Registration: 1st Floor Lobby, 14:00-18:00
All conference registrants may pick up their badges for the following day.
You may download the Handbook or any of the presenter-contributed digital files from: http://tinyurl.com/erwcdocs
Pre-Conference Workshops — Friday, August 4, 2017
1. ER Program Design and Implementation –15:30-18:00, Room 4404
Ben Shearon, Tohoku University
Most books and presentations about ER look at the learner or classroom levels. This workshop will ask participants to think about ER program design and implementation. It will cover materials, reading targets and activities, administration, selling/promoting the program to teachers, admin, and learners, and how to evolve existing programs.
2. Creative and meaningful classroom activities to foster a reading community — 15:30-18:00, Room 4405
Yuka Kusanagi, Tsurumi University
Megumi Kobayashi, Seikei University
Motoko Fukaya,Tsurumi University
This workshop introduces activities based on shared reading to foster a reading community in the classroom. The interest in extensive reading (ER) approach has been steadily increasing in Japan because of the linguistic as well as affective benefits on EFL learners and the establishment of the ER system. Despite the positive outcomes, however, the facilitators have observed that a certain number of learners have difficulty in reading regularly in our ER program. One possible factor of such failure may be a lack of reading experience in their first language (L1). The population of Japanese students who do not spend any time at all reading books in L1 has increased, from approximately 35%, 2012 to 49%, 2016 (National Federation of University Co-operation Association, 2017). It is necessary to scaffold the students’ introduction to the world of reading to form reading attitudes and habits as independent readers. In order to cope with this, the facilitators have developed various classroom activities to increase their interests in reading in a FL and a positive classroom community (Kusanagi, Fukaya, Kobayashi, 2015; Fukaya, Kusanagi, Kobayashi, 2015).
This workshop explores the literary discovery through learners’ collaboration and individual’s inner dialogue. The workshop will begin with a read aloud activity as warm-up, followed by a World Café discussion and creating a five-line poem based on reading. The session concludes with a report on our learners’ outcomes and an open discussion with the participants.