This session will introduce the exciting new and upcoming World Heritage series of graded readers. The series taps into a wide-spread interest in world heritage sites and assets around the world. The series will be written as several levels from late beginner to early intermediate for both high school and university populations. These readers will be perfect for content based teaching and will raise the students' awareness of the world and their global competencies in order to become global citizens. The presentation will provide the details about the series, the number of titles and launch date, and so on.

Welcome to the second online Extensive Reading Around the World!

This presentation reports the positive impacts made by online extensive reading on 14 adult learners of English. The participants who were advanced learners conducted extensive reading on Xreading for one year. The participants’ transformation from unconfident L2 readers to avid, engaged L2 readers is demonstrated by various data: their journal entries, comments given during five individual interviews, records kept on Xreading, and pre-/post-project metaphors that reflected their perceptions towards L2 reading. Specifically, seven participants read more than one million words and all of their metaphors shifted from negative to positive orientation. Furthermore, the participants made statistically significant gains in reading rates (p < .005) and vocabulary sizes (p < .0005). This presentation reports in detail, the factors that created such positive outcomes. They include the support given by the researcher, the successful routinization of L2 reading, and the Xreading factor such as the easy access to abundant intriguing graded readers.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Research and Theoretical Issues.

In this study, the presenter used three research questions to investigate how learners incrementally increase their TOEIC test scores through extensive reading. The first question concerns the number of English words that must be read to reach the intermediate level. MReader and the TOEIC online test scores were used to estimate the words that is necessary to reach the CEFR B1. As a result, it was estimated that reading about 500,000 words was required. The second question is about identifying which factors most affect the final TOEIC scores. What had a greater effect on the TOEIC scores, the learner's initial academic ability or their reading volume? This looks like the classic chicken and egg problem, but multiple regression analysis of the data showed that the amount of reading affected their test scores more than their initial ability. The third question is about the students’ motivation. What psychological factors affect the amount of reading? The presenter used multiple regression analysis and found that the students’ positive attitudes toward reading were influencing the total amount of reading being done. The details of the classroom setting and analysis will be shared during the presentation.

Managing an ER program by myself for 105 students, without Graded Readers, I needed help developing my small book collection (100 titles), and therefore designed a few classroom activities to encourage reading, discussion and positive interdependence, while supporting the growth of the program at the same time. In this short presentation, I will introduce two interaction-rich group activities (“book recommendation” and “designing quizzes”) and one individual writing activity (“book review”), while presenting some examples and feedback from my students. By picking new books, designing quizzes and reviewing books for their schoolmates, many became more confident, as they saw themselves as members of a lively reading community.

I teach French as a foreign language in a Japanese university, to beginner to low-intermediate level students, but am confident that these activities will be useful in many contexts, and even with Graded Readers.

This study analyzed the impact of extensive reading (ER) on the TOEIC score among Japanese high school students. ER was administered for three academic years to three grades each with 250 students respectively. The individual reading amount and their TOEIC scores were recorded by the English teacher. The students were encouraged to read 200,000 words per year mainly outside of the classroom. Students read 5,000 words per week, which is 10 minutes per day for students who read 100 wpm, for five days a week, during 35 weeks of school, plus 25,000 words during the long vacations. The study showed that these students scored 650 or higher on the TOEIC test. The study also explains how to implement ER in a regular Japanese high school without eroding the fixed curriculum, and how the involvement of the school library supported ER and student motivation.

The Journal of Extensive Reading (JER) is a peer-reviewed online journal of research on extensive reading run by the Japan Association of Language Teaching (JALT) Extensive Reading Special Interest Group. The journal supplements what is already offered in the journal Extensive Reading in Japan (ERJ) by focusing on the publication of high-quality empirical research on ER. Please join our session to learn about our publication and how you can get more involved in the extensive reading research community by submitting a manuscript or becoming a reviewer yourself.

This presentation is on how one teacher taught a reading course online using Zoom during COVID-19 for nine second- and third- year EFL undergraduate students in Japan in three phases: (1) getting to know the students, (2) staying attuned to the students’ wants and needs, and (3) getting students to become autonomous learners. Challenges as a result of COVID-19 and a move from classroom teaching to online teaching included difficulties in having students borrow and purchase books and having students conduct extensive reading throughout the course. Implications for teachers teaching reading online and face-to-face in EFL contexts not limited to Japan are also provided.

This presentation will introduce a long-term research project on extensive reading jointly run by three different universities in Japan. We organized a reading circle in 2021, which is formed of 40 students from four departments in three different universities who volunteered to join. The project will last until 2023 and during the three years, the participants are recommended to read as many books as possible using Xreading and attend periodical meetings and group activities that are intended to raise or maintain their motivation to read. It is an educational practice as well as a research project. As an educational practice, we are interested in how we can manage the learning community to make extensive reading successful. As a research project, we are interested in what kind of psychological transformation will occur over the long term. The presentation will focus on the project scheme and the outcomes of the first year.