Extensive Reading Podcast

In the second part of our interview with Dr. Rob Waring, he tells us about his experiences as author and editor of graded readers in general, with particular reference to a very successful collection whose books he co-authored with Maurice Jamall: Heinle Cengage’s Foundations Reading Library. For those of you who want to know more about the topic of this podcast, here are a couple of nice readings: First, a text by Rob Waring on the art of writing graded readers. https://www.er-central.com/authors/writing-a-graded-reader/writing-graded-readers-rob-waring/ Second, an article by Stuart McLean on the graded reader collection we discuss in the interview. http://jalt-publications.org/content/index.php/jer/article/view/5 Note: we recorded this episode before this week’s horrible floods in Japan and feel a little embarrassed about how lightly we talk about the rain in the episode.

Whenever we asked our guests for tips on who to interview next, Dr. Rob Waring’s name popped up almost immediately. When we asked Paul Goldberg, he told us that nobody made the case for extensive reading like he did, and that if you were in the same room with him and did not support extensive reading yet, he would be fast to make you change your mind about it. In this episode, which includes the first part of our interview, Dr. Waring tells us about his experiences with ER, including the first ER colloquium in 1997 and the creation of the ER Foundation. He also tells us about how vocabulary research shows that there is a no other way but to do extensive reading if our students are to learn the many words and lexical units they need to learn the target L2. Here’s a link to an article by Dr. Waring whose title says it all: The inescapable case for extensive reading. [insert link: http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_why/er_is_vital.htm]

After a long break that we took following the beginning of the academic year in Japan, we are back with a new episode and a new interview. This time we deal with extensive reading in Chinese. We do so in the company of Chinese language consultants Jared Turner and John Pasden, who have put together a collection of graded readers in Chinese called Mandarin Companion. In the interview they discuss their experiences reading and doing extensive reading in Chinese, and also the challenges of creating Chinese reading materials that are both interesting and useful to learners of the language.

For our nineteenth episode we have an interview with professors Naeko Naganuma and Patrick Daugherty, from Akita International University, in the north of Japan. In the interview they tell us about the research that they have recently carried out on academic dishonesty in extensive reading programmes and they suggest a number of ways in which teachers can discourage cheating while making the student’ extensive reading more engaging and rewarding.