#22 The Foundations Reading Library. An interview with Rob Waring (part II)

07/10/18 • 0 min

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.

Previous Episode

#21: The mathematics of language scream at us. An interview with Rob Waring

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]