What One Extensive Reading Program Looks Like

It's late April. The first meeting of the English reading class begins. Fifty junior college students sit as the teacher explains the class: We're going to read. And read. And read. And read. And by July, you'll have read over 500 pages of English. Eyes open wider. You can see the shock on their faces. You know the students are thinking, "Read 500 pages of English by July? That's more than I've read in my whole life!"

Exactly. Five hundred pages per term minimum does sound like a lot. It is a lot. But by July, most students are far past that point and are nearing 700 or 800 pages. Several are well past 1000. Extensive reading is a major component of eigo kôdoku (English Reading), a required class for all first year students in the Department of Intercultural Studies at Miyagi Gakuin Women's Junior College, Sendai.

"Required reading for pleasure"¹ might sound like a contradiction -- but that's what we do. The high minimum page count ensures that they won't be translating every word -- they simply don't have time.² Rather, they read the same way they read Japanese: for information, general learning, entertainment and for fun. Most of the books they use are graded readers from a collection of about 700 in the school library. The follow-up assignment is a short "reaction report" in which they summarize the story and, more important, say what they thought about it. Learner comments like the following, whether positive or negative, clearly indicate understanding at a level much deeper than typical comprehension questions: "I cannot help laughing" (about the book Introductory steps to understanding³); "I was excited. This book is a very fearful story. If you read this book, you won't like a roller coaster" (sic) (Roller Coaster); "They were about to kill David. The scene was really scary, and I couldn't stop reading because I was anxious about David's life." (The Forger); "I don't feel anything. So I don't like very much." (sic) (Three Mile House); "When I read this book, I tensed!" (sic) (Poseidon Adventure)

"I tensed?" You'll note the student reports are not read for the grammar. That's not the point. The learners only need to react. Students are encouraged to spend less than twenty minutes on a report (if they have more than 20 minutes, I'd rather have them start reading another book). Actually, I wish I could read Japanese well enough to have them write their reports in their native tongue. Since reading is a receptive skill and writing a productive one, having to write the report in English can make the "proof" of reading more difficult than the reading itself.⁴

With over 120 reading students reading one or more books each week, it would be easy for my task of reading all the reports they've glued into their reading notebooks to become too time-consuming. I skim all the reports using two rubber stamps, available at most stationery stores. On most, I simply stamp "OK." At times, it's useful to add a note -- a word of encouragement, my own reaction, or a bit of advice (e.g., "If a story is boring, it's OK to stop reading it. Choose a different book"). These notes are marked with a "point" stamp. Using the stamps saves hours and, coupled with the occasional note, lets the students know that I have read what they wrote.

Most of the learners' extensive reading takes place outside class. Although the number of pages read is the single most important factor in their grade, after an initial orientation, we don't do much extensive reading in class. We're trying to develop the reading habit in the students: to get them to read at home, on the train, anytime they feel like it. Learners spend class time on "skills" materials including some that are teacher-written as well as SRA kits (1985, 1989).

The books are divided into six levels, using the scale developed by Bamford (1993, p. 71). Level one is the easiest, consisting of books with a headword vocabulary of less than 500 words, a limited number of structures, well-illustrated pages with large print, and very little text on each page. The stages ascend in difficulty up to level six, which look and feel about the same as a paperback written for native language readers. Given this range, the students in the Miyagi Gakuin program keep track of their reading using weighted pages, that is, one page of a higher level book is worth more than a page of a book at level one or level two.

The scale we use is as follows:
 

We arrived at this scale through trial and error. When the program began six years ago, we had a more "generous" weighting system. Level one was .5, level two was 1.0, level three 1.5, and so on. With that system a single page of a level six book was worth three pages. The result was the exact opposite of what we wanted. Rather than rewarding those who were able to read at a higher level, it provided an incentive for weaker students to attempt books that were simply too difficult for them in order to get more points. The irony, of course, is that they could have gotten page points more quickly by staying with easier books since they can read and understand them so much faster. More able students, on the other hand, found it was the depth of the stories in higher level books that made them worth reading. Plots at levels four through six are more complex, characters are more developed, and the stories are more interesting for those learners who can handle them. That's the reason weighted page points are the same for the upper level: enjoyment of the stories is its own reward.

One hears occasional stories from teachers at other schools where the librarians act is if the books are their personal property and resent the fact that students might want to borrow them. Fortunately, the opposite is the case at my college. The librarians are wonderful. They support the program with an almost missionary zeal. The students are reading a lot. That, the librarians feel, is what the books are there for. Why are the librarians so helpful? It may be that we are just lucky. However, we did consult the library staff when we started the program, asking for their help and advice on a number of issues such as having students mark their book evaluations on a small form glued to the inside cover of each book. Perhaps it was involving the librarians from the beginning that made the difference.

Each year, each department in the college receives a budget to purchase library books. In the Department of Intercultural Studies, that money is then divided so each teacher has an allotment. The year we started the extensive reading program, two of the English teachers went together and used their allotments for a selection of about 250 readers. Since then we've added to the collection each year. In addition to the readers, we've added tapes for about fifty titles. Students have the choice of just reading, or else listening to the tape and "being read to."

What exactly are they reading? -- Graded readers (see Hill's & Waring's articles in this issue). The most popular levels are 3 and 4 on the Bamford scale. Books specifically written for EFL learners are decidedly more popular than books written for native English speaking "reluctant readers." (We imported a couple of hundred books from the U.S., thinking we were getting a good deal since they were so cheap. But if students don't like or can't understand them, that's not much of a bargain.)

Student interest covers a wide range of topics. Those topics don't necessarily fit the stereotypes. One might imagine that 18 and 19 year-old Japanese females would go in heavily for romances. At least that's what colleagues from other schools suggested we order. Not necessarily. Although many students do enjoy love stories, they aren't anywhere near at the top of the list. The following is the breakdown of one class's reading over a term.

Population: One class of female first year junior college students, surveyed at the end of first term. 56 students, 52 reporting.

Total books read 655
Nonfiction: 61 books (9.31% of total)

Fiction: 594 books (90.69%)
 

	books read	as percentage of total read
Nonfiction categories
- history	18	(2.75%)
- culture	13	(1.98)
- other	30	(4.58)
Fiction categories
- mystery	131	(20.00)
- adventure	88	(13.44)
- humor	72	(10.99)
- love	20	(3.05)
- science fiction	6	(0.92)
- other	176	(27.87)

Note that the point was to see what students perceived as their interests. They decided how to categorize each book read. A humorous adventure story with romantic characters might be in any of those categories. This may account for the relatively high percentage of books being classified as "other." It might also be worth mentioning that "humor," while very popular, represents only a few books that nearly everyone read and enjoyed. Many of these were written by L. A.Hill in an old, but extremely popular and comprehensible series. Humor is the only category where students reported there not being enough books available. This isn't just a problem of our particular collection. Rather, it reflects the small number of humorous graded readers available.

The above is not a shopping list or a suggestion that teachers who want to start extensive reading programs should buy 9.31% fiction and 90.69% non-fiction of which 20% are adventures, and so forth. Every school will have individual students with various interests. Perhaps the key is to build a library broad enough that, no matter what a person's interests are, something will fit (See Waring's article, this issue).

The program is now in its eighth year. How successful has it been? The students involved have read a total of well over a million pages of English. Hopefully, they've enjoyed most of those pages since they choose the books themselves. The first year's class is compulsory. Few students would take it if it wasn't, since their image of reading English, based on what they did in high school, is so very different from reading for pleasure. In the second year, the course is elective. Still, between a third and a half of eligible students take the course. As a reading teacher, those numbers are gratifying. Even more gratifying is knowing that the learners really are growing as readers. They understand that extensive reading in English can give information, pleasure -- the gamut of reactions that it brings in the learnersí native language. You realize that when you get the occasional comment or reaction like the following: I enjoyed this book. Maybe this is my first time to know the fun of reading.

Bamford, J. (1993). Beyond grammar translation: Teaching students to really read. In P. Wadden (Ed.), A handbook for teaching English at Japanese colleges and universities (pp. 63-72). New York: Oxford University Press.

SRA Reading Laboratory 2C. (1989). Chicago: Science Research Associates.

SRA Reading Laboratory 3A. (1985). Chicago: Science Research Associates.

1. One reviewer questioned calling this "reading for pleasure" on two grounds: (a) it is pleasure reading only if every person actually enjoys it and (b) "reading for pleasure" makes it sound as through extensive reading is less serious than it really is. I've retained the term since it is what we tell the students they are going to do. Part of it is encouragement but, just as important, we are trying to reorient their image of reading English. They come in thinking reading English equals translation. We are trying to make it clear that this is not the case and that they will be reading English the same way they read Japanese. Also, they are choosing the books they read from the start. The learners themselves make the decisions about what they want to read. Of course, some books bring more pleasure than others -- this is true regardless of what you are reading -- but the learners are always reading books of their own choosing. Teachers setting up extensive reading programs who feel "reading for pleasure" may create a less-than-academic image may prefer a term such as "reading for fluency."

2. For an excellent introduction to the way Japanese students are usually taught English reading, see "The yakudoku tradition" by Nobuyuki Hino in Dubin, F., & Kuhlman, N. (1992) Cross-cultural literacy: Global perspectives on reading and writing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

3. Readers mentioned are the following: Hill, L. A. Steps to understanding . Short Stories, Oxford University Press; Roller Coaster and The Poseidon Adventure, Longman Movieworld, Level 1; The Forger, Longman Originals, Level 4; Three Mile House , Fearon Educational Publishers.

4. Some teachers will disagree with the idea that reporting can be done in the learners native language. While reporting in English does give learners extra writing practice in English, the idea of native language reporting is included here to encourage teachers to think about the differences between receptive and productive language in the tasks we give learners.

Thanks to Brenda Hayashi, Miyawaki Hiroyuki, David Gilbey, Steve Brown, and Rob Waring for feedback on this article.