#16: From theory to practice. ER in a secondary school in Malaysia. Interview with Navinder Kaur

02/16/18 • 0 min

Our guest for this episode is an English teacher in a secondary school in Malaysia who has been using extensive reading in her classes for many years in spite the isolation and the budget limitations. In this interview she tells us everything about motivating her students to read without recurring to external motivation, and we also discuss issues like the need to properly orient students before they start doing ER, or the role of ER-related activities besides sustained silent reading.

Previous Episode

#15 ER in Japanese. Interview with Dr. Mitsue Tabata-Sandom (Part II)

Our previous episode featured the first part of our interview with long-time promoter of ER in Japanese Dr. Tabata-Sandom, which dealt mostly with the particularities of the Japanese writing system and its effects on learning to read the language. In this episode we include the second part of that interview, which deals with topics such as the challenges that authors of Japanese graded readers face, the limitations of Japanese graded readers and of doing ER in Japanese, Japanese teachers’ openness and willingness to do ER, and the role of children books and manga in learning to read in this language. But maybe most importantly, this episode comes with a very rich account by our guest of the resources that are available for those who want to do ER in Japanese.

Next Episode

#17: ER and the Four Strands. Interview with Paul Nation (Part I)

Professor Paul Nation, our guest for this and the following episode, needs no introduction. His name has been recurrently popping up in previous shows, mostly in discussions about the role of extensive reading within language teaching in general. In this first part of the interview he discusses just that: his ‘four strands’ approach to language teaching, and also their implications for the way we understand teachers’ roles and extensive reading. In the context of this discussion, Professor Nation also comments on Professor Akio Furukawa’s celebrated ER programme, and on the role of speed reading courses to improve reading fluency.