Extensive Reading Podcast

Our sixth episode features the first part of a long telephone interview with professor Atsuko Takase, long time ER enthusiast, practitioner and promoter, and co-chair of this summer’s Extensive Reading World Congress in Tokyo. Professor Takase tells us about when she was visiting a high school student in the States in the 1960s where she had to read extensively in English, and about her experiences doing extensive reading with high school students and university students as well as with private students of elementary and junior high school age. Finally, she gives advice on how to motivate reluctant readers and repeating students.

Welcome to our fifth episode, the first one after a long summer break. In this episode we interview Paul Goldberg, creator, founder and owner of X-Reading, an online subscription-based graded-reader library that allows students unlimited access to more than 600 books on their computers, tablets or mobile devices any time they feel like doing a bit of ER. Paul tells us extensively about his project, including how and why he created X-Reading, how he managed to get the publishers on board (Macmillan, Cengage, Oxford, Cambridge, ELI, Atama Ii and more), all that the project has accomplished and what it will look like in the future.

Welcome to our fourth episode, in which we play the second part of our interview with Thomas Robb that we started in episode 3. This time, professor Robb tells us about the history of the most popular tool for teachers all over the world to make sure that their students are reading their graded readers: the MReader. For the Continuing the Debate section we comment on a brief segment by long-time comprehensible-input advocate Stephen Krashen, which we borrowed from a short lecture available onYoutube. We hope you like the episode. We certainly had a great time recording it.

Welcome to the third episode of the Extensive Reading Podcast. In this episode we include the first part of a long interview with Thomas Robb, who has been implementing extensive reading programmes since the 1980s at Kyoto Sangyo University and who is probably best known for being the creator and administrator of the M-Reader, a very helpful programme for teachers and students doing extensive reading. In this first part of the interview he tells us about his early experiences with ER, about the origins of the JALT ER SIG (the extensive reading special interest group at the Japan Association for Language Teaching), which played an important role in the creation of the Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF), about the ERF itself and its different activities to promote extensive reading, and finally, about the 4th World Congress on Extensive Reading, which will take place in Tokyo from August 4th-7th, and which he will be co-chairing.

Episode #2: Mark Brierley on Running an ER Programme Welcome to the second episode of the Extensive Reading Podcast. In this episode we interview ER enthusiast and long-time practitioner Mark Brierley, from JALT's Special Interest Group in Extensive in Reading, who tells us about why graded readers should always be present in the language classroom, how to build up large-scale library of graded readers, and how to keep an extensive reading programme started and running for many years. Also in this episode we start Continuing the Debate, a new section in which we will be discussing opposing points on view on second language acquisition, teaching and learning. This week Travis introduces Merril Swain's Output Hypothesis, nothing less.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Extensive Reading Podcast. In this episode, your hosts Jose & Travis attempt to take an intensive look into extensive reading. We discuss Day & Bamford’s (2002) Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive Reading in order to lay a foundation on what ER is. We also hear brief comments from Paul Goldberg, Mark Brierley, & Ann Flanagan who spoke at the recent “JALT Nara and JALT ER SIG: A Day of Extensive Reading – All you ever wanted to know about ER!”. We hope you enjoy the first ER Podcast!