The Extensive Reading Foundation

Hi, my name's Jez Uden. I'm new to The Extensive Reaing Foundation, but not new to graded readers and extensive reading. I've recently started EFL reading groups in cafes (www.jezuden.edublogs.org) and so far this has proved to be very successful. The learners are responsible for buying their own books and are now building their own library and sharing books with each other. The reading is done extensively 'outside' of the classroom in the students own time. We then meet once a week in a cafe to discuss the books. It is important that the learners read different books to each other, but for me one of the key things is not to give any time limits on finishing the books. Both of these factors encourage a wider variety of language during the discussions e.g "I've just started reading," "I'm in the middle of reading," "I've just finsihed..." etc. This coupled with the richer, wider variety of language that the learners are exposed to during the reading leads to frutiful and lexically rich discussions during the meetings. It is important to hand over as much responsiblity to the learners during these meetings and to act more as a guide. I tend to provide some input when I feel it is necessary, or when the discussion breaks down. Learners can then (if they wish to) write comments about the books they have read or are reading on my blog site, thus giving them a purpose to write.

This process is a task-based approach whereby the 'task' is the reading, and the 'negotiation' takes place during the meetings. In terms of learner centredness and autonomy, I think the only way it could be any better is if these reader groups could eventually become self-sufficient without the need for any teacher. this is something I'll be looking at in the future.

I hope this has been of interest to you

Jez Uden

It gets discouraging! My university just gave me a $3000 budget for buying graded readers and LL award winners. They have instigated mandatory second year composition courses. However, even though I pointed out to the Dean of the College of English that, "good readers are good writers", I am still the ONLY teacher to use ER as a methodology. (and I have only one ER class of 6 students this semester) They have no "formal" coursework for reading. I can't get any of the other native teachers at our uni to use it either. They like to use those courseware textbooks like "Side By Side" and "Expressways". One of these yahoos recently emailed me and admonished me, saying "when are you gonna get rid of those dumb books and have a good conversation course (ie, teach English properly)?"

Why is something so easy so difficult?