Extensive Reading Podcast

Last August we went to Kyoto Sangyo University to interview Professor Amanda Gillis-Furutaka. She has been teaching there for over twenty years, contributing to establish and maintain a large extensive reading programme at this university. Over the last few years, she has been carrying out qualitative research on the thought processes that occur when we do ER in a second or foreign language. In this episode, Professor Gillis-Furutaka tells us about some of the most interesting insights that she has obtained through her interviews with students of different ages and levels. Listen and learn about the various factors affecting graded reader readability besides the number of headwords, about the many ways in which the L1 is involved while reading in an L2, and about the interplay between working memory and the practice of extensive reading.  Resources:  In this 2012 article you can find information about the ER programme at Kyoto Sangyo University.  http://erfoundation.org/proceedings/erwc1-Gillis-Furutaka.pdf

We have dedicated our 25th episode to the future of ER research. There are so many things that we still don’t know about ER that it is not easy to decide where to start looking. In our case, we begun by seeking out the opinions of two long-time ER practitioners and advocates with extensive experience conducting research in this field: Rob Waring and Tom Robb. Both of them have already been on the podcast in the past, Professor Robb in episodes 3 and 4, and Professor Waring in episodes 21 and 22. From different perspectives, they suggest a myriad ways in which we can broaden our knowledge of everything that surrounds extensive reading. In this article by Professor Waring he lists many questions concerning ER that remain unanswered today and that he discusses in the podcast. http://www.robwaring.org/papers/various/assesser.html

There are so many ways in which Tokyo Oberlin University Professor Marcos Benevides, our guest for our 24th episode, is connected with ER that it is hard to chose one to start with. For one thing, for the last six years he has been using extensive reading as part of an English programme for 2,000 students that he coordinates at his university. Also, he is an author and editor of graded readers, and the founder of a very particular collection: Atama ii Books, which you can sample here [http://www.gtcpub.com/Class/atamaii/tada/2016se/content/page1.htm]. Finally, he has also experienced first-hand the effect of reading on successfully learning and acquiring a new language (he was born in Brazil and moved to Canada with his family when we has eleven years old). Professor Benevides tells us in detail about all these experiences in this interview.

I first saw Dr. Charles Browne a few months ago at JALT’s PanSIG in Tokyo. He was giving a talk in a room that was almost as packed as a Japanese train during rush hour. He was introducing ER Central, which is a website that he created with Rob Waring, where students and teachers can find a myriad ER-related resources, and he was glowing. You could tell that he was passionate about it. I immediately thought that we had to have him on the podcast. So I told Travis and we got in touch with him. We asked him if he would give us an interview and, to our delight, he said yes in no time. Our original idea was just to have him introduce his website to our audience, but the interview flowed in different directions and became something that I find even more interesting. Among many other things, it included a really nice section on what Dr. Browne calls a symbiotic relationship between extensive reading and intentional vocabulary learning, for example, by means of flashcards.  Check out https://www.er-central.com/

In the second part of our interview with Dr. Rob Waring, he tells us about his experiences as author and editor of graded readers in general, with particular reference to a very successful collection whose books he co-authored with Maurice Jamall: Heinle Cengage’s Foundations Reading Library. For those of you who want to know more about the topic of this podcast, here are a couple of nice readings: First, a text by Rob Waring on the art of writing graded readers. https://www.er-central.com/authors/writing-a-graded-reader/writing-graded-readers-rob-waring/ Second, an article by Stuart McLean on the graded reader collection we discuss in the interview. http://jalt-publications.org/content/index.php/jer/article/view/5 Note: we recorded this episode before this week’s horrible floods in Japan and feel a little embarrassed about how lightly we talk about the rain in the episode.

Whenever we asked our guests for tips on who to interview next, Dr. Rob Waring’s name popped up almost immediately. When we asked Paul Goldberg, he told us that nobody made the case for extensive reading like he did, and that if you were in the same room with him and did not support extensive reading yet, he would be fast to make you change your mind about it. In this episode, which includes the first part of our interview, Dr. Waring tells us about his experiences with ER, including the first ER colloquium in 1997 and the creation of the ER Foundation. He also tells us about how vocabulary research shows that there is a no other way but to do extensive reading if our students are to learn the many words and lexical units they need to learn the target L2. Here’s a link to an article by Dr. Waring whose title says it all: The inescapable case for extensive reading. [insert link: http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_why/er_is_vital.htm]

After a long break that we took following the beginning of the academic year in Japan, we are back with a new episode and a new interview. This time we deal with extensive reading in Chinese. We do so in the company of Chinese language consultants Jared Turner and John Pasden, who have put together a collection of graded readers in Chinese called Mandarin Companion. In the interview they discuss their experiences reading and doing extensive reading in Chinese, and also the challenges of creating Chinese reading materials that are both interesting and useful to learners of the language.

For our nineteenth episode we have an interview with professors Naeko Naganuma and Patrick Daugherty, from Akita International University, in the north of Japan. In the interview they tell us about the research that they have recently carried out on academic dishonesty in extensive reading programmes and they suggest a number of ways in which teachers can discourage cheating while making the student’ extensive reading more engaging and rewarding.

In the second part of the interview, Professor Nation discusses different ways of doing extensive reading depending on whether one’s target is more fluency or vocabulary oriented, the need to make sure that the students know the reasons why they should be doing ER, the amount of reading that students ought to do, questions of vocabulary and frequency, and of course, the role of output in language acquisition and learning.

Professor Paul Nation, our guest for this and the following episode, needs no introduction. His name has been recurrently popping up in previous shows, mostly in discussions about the role of extensive reading within language teaching in general. In this first part of the interview he discusses just that: his ‘four strands’ approach to language teaching, and also their implications for the way we understand teachers’ roles and extensive reading. In the context of this discussion, Professor Nation also comments on Professor Akio Furukawa’s celebrated ER programme, and on the role of speed reading courses to improve reading fluency.

Our guest for this episode is an English teacher in a secondary school in Malaysia who has been using extensive reading in her classes for many years in spite the isolation and the budget limitations. In this interview she tells us everything about motivating her students to read without recurring to external motivation, and we also discuss issues like the need to properly orient students before they start doing ER, or the role of ER-related activities besides sustained silent reading.

Our previous episode featured the first part of our interview with long-time promoter of ER in Japanese Dr. Tabata-Sandom, which dealt mostly with the particularities of the Japanese writing system and its effects on learning to read the language. In this episode we include the second part of that interview, which deals with topics such as the challenges that authors of Japanese graded readers face, the limitations of Japanese graded readers and of doing ER in Japanese, Japanese teachers’ openness and willingness to do ER, and the role of children books and manga in learning to read in this language. But maybe most importantly, this episode comes with a very rich account by our guest of the resources that are available for those who want to do ER in Japanese.

“Anyone can learn to read fluently in Japanese” In this episode we start to explore a promising territory that has been tempting us for a long time: extensive reading in languages other than English. We look at ER in Japanese with the guidance of Dr. Mitsue Tabata-Sandom, who has been using extensive reading to teach Japanese to her university students in New Zealand for many years, and who has also carried out a number of most interesting research studies on ER in Japanese. She gave us a long interview that will constitute the bulk of this and the following episode. In this first part of the interview she tells us about the particularities of the Japanese writing system and its relationship with extensive reading. She also tells us about her experiences as an author of Japanese graded readers.

Reading aloud is often seen as a little more than a resource that can be used when the students’ level is too low for them to do extensive reading by themselves. However, there are those who argue that there is room in every class for reading books aloud, regardless of the age of level of the students. Our guest for this episode, Dr. George Jacobs, is one of them. In this interview you’ll find a most accessible introduction to the best practices and principles for reading aloud to students, and its connections with positive education and with sociocultural theory.

We recorded our last episode of the year with professors Kevin Ramsden and Aaron Campbell in a very nice studio at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, or Kyoto Gaidai, as it is commonly known. They told us about how they are putting altruistic motivation to work, having their students do much more extensive reading than they would otherwise, while at the same time helping to create a library at a rural school in Cambodia, among many other things. You can also hear the voice of the teacher at the receiving end this project, Sonita Sen, who tells us about how the library is being set up and the effect it is having. You can learn more about this project at swapnetwork.org, which is also the right site to visit if you are considering making a donation.

We are back after our one-week break with an episode that continues to deal with editing and adapting graded readers. Nick Bullard, long-time editor of graded readers at Oxford University Press as well as adapter tells us more about the issues surrounding these two complementary jobs. We learn, for example, how potential adaptations of George Orwell, Graham Greene and Truman Capote would have completely different implications and why that would be so. Nick also tells us about grading and headwords and the many issues that surround them.

Do you know when your favorite author died? Our guest probably does! In our tenth episode, we bring you part one of our two part interview with Nick Bullard, who has been in the graded reader business for a long time both as editor and as writer. As an editor, he has extensive experience managing the graded readers for Oxford University Press. As a writer, he has adapter some classic stories such as, Arnold Bennet’s The Card, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, H.G.Wells’ The Invisible Man, and Ian Fleming’s Octopussy and The Living Daylights. In this part of the interview, Nick explains his background in graded readers, how Oxford University Press’s Bookworms and Dominos series began, and the challenges of adapting classic works.

Don’t call them characters. Call them people. Our ninth episode features the second part of the interview we had with Dr. Antoinette Moses, acclaimed author of graded readers like Jojo’s Story, John Doe and Book Boy. In this part of the interview Dr. Moses gives plenty of good advice to those who might be considering writing graded readers themselves, mostly concerning character creation and getting into the students’ skin to write about what they may find interesting and engaging. For those of you who may be considering that possibility, here are a couple of potentially useful links. First, in Writing a Graded Reader, professor Rob Waring, author of numerous graded readers, thoroughly discusses the nature of these kind of books and how best to write them. Second, in Behind the scenes – Writing & Publishing Graded Readers, Nicola Prentis gives an account of the writing and publishing of a graded reader from the point of view of the teacher turned author. Her insights and narration in her post are as goo

For our seventh episode we have the second part of the interview that Professor Atsuko Takase gave us. She tells us about teachers’ motivation to do ER, the need for teachers to do ER themselves so that they can understand the students’ experience with ER, and the role of manga in ER among many other things.