are most likely to do, because it can be fun.
Second, it personalizes students’ contact with the language. By reading the books that they want to read, at a time and place of their choice, ER both individualizes the learning experience and makes it autonomous. Both of these are features that many of us would wish to introduce into the classroom.
Third, reading and writing have often been neglected in language programmes, despite the fact that many students, for study or work, need to develop both skills. Students can only develop the writing (and reading) skills that they need by reading extensively; writing is not a skill that can develop without models.
Finally, and this point emerges time and time again from the chapters in this book, reading can be pleasurable; and anything that associates language learning with pleasure has great value. Even more than that, it is clear that there are many students who have participated in ER programmes and found the experience life-changing.
In his opening chapter, Richard Day defines ER and looks at some evidence of its success in the classroom. His emphasis on the use of graded materials as an essential part of any programme underlies all of this book – there can be no successful ER without appropriately graded materials.
In the next two chapters, editors of two series of graded readers give us their views on how ER materials can be developed and how they see them being used. Jennifer Bassett explains the principles of language grading, stresses the importance of good storytelling, and offers three golden keys to extensive reading – comfort, choice, and enthusiasm. Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter give us some historical background, and look at the development of both graded readers and appropriate support materials.
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