The Extensive Reading Foundation

Our first poll may seem to be asking all of you a quite obvious question; after all  if you are visiting us here, you are very likely to believe in the importance of extensive reading. However, in practical terms many teachers around the world have to face time and institutional constraints to use graded readers in their language courses.

When we talk about  Extensive Reading our major focus is always on the learner, as we firmly believe it can promote literacy and language improvement. So far so good, but it seems to me that we are unliley to succeed in motivating students to read if their teachers don't do it themselves.

This is a current research interest of mine. By my best calcualtions there is a gap of around 5,000-6,000 words between the demands of unsimplified text and the endpoint of graded readers. Graded readers end around the 3,000 word level and unsimplified text requires a vocabulary size of around 8,000 words to get 98% coverage.