The Extensive Reading Foundation is a not-for-profit, charitable organization whose purpose is to support and promote extensive reading. Dr. Richard R. Day, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and Julian Bamford, then of Bunkyo University, Shonan Campus co-founded the Extensive Reading Foundation in 2004, using the royalties of their book, Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom (Cambridge), as its initial source of funding.
Activities
LLL Award: The first Foundation initiative was the annual Language Learner Literature Award for the best new graded readers in English.
Annotated Bibliography: Another is maintaining a bibliography of research on extensive reading.
Grants: The Foundation is also interested in helping educational institutions set up extensive reading programs through grants that fund the purchase of books and other reading material. A number of reading programs have already been set up where there was a demonstrated need in a developing country.
Graded Readers:
The ERF offers information on the various graded reader series, as well as on “young learners’ readers” — books originally created for native-speaking children that can also be used for Extensive reading.
The ERF maintains a set of Google Drive documents with listings of various book series, their word counts and other essential information.
The Moodle “Reader” plug-in and the browser based MReader.org site provide teachers and school administrators with an easy-to-use tool for assessing their students’ reading progress in a gamified environment.
The ERF Graded Reader Scale equates reader difficulty based on each publisher’s announced headword counts.
The ERF Placement test offers one method of determining student reader levels by having them read and report their understanding of short book excerpts at multiple levels.
Resources
The ERF Guide to Extensive Reading, powerpoints and other visuals are available in multiple languages as downloadable files.
Bi-Annual Congresses
Conferences solely dedicated to Extensive reading have been held in Kyoto (2011), Seoul (2013), Dubai (2015) , Tokyo (2017) and now Taichung, Taiwan (2019). See the separate pages for each of these on this site.
Affiliates
In order to further promote the ER approach, the ERF welcomes relationships with like-minded organizations, recognizing them as “affiliates”.
Recycling of Graded Readers
Teachers and schools possessing graded readers that they no longer need may send them overseas to a school wanting them, with the ERF paying the shipping fee.