Our first poll
20 August 2008 - 4:10pm — Chris Lima
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. Many of you may also believe that graded readers are not the best option when we we think of giving learners some literature reading input.
We really would like to hear from you on this. If you are visiting our site, please do cast your vote and leave us your comment clicking on the *comment* button just below the poll options.
Thanks a lot in advance 
Chris
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Recent blog posts
- The MoodleReader Software for Tracking Student Reading
- Annotated Bibliography of Works on Extensive Reading in a Second Language now on the ERF site!
- Reading About Reading
- Discussing Extensive Reading at Cardiff Online
- The Power of Reading
- Our first poll
- Extending extensive reading to teachers
- The gap between graded readers and unsimplified text
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Comments
ER and low reading proficiency
Hi Chris
My name's epiphane ADJADJI from Benin a West french African developing country. I am an EFL teacher biten by the desire to improve the teaching of EFL in my countr? No long now Have I discovered the ER program. My concern is hyow to implement a succesful ER when students have a low or reading skill? Is the ER program doomed to failure?
As for your post let me confess that if well implemented backed with a strong motrivationn from teachers, ER program can be of great help to students in providing them with language input. Knowing however that ER is not the only means to ptrovide input to students. One way may be the word blitz method which consist of bombarding students with words readily usable Words.
Thanks for answwering to my comment
Epiphane
Rgrds
Benin
ER at our university
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?
Pusan University of Foreign Studies, Busan, South Korea