Future-ready means life-ready. As well as skills in science and technology, our students need non-technical skills such as social emotional learning (SEL), critical thinking and cultural awareness. To be truly future-ready learners will need to display knowledge and sensitivity to other people, places, and cultures. Reading is essential to both language learning and understanding other cultures. 'China Showcase Library' (CSL) from National Geographic Learning is a graded reader series that showcases authentic content and high-interest topics that stimulate higher order thinking skills. In this session we will discover how CSL incorporates critical thinking, SEL, and cultural awareness to inform, engage and prepare students for the future.

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.

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

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.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Extensive Listening.

Extensive Listening (EL) is a teaching approach that emphasizes the provision of authentic, comprehensible, and fun aural input for an extended time period in order to improve language proficiency, especially the listening ability, of L2 learners. This presentation provides 5 compelling reasons why EL should be implemented in L2 classrooms: no conclusive evidence regarding the benefits of listening strategy teaching has been found; some studies have found no significant effects of listening strategy teaching on listening ability improvement; my own experience as an EFL learner; EL is regarded as a fun and theoretically sound way to learn L2; and in-class EL should help create more autonomous learners. The presentation will also show how in-class English audio-visual watching (e.g., movies or TV series) with subtitles and/or captions can be implemented and how it can help improve learners’ listening ability as well as increase learners’ confidence, motivation, and self-esteem in their own English language learning outside the classrooms.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Writing Materials.

Research into extensive reading (ER) has provided evidence of gains in fluency, vocabulary development, and improved motivation. However, since reading literacy is such a complex phenomenon, what about the performance gaps for our learners that go unaddressed with basic ER principles? This presentation briefly covers a four-stage framework for diagnosing foreign language reading skills (Alderson et al., 2015) — observation, initial assessment, hypothesis testing, decision making and feedback. The session then highlights three fundamental underpinnings—the science of how we read, individual differences, and bottom-up reading processes. With a greater understanding of these three, teachers can identify learner strengths and weaknesses to better support them in their reading challenges and development. Online links and various diagnostic tools will be shared and trialed for practical, ‘learning by doing’ in experiential learning. Participants should take away a broader sense of issues their learners may face with reading and resources to implement following diagnoses.

When an author writes a book, they create a new and unique world. Readers can enter that world, but they don’t typically have the opportunity to interact with its creator. With the aim of increasing students’ motivation to read, a series of events called Talk to an Author was organized. In each event, a specially invited author gave a short presentation about a book they wrote, including their motivation for writing it. Students attending, who had previously read the book on the Xreading website, were then given the opportunity to share their feeling about the book and ask questions directly to the author. In this session, the presenters will discuss the first two Talk to an Author events, including their experience organizing the events, feedback from both the students and authors, and finally their plans for future events.

Join the breakout room to ask and answer questions. Please watch the video before joining the session. The presenter will be available to take questions about any of the topics brought up in the video. Participants will also have chances to add their own idea.

“Reading for fun” isn’t a common practice for high school graduates in Palestine, where interest in reading typically centers on high school exam results. How might ER improve students’ attitudes about reading and shape their identity as readers? Over one semester, to supplement intensive reading from an instructor, students at an intensive English program practiced in-class speed reading (Nation, 2020) and regular self-guided ER through the Oxford Bookworms series, as well as free digital ER resources (Newsela, Ello, and English Through Story). Results suggest that consistent ER routines may have changed students’ perceptions about reading, heightened their awareness of their own progress, and stronger self-identity as “readers.” This is remarkable given a setting where unpredictable interruptions are the norm. This session and discussion will give the results of a reading inventory survey, lessons learned, tips for implementing ER, and its proposed expansion beyond the setting. The audience will contribute valuable feedback!

Geoff teaches English through the format of book clubs. How does he help to engage students in the choice of book? How does he help the setting, author and characters come alive? How can we create a programme structure that leads to inspired and motivated readers? Geoff will show how he provides an engaging and motivating start to a course by going outside the text to look at location and setting, the author’s background, and cultural or historical aspects to bring the text to life. He will show numerous practical examples of how he does this such as using Google Earth for location setting; using author interviews or movie clips; biographies, and of course the book itself. This session is aimed at teachers looking for ideas to ensure a motivating start to an extensive reading programme.

The Avenue project has been working towards raising awareness of extensive reading as a means of supporting language learners in the settlement sector across Canada. As this venture is gaining momentum, we have identified essential characteristics of a large scale, cohesive extensive reading program. In this session we will share these attributes with examples from the Avenue project. We will also share an update of our progress towards building a national extensive reading system.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Reading in an electronic age and ER without graded readers.

Much has been said and written about the benefits of ER for language learning, and vocabulary gains through ER have often been investigated. Vocabulary knowledge is obviously important; it is, for example, regarded as the single greatest predictor of comprehension. Vocabulary is also essential for communication for, as was said fifty years ago: “while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”. Yet, while vocabulary gains have received much attention, learning grammar through ER has been largely overlooked. In this talk, I want to focus on the problems that unfamiliar grammatical constructions can cause in ER, and the grammar learning that is possible from ER. I will be doing this with examples from my own experience as a French language learner (not that you will need to know French to understand the examples!). After considering the extent to which grammar learning is possible, I will then discuss how the language teacher and other forms of instruction can facilitate this learning. The talk will suggest gaps in our current knowledge and so will conclude with some thoughts about future research directions.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Classroom issues.

Many language teachers implement Extensive Reading in their classes in the knowledge that it will benefit learners’ language development. However, it can be difficult to create entire courses around ER, and some institutions require a compulsory textbook for each course. This presentation describes the development (and completion) of a four-skills coursebook seamlessly integrating an ER program through Xreading.com. The book is designed with a task-based approach and features engaging and relevant topics for learners.

Join the breakout room to ask and answer questions. Please watch the video before joining the session. The presenter will be available to take questions about any of the topics brought up in the video. Participants will also have chances to add their own ideas.

This presentation will look at how teachers and educators can create high-quality extensive reading materials that can also work for extensive listening. Attendees will learn how to create graded readers by recording natural speech in the form of narrations, stories, and interviews. The presentation will then show how to use various free tools, such as Canva, PowerPoint and Google slides to transform audio into engaging and even interactive audio books and lessons. In addition, teachers will learn how students can create works of art to share with other students around the world. Lastly, the presentation will briefly show how educators can crowd source creation by recording audio and video of people (friends, family, coworkers, etc.) around the world and then transforming it into extensive reading and listening materials, particularly graded readers.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on XReading.

The Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF) has created a wide array of resources, and houses and publicizes resources created by others. This presentation reports on one of these ERF resources: the ER-MOOC (https://er-mooc.org). The MOOC is a course that engages educators in thinking about major aspects of Extensive Reading Approach. Those who register and complete the course receive an official certificate of completion from the Extensive Reading Foundation. The course was facilitated by Helene Demirci and Tom Robb, with help from many other contributors. It consists of 13 modules on topics such as “getting started with extensive reading,” tracking and assessing students’ reading,” and “introduction to websites for extensive reading and listening.” To help educators complete the course, 13 weekly 50-minute sessions are held online, one for each module in the MOOC. Five people from five different countries who participated in these sessions will share about the MOOC and the sessions.

Xreading is digital library that gives students access to over a thousand graded readers from major publishers such as CUP, Cengage, and Macmillan. Students have unlimited access to all books as well as audio narrations, ratings, and quizzes. In addition, the system tracks students' reading progress (books read, words read, reading speed, quiz scores, etc.) so it makes management and assessment much easier for teachers. The system is constantly evolving and growing in terms of the number of books and features. In this presentation, the founder of Xreading will explain the new functionality that has been added over the past year, including the speed-reading and journal components, and what is planned for the future. Current users of the system are encouraged to provide feedback and suggestions based on their experience.

Inspired by the book flood studies, the project aimed at providing more input to a group of high school French learners in the U. S. since they rarely have the opportunity to read a coherent text or to see language used in context. Twenty-one high school students in the U. S., having studied French for two years in middle school, participated in an experiment where they were guided to read stories in French for twenty minutes each day, twice a week, for three months. Materials used included simplified stories as well as children’s stories for native French speakers. Pre- and post-study questionnaires were used to see if the experiment had an impact. The results showed that although there was no significant improvement in terms of reading rate or vocabulary size, students showed improvement in pronunciation, and they reported being more confident in their reading ability, and more motivated to read.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Library Management and Reading Spaces.

Community sharing and empowering on extensive reading can be supported and done through various means. Starting from early 2020, free online workshops and webinars on extensive reading have flourished to help the community to stay updated, enriched, and connected due to COVID-19. Indonesian Extensive Reading Association (IERA) took this opportunity to create an online platform for ER community in the form of a podcast. A podcast is an open source that provides varied series of discussions on certain topics. The podcast that we are going to share is “satERdate with” podcast which focuses on extensive reading and literacy. “satERdate with” invited ER experts, practitioners, and enthusiasts to share theories, insights, and their best practices. This presentation emphasizes the possibility of using a podcast as an online community sharing and empowering on ER. In addition, we will also highlight how the podcast can be used as a free authentic extensive reading online resource for academic purposes.

This presentation will outline the goals of the Global Foreign Language Reading Survey 2022 (GFLRS 2022). GFLRS will survey teachers from all over the world to examine their perceptions of how foreign language reading should be taught in kindergarten, formal schooling, university and in adult education. GFLRS will illuminate the teachers' perceptions of the place of extensive reading in the foreign language curriculum and how it is practiced by those teachers who are doing ER and will find out why many teachers and institutions are reluctant to do ER, the barriers they face before adoption and what we can do to persuade them to adopt ER. Attendees will first hear a brief summary of the project and will be encouraged to highlight areas in the survey that might need to be modified for certain regions to account for local conditions. Finally, participants can sign up to be part of the survey either as subjects or recruiters who will find subjects. All non-personally or institutionally identifying data will be made available to the public.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Global Issues and Intercultural Communication.

The positive effects of Extensive Reading/Listening on language learners have been recognized and more and more institutions have been implementing ER/EL in many countries around the world. Meanwhile, some schools, which had once shown great success with their students’ improvement of their language proficiency, are now not as enthusiastic as before or have even reverted to their previous teaching methods, for various reasons. First, this presentation will explain why ER/EL is important for language learners. Second, it will provide some reasons why many schools are not implementing ER/EL. Then, some demotivating factors for learners which keep them from ER/EL will be provided. Next, useful tips, which motivate learners to keep reading and listening extensively, will be introduced by presenting the results of practical studies. Finally, the presentation will propose teachers’ roles: what they should do or should not do to succeed with an ER/EL program.

Each of the ERF's affiliates and forming affiliates will present their activities in the past year in a 2-3 minute presentation to the ERF Board. This might include officer changes, events held, constitutional changes and so forth. Each affiliate and forming affiliate should also present on their upcoming plans. The ER public encouraged to attend to see how these ER associations work behind the scenes and potentially use this information to start their own ERF Affiliate.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on ER in other langauges than English.

After 5 years of living in a Chinese speaking country and over 100 hours of class lessons, I failed to get a grasp of this language and communicate in my daily life. After discovering ER and the Mandarin Companion series, I began a serious quest into extensive reading for myself. Within weeks, my comprehension grew as did my “feel” for the language and for how to correct troublesome grammar points. In this talk, I describe the experiences of first getting into graded readers, where my reading was slow initially and how it improved quickly, how this helped my grades, and the difficulties that arose. Additionally, I found ER is beneficial for those at advanced language level. This talk is to help teachers better understand their students’ extensive reading experiences and encourage teachers to write graded readers in their own languages.

This session has two parts. Motivating Learners to Read Extensively Around the World Whilst there is a certain level of agreement on the activities that can be adopted to gain the benefits of extensive reading for language learning, recent discussions among the ERF affiliates have impressed upon us that different approaches are needed when motivating learners to habitually engage in extensive reading in different parts of the world. Therefore, this panel discussion aims to bring together the affiliates to discuss and answer questions related to motivating learners to read extensively in their given context. The session will include other panelists not listed here. Following the panel there will be a general discussion on forming and managing ERF Affiliates

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an increasingly hot topic across various fields and levels of education, and it is not unusual to see them used as a framework or a reference for curricula that engage with social change as early as elementary school. Yet for many students, the SDGs are often just abstract concepts whose issues are perceived to be only related to communities and/or countries rather than ones that impacts their own lives. We discuss how SDG-based extensive reading programs can promote both local and global engagement by educating students with a passion for reading, and through that platform learning about the significance of the SDGs not only on a global scale, but also on a national level. Furthermore, we demonstrate how extensive reading can be a stepping stone to critical thinking about the SDGs and issues they can see in their everyday lives. In addition, the readers encourage students to make connections between the goals and encourage students to see social issues in that way as well. In conclusion, we introduce the process of creating locally engaged SDG-inspired extensive reading programs, student reactions to these materials, and conclude with a discussion of feedback from our students to reveal how your students can benefit from them.

Xreading News is an exciting new feature recently piloted on Xreading. Each week there are 5 graded news articles. Stories are short and cover a wide range of topics, such as Science & Technology, Health, and World News. The team of story writers and the series editor will discuss various aspects and perspectives on the process of bringing news stories to Xreading. They will discuss sourcing and selecting stories, writing graded text, and simplifying complex issues. They will also talk about using the stories in the classroom.

The session will explain how remote online extensive reading (ER) groups were created using Zoom video conferencing for after school activities and summer camps. Teachers of Arabic in local schools in the UAE were invited to join the project and interested teachers were provided access to the Arabic ER website that contains links to online Arabic reading materials and the Arabic M-reader site.

The project aimed to introduce ER in the home in an attempt to encourage families to embrace and normalize reading. The Arabic version of M-reader was used to track students' reading and to facilitate a competition. Feedback on reading achievements and the competition was provided in the Zoom meeting activities by volunteer undergraduate students. They also assisted in supporting students' ER practices in Arabic by reading aloud to children in the reading group.

The outcomes of the project will also be explained so that online reading groups can be implemented in any ER setting.

Join the breakout room for a discussion on Motivation.