School Encouraging Students’ Extensive Reading using Interactive Virtual Library: A Story from MTsN 1 Pandeglang, Indonesia more

Sun, Aug 7, 10:00-10:20 Asia/Tokyo

Studies indicate that extensive reading has given considerable benefits for language learners (Nation, 1997; Yamashita, 2013; Suk, 2017; Wang & Ho, 2019). However, the major challenge to do extensive reading in an EFL setting is book availability (Renandya et al., 2020). In addition to that, students in the digital age nowadays are strongly dependent on activity-related technology, causing reading to lose its attraction. In the effort of proposing an alternative solution to this challenge, extensive reading needs to be simultaneously implemented with technology. One encouraging way is using Interactive Virtual Library (IVL), which is a contextually-designed free reading resource created by a teacher to support students’ ER practice interactively. In this presentation, we would like to share an Indonesian teacher’s best practice in encouraging students’ ER using IVL. Specifically, we would like to describe how the IVL is created, how it looks like, and how it is implemented in the classrooms. In addition, we will also discuss some opportunities that the IVL offers, including how it can be adopted and/ or adapted in other EFL contexts, and how it solves the issue of limited book availability at schools. Furthermore, we will describe some potential challenges from creating and implementing the IVL, and what we can reflect in order to better implement it in the future.