All levels Practice-based Long Session (45 minutes)
Speak to an Author: Connecting Students and Authors
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.
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I am a professor at a university in Tokyo, Japan and a writer of graded readers and textbooks.
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Paul Goldberg has taught English as a foreign language in Venezuela, Spain, Korea, the US, and most recently at Kwansei Gakuin University, in Japan. His main areas of interest are extensive reading and extensive listening. Paul is the founder of Xreading, which he developed because of his desire to make graded readers more accessible for students, and extensive reading programs easier for teachers to manage. Email: paul@xreading.com.
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I've been working in the field of English language teaching for over 30 years, both as a teacher and author. I am also a storyteller and have travelled extensively around the world to tell my stories and spread the message that words are powerful. Five of my graded reader stories have won Extensive Reading Foundation language learner awards
