Integrating Extensive Reading into an Academic Curriculum

Stephen O’Connor, New Zealand

Stephen O’Connor is a lecturer at IPU New Zealand. He has had extensive teaching experience in both Japan and New Zealand. His present research interests include extensive reading and second-language writing. E-mail: soconnor@ipu.ac.nz

Menu

Introduction
Purpose
Support
Orientation
Time
Motivation
Benefits
Conclusion

Introduction

You can learn so much from books. Writers use them to spread knowledge and ideas so that we readers can extend our own comprehension and understanding. Reading can have profound and longstanding effects on people. The American president, Barack Obama formulated his interpretation of empathy from Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness and James Dean was similarly touched by the Antoine de Saint Exupery fable, The Little Prince with its theme of keeping an open mind and remaining curious. Whether famous or not, reading is an essential part of all our lives and we do it for leisure, work and study. For students who are studying another language, reading in that language is essential. The problem has been how to get the students to read the large amounts of comprehensible language needed in order to build fluency and at the same time consolidate their language knowledge in the new language. Extensive reading does this by giving students a focus on reading for pleasure while surreptitiously raising their reading levels. Williams with his approach to reading (1986) and then Day & Bamford (2002) provided the definitive template on how to approach extensive reading with a second language class.

Extensive reading is essentially a lot of reading done with interesting stories at a level that is comfortable and enjoyable to the reader. It gives students the depth with contact of the words so they can better acquire them. There has been recent numerous empirical evidence that robustly advances the benefits of an extensive reading program as part of a curriculum. This includes advantages impacting on the important skills of vocabulary (Horst, 2005), speed and comprehension (Bell, 2001), listening (Elley & Mangubhai, 1983), and writing (Tsang, 1996). Macalister (2015) advocates the integration of the reading into the content of the lesson. However, for the students to most benefit from using extended readers, I would propose that it is also done as part of a holistic integrated reading component of the curriculum that has its own standalone range of assessments embedded within the academic paper.

Purpose

The learners in my context were striving to enter into the university degree programme from their initial foundation year. They had been identified as students who could succeed in the programme, but who would probably need, and be made aware of the skills they still needed to aspire to. The paper that I taught was thus designed to enable them to study at the degree level more effectively, focusing on the necessary vocabulary, comprehension, academic writing and reading skills that they would need in the full degree programme of the university. It was a total of 100 hours in class work, as well as out, delivered two hours a day over 10 weeks. Being second language learners, many of the students had not read a lot of books in English and those that had, had done as a text requirement only. Reading is essential in degree and I felt it was important to try and build up the students’ enthusiasm for it.

The course assessment allocated twenty-five per cent of the final marks to the reading and integrated skills component of the course. This comprised the reading of the extensive readers based on the total amount of words read over the course.

Reading: The reading of graded readers at a comfortable level.

This was worth 8% of the final total.

Assessed through amount of words read.

The reading was undertaken in class as well as expectations of them doing it in their own time. As well as the reading, and in order to build up a wider spectrum of skills across the four skills, the students also completed a suite of other tasks that were related to their reading. This included the writing of journals that were assessed on the amount of pages that were written over the course. The students were given a range of topics on which they could write, and this included reviews of their extensive readers.

Journal: The writing of the 3minute paper, instant book reports and general journal writes based on your reading. This is worth 6% of the total final grade.

Assessed through amount of pages written.

To round off the suite and the twenty-five per cent assessment, there were two book conferences that they completed in groups and also a speed-reading component that makes up the 25% of the assessment out of a total of 100% for the paper.

There were a number of reasons that I considered this approach to be a success and this was reflected in a questionnaire the students completed.

Support

“Before I chose a book, I just read one page at first and then if there is too much vocabulary that I don’t know, I don’t choose that book.”

The students had access to an excellently resourced library that had multitudes of titles both fiction and non-fiction of a range of genres at various levels of graded readers. Having the books in the library, prominently displayed, surrounded by comfortable armchairs helped to individualize their reading experience. The students were given a run through on the cataloguing of the graded readers and how they could choose a suitable book according to their own level. There were no class sets or mobile carts to access in the classroom because the library was also ‘marketed’ during the course as the hub of their study programme with lessons in it on how to access and use the database in order to link it with their learning during the course. The students needed to be aware of the importance of the library in degree studies and how it would enable them to be more effective in order to succeed at a degree level. Having to bodily go to the library and choose their graded readers helped to engender a culture of using this learning resource.

I instilled in them strategies that they could use when choosing a book. This included the five-finger rule, which gave them a simple template for deciding if a book was at the correct level to read for them. If there were five unknown words on a chosen page, then the book would be too difficult. However, one or two unknown words would be a perfect level. This was important as it helped to future proof their choices when reading and it also provided a backstop in what to read.

Orientation

“The book ‘The Golden Seal’ was the first time to read a story in English and I could know more about the story from the start to the end.”

Guiding the students through the first extensive reader is a very important step in the success of the programme. Initially, the class had an intensive introduction to the benefits of extensive reading sourced from empirical research so that they could have very clear expectations on how they could benefit. As a class, we then read a graded reader and did a number of activities related to the concepts of plot, setting and character. This helped to educate them on what features they can focus on when reading a story. An essential skill they will need further down their academic pathway. This first graded reader should be a very easy book so that even the very weakest student can read and enjoy it. As there were not enough multiple copies for everyone in the class, it was put onto the class moodle page chapter by chapter. Also, we made use of the book CD and listened to some of the chapters as a class, for as Williams (1986) mentions, with his ninth principle students need to be aware of stress and intonation, so that their internal reading finds this rhythm. These activities were approximated as a springboard to knowledge and a kick-start that could be diverged as they moved through their enjoyable reading of the extensive readers. If there is no CD available, a lot of the audios can be downloaded from the publisher’s website, some for free.

Time

“I can read the book in-class because I don’t have enough time to read outside of class.”

The extensive reading component of this course was considered to be integral to the overall development of the students’ language ability. As they were studying to enter the college’s degree programme, reading was an important skill that the students needed to value and be prepared to commit their time to. For the most part, the students did this because they were motivated to enter the degree programme and they recognised the benefits the extensive reading could take them to, through not only gaining points towards their assessment in the course, but also a more holistic overview of further benefits in their long term study. In order to keep tabs on the reading that was been done both inside and outside of class, the students recorded their daily reading at the beginning of the class. I then tallied up everyone’s words for the week and posted the scores onto the university’s moodle site. This proved motivational for the students as they compared results and looked to improve the reading done week by week. The students also filled out a sheet that listed the title of the book, the date borrowed, date returned and also the level. The level was important because it showed if the students were moving through the graded levels or not. Overall, the course was very comprehensive as it also focused on the content that they were to study in the degree programme, and so for some periods not a substantial amount of time in class could be given over to extensive reading, which taught the students to prioritise their own time in order to maintain and improve their reading in order to fulfil the assessment requirements to the level that they aspired to. This is a skill that would be invaluable in the degree programme.

Motivation

“ I was motivated to write my journal. To write it I must read a book and summarize contents.”

Ray Williams’s (1986) top ten principles for teaching reading mentions that the reading process is interactive, fostered between books, the reader, and also within classroom activities among the participants. In order to keep motivation levels for reading high and to ensure there was a focus on reading throughout the course, a number of out come based activities linked to assessment were built into the schedule. One quarter of the final grade was based on reading and integrated skills. The students could gain points from the number of words read. In order to keep tabs on the reading that was been done both inside and outside of class, the students recorded their daily reading at the beginning of the class and as previously mentioned, they were put onto the university’s online platform. This provided them with early access in order to monitor their reading and to see how they were progressing in comparison to their classmates. At the end of the term the words were added up and points given according to the assessment criteria. The students also had group book conferences whereby they introduced an extensive reader to members of the class placed in small groups and were then graded by the members of the group according to an assessment rubric. This gave them the opportunity to share the books they had been reading, essentially ‘selling’ them to their classmates. A speed- reading component complimented the programme. The readings were related to the content of the course, so that the students could feel links to their overall learning in the course. Again, this was part of the assessment with students gaining grading points in completion, graphing and a written assessment of the results.

Benefits

“ I became to read more quantity outside of class. It is helpful for studying and I could read faster. I’m getting autonomy little by little.”

Williams (1996) mentions that the purpose of becoming an autonomist reader is enabling the student to be able to use the strategies for reading that they have developed over the course, so that they are able to become independent.

By the end of the course, I felt because of the overall coverage of the integrated approach to the reading programme, that included the journals, conferences and speed reading, the students had the confidence and understanding of the benefits to not only read in English, but also to enjoy and feel that they wanted to continue reading once the course had finished. Also, there was a flow over effect to their academic purpose.

Any degree level course demands large amounts of academic reading. One of the major aims for this paper was to push these pre degree students to attain the 650 TOEIC points minimum that they would need to enter the university’s full degree program and attempt any content papers. Across the three semesters that the course had been running, the students’ TOEIC scores all rose considerably. The first term students who took the paper recorded an average score of 717, an increase of 51 TOEIC points. The second term cohorts had an average improvement of 698, which was a 95 point rise. The final semester saw a median of 702 and this equated to an elevation of 98 points. Overall, this saw a heightening of TOEIC scores across the three semesters of 705 at an increase on average of 81 points. Although there were other significant components of the course that could have impacted on these scores, just from the feedback from the students and also from observing them, I believe that the extensive reading had a notable impact on the success of these TOEIC scores. Reading longer texts gave the students the required coverage of all round reading skills that would enable them to do better in tests like TOEIC.

Conclusion

Journal Entry

“First time we entered this class our teacher mentioned that we have to read a book everyday so that we can get 8% for 100,000 words. Firstly, I thought that I could not achieve it because the book that I’m going to read is in English, my second language. It would be possible if it were in my first language.

I love reading books. I enjoyed every single book that I read. Today is the last week of words read, and this is my last challenge. I’ve just counted that so far I got 225,000 words read. That is amazing isn’t it?” Perhaps one of the most positive side effects is the open ended nature of extensive reading as the students can continue, maintain and enjoy their reading, sharing their books after all the grades have been tallied, the course has ended, and further on throughout the rest of their university life. Through this holistic approach to the implementation of the extensive reading, they can be assured they have the necessary reading skills and can candidly make a claim to reading independence.

References

Bell, T., (2001). Extensive reading: Speed and comprehension. The Reading Matrix, 1 (1). Retrieved from http://www.reading matrix.com/articles/bell/index.html

Day, R & Bamford, J. (2002). Top ten principles for teaching extensive reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 41, 375-411.

Elley, W. B., & Mangubhai, F. (1983). The impact of reading on second language learning. Reading Research Quarterly,19, 53-67.

Horst, M., (2005). Learning L2 vocabulary through extensive reading: a measurement study. The Canadian Modern language Review, 61, 355-382.

Macalister, J., (2015). Reconsidering core principles in extensive reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 27 (1), 122-128.

Williams, R., (1986). “Top ten” principles for teaching reading. ELT Journal, 40 (1), 42-45.

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