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George Jacobs and Willy Renandya, of Seamo Regional Language Centre (RELC), are active researchers and promoters of Extensive Reading (ER) in EFL in Asia, and are two of the coeditors of the book, Successful strategies for extensive reading (1997, SEAMO). They were interviewed via e-mail by Andy Barfield.
Let me begin by thanking you for agreeing to do this interview over e-mail. Can I start by asking you both how you first became interested in extensive reading? From your own experience in learning a language, from teacher training, your own research, or through other means?
Jacobs: ER appealed to me for a few reasons. First, as a child growing up in the U.S. state of Illinois, I was, for a while, an avid reader. I was reminded of myself back then when about eight years ago, I read about the flashlight-under-the-blanket phenomenon, where children are so keen on reading that they smuggle a flashlight into their bedroom so they can continue reading after their parents turn off the lights. I remember a series about Cowboy Sam. I've never seen it as an adult, but I recall being quite taken by it as a kid.
A second reason that I liked ER was my own experience as a second language learner studying Spanish. I remember in junior high school reading a simplified Spanish version of Don Quixote and then our class going to watch the musical Man of La Mancha. Later, I would read a book in English and then read the Spanish version. I did that with Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven. Reading a good story is fun in any language.
Renandya: Like George, I became interested in extensive reading from my own experience in learning a language. I learned English as a foreign language in Indonesia, where English is not widely used. The main source of input was the classroom, i.e., from the teachers … It was when I was at university doing my first degree in TEFL that I was first introduced to graded readers. But I didn't really enjoy reading these simplified stories. While the library had a good number of graded materials, most of them were not too appealing for me. Many of the collection were of the literary types (those by Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, etc.). I got hooked into reading extensively when I accidentally picked up a "whodunit" novel in a local bookstore, a Perry Mason series by Gardner. It was not easy at first to read this unabridged novel. But after reading three or four books by the same author, I found that I could understand the story better, and soon found myself reading the other series. I must have read at least 30 or 40 Perry Mason series by the time I finished my TEFL degree, in addition to devouring quite a number of other similar stories by, for example, Agatha Christie. I can see now quite clearly that the reading that I did contributed most to my language development.
Jacobs: Another factor that led me to ER was the Input Hypothesis. I began language teaching in the in the 1980s when the emphasis on comprehensible input was at its height, and I still believe there's a lot to it, even if just large doses of comprehensible input may not alone be sufficient for advanced proficiency in a L2. I read lots of stuff by Krashen, and I still admire his work and that of others such as David Eskey, Jeff McQuillan, Beatrice Dupuy, and Lucy Tse who have worked in that same vein.
Renandya: Yes …two other important influences for me have been Warwick Elley (the book flood project in Fiji), as well as my own research with George. This has further convinced me of the tremendous benefits of extensive reading in second/foreign language learning.
Jacobs: Could I add two more points? One is ER's link to learner autonomy, and the other the connection with co-operative learning. I try to view the goal of language education as not just to add another skill to students' repertoires. I also consider what effect instruction has on the whole person and on the type of citizen students are or will become of their country and of the world. For this reason, I attempt to use teaching methods that give people the skills and confidence they need to stand on their own two feet rather than waiting for big brother to tell them what to do. ER provides students with a key route toward understanding the world for themselves.
As for cooperative learning, it may seem to be a contradiction to talk about learner autonomy in one breath and cooperative learning in the next, but actually I think the two come together smoothly in ER. The reading that students do in ER gives groups something to talk about and work on, while groups provide a great way for students to share the joys of reading, thus encouraging each other to do more ER.
Last but not least, I saw the enjoyment that my students experienced when they read and told each other and me about their reading. I also heard similar stories from other teachers. I saw students going back to the library and reading beyond the required amount. Not surprisingly, I also saw a minority who just went through the motions. The worst case I recall was when I was teaching English in a high school in Hawaii. Every morning, the students were to do ER in class. In honor of Hawaii's famous waves, this part of ER was called SURF (Silent Uninterrupted Reading for Fun). Most of my class were native English speakers, but some were recent immigrants. One of these kids, despite all the tricks I tried, most often spent SURF time with his head in his arms on the desk.
The enjoyment is central — at the same time, the success and the resistance sound familiar! You work on in-service development courses on the teaching of reading and writing, so could I ask you, George, how a teacher might need to change their practice to help overcome such resistance?
Jacobs: One example of a key moment of change was told to me by a Singaporean teacher who was doing ER with a Primary 6 (about twelve years old) class. She had been attending an in-service course on reading and writing instruction in which I had emphasised ER. We had read an article by Vivienne Yu, in which Vivienne draws lessons from her experience implementing ER in Hong Kong. One of the points that Vivienne makes is that teachers need to be motivators and enthusiasts for ER, part of which entails that when the students are reading silently, the teacher should be reading silently too.
This teacher had implemented a 20-minute slot for USSR (Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading). However, it wasn't going very well. The students were not too keen on reading, and she was spending her time not reading but patrolling the classroom in a vain attempt to get her students to read. Finally, she gave up and just sat at her desk, opened a book, and didn't look up for the entire 20 minutes. The first few times, she heard noise and was very tempted to look up and chastise the wrong doers, but she resisted the temptation. As the days went by, she kept her nose buried in her book, but her ears were detecting a greater silence. After about two weeks, she looked up. All the students were reading.
I think this is a great example of the power of trust. The teacher was telling her students that she trusted them. At first, some abused this trust, but eventually this teacher accomplished her goal of getting everyone to read during USSR not by badgering them into submission but by setting a good example and trusting that students would have the good sense to follow that example.
That's a great role modeling story of the spaces that can open up with ER. I'd like to go back, for a moment, to Willy's book flood metaphor and example. Getting ER going requires a large quantity of rading materials. In your experience, is it generally possible for teachers to gain access to such materials?
Jacobs: That's right. For ER to succeed, teachers need a large quantity of materials, and these need to be at a range of difficulty levels and to suit a range of interests. The issue of procuring these ER materials when funds are limited or appropriate materials are not available is a difficult one. We just had a group of 20 second language teachers from Vietnam here at RELC for a course. I was, as usual, extolling the virtues of ER. We read the Vivienne Yu article mentioned above, and the teachers also did some ER activities to improve their own proficiency in English. The main ER activity they did was one that combines ER and cooperative learning. It's called "Book Wheels" and can be found in the book on reading in TESOL's New Ways series, New ways in teaching reading. In "Book Wheels," students work in groups to tell each other about a book they've read and to ask each other higher-order thinking questions about their books.
The teachers from Vietnam enjoyed "Book Wheels" and agreed that ER would be great for their students. However, again and again, they kept asking, "But where are we going to get the books?" Obviously, the easiest way to get books is for the school or the students to buy them, as is often done in places such as Singapore or the US.
Is that the case, though, in Vietnam? I'd guess funds for any kind of educational materials can be severely limited.
Jacobs: Fortunately, other means exist even when funds are limited. Some of these are described in the works listed in the section on Reading Materials in the bibliography of works on ER in second language education that Willy, Julian Bamford and I have been compiling. This is available on the ER website <http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/er/>.
There's also the opportunity for localising content here. Teachers can create materials for students. Gaudart (1994), and Toh and Raja (1997) describe two different ways this was done in Malaysia. For instance, when Marcus Raja was a school principal in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, he wrote stories for his students to usefor ER. Since he was writing the stories himself, instead of buying them, he was able to situate the stories in the local context, thus, perhaps increasing students' interest and making the stories more comprehensible.
Students can also be a source of ER materials. Three chapters in the book on ER that Willy and I edited with Colin Davis depict various ways in which students can write ER materials. For example, in one chapter, Beatrice Dupuy and Jeff McQuillan describe a program in which university students of French as a second language wrote and illustrated their own ER books with help from their teacher. This helped to overcome the problem of finding materials that would be of interest to university-age students, yet were comprehensible for students of low proficiency in the L2.
I'd like to move the discussion to ways of motivating low-level, reluctant readers, as I think for many teachers in Japan this is a key issue. Willy, let me ask you about parallel-text bilingual readers (one language one page, the other language the other page) and how that kind of format may be very close to what beginning readers do in the L2, while, at the same time, published readers almost always follow a monolingual mode. Do you have any comments on bilingual readers as a possible appropriate or inappropriate starting format?
Renandya: Motivation is indeed a big issue in foreign language learning and this is particularly so with low proficiency pupils. My research (Renandya et al., 1999) in teacher/learner beliefs confirmed my own suspicion (and that of others, e.g., Dornyei, 1998) that motivation is one of the most important factors in language learning.
I have never used bilingual readers with my students, but I can see their potential in helping those low-level, reluctant readers to pick up their first book. Bilingual readers can potentially break poor readers' reluctance to read, as they can always fall back on the native language version on the opposite page when a comprehension problem arises. But as soon as they have built up enough confidence, they should move on to monolingual readers. Care should be taken to ensure that these beginning readers who lack confidence get ER materials that are at the right difficulty level. For these readers, the right level might not be i, or i +1. What they need is probably i _1 or even i _2 materials (see Day and Bamford's extensive reading book for a similar view), and preferably ones with lots of visual/pictorial support. In my ER class with beginning adult students, I always make it a point to tell them to read books that are both easy and interesting. Once they have become comfortable reading easy materials, I encourage them to read more challenging (but not too challenging) materials. Fortunately, our library has a good collection of readers for learners of varied interests and proficiency levels.
Perhaps the bilingual question can also be raised with `output' from ER. I'm wondering if there is also a possible gradation from a bilingual to a more monolingual mode in activities around ER? For example, low-proficiency may write in their L1 about what they have read in their L2, and gradually increase the L2 ratio as they read more.
Renandya: For low-proficiency L2 learners, we should be more concerned with the amount of reading (comprehensible language input) that they get, rather than with the types and forms of post ER activities (output). The key principle in designing post ER activities is that they should be easy to do and highly appealing to the learners. Whether or not L1 or L2 is used is not a central issue, at least for beginning readers. There is one study by Mason and Krashen (1997) that attempted to address the issue of the role of L1 in post ER activities. Students who wrote summaries in L1 and L2 performed equally well on a number of dependent measures used in the study. In addition, both groups of students in general performed better than the non-ER group.
Very much to the point. George, would you say a bit more about how you see student-student cooperation fitting with ER?
Jacobs: A couple of weeks ago, I finished a 1998 book called The Nurture Assumption <http://home.att.net/~xchar/tna/> that makes the claim that peers have a more powerful effect than parents on the development of children and adolescents. Whether or not you agree with this view, I think all teachers have seen how students' attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors rub off on their classmates, for better or worse. For instance, a core group of avid readers can help create a classroom of avid readers.
That reminds very much of Tim Murphey's work at Nanzan University, Japan, with Near Peer Role Models and his book Language Hungry, i.e., using models of excellence for students from other students (Murphey, 1998).
Jacobs: That's just it. Let me share some other ideas I've read and heard about and/or tried for using peer power to promote ER. Most of these techniques also have the advantage of providing students with opportunities to produce language. Such language will sometimes include new voca-bulary, structures, ideas, and information that students encountered while reading.
The Internet TESL Journal had an article in 1998 by Heal <http://langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt /98/dec/sh_heal.html> describing how group activities to accompany a class reader seemed to increase student motivation for ER. In Heal's class, the groups first answered questions written by the teacher. Later, each group wrote questions for other groups.
In a setting in which each student reads a different book, Willy and I have had success with students coming together to tell each other about the books they've read. Students briefly describe the story for their groupmates and then peers ask questions. Another way to encourage students to share with peers what they've read is via Literature Circles, groups of students who come together to discuss what they've been reading. Dupuy (1998) describes how Literature Circles worked in her intermediate French classes.
Art is another medium via which students can share with each other about what they've read. For instance, students might design posters, murals, board games, collages, book covers, bookmarks, and drawings of key scenes to advertise books they like. A few teachers have told me that their students even made "dioramas," a kind of model, to illustrate scenes from their books.
Yes, I've really enjoyed comic strip (manga) summaries and interpretations created by my students here—with speech bubbles and captions, for example…
Jacobs: Right—the artwork can often be accom-panied by language. For example, a book cover could include a blurb on the back of the type found on commercially produced books. Drama can also be used by students to advertise good books, such as when students do a skit to illustrate a portion of the book or do a dramatic reading of lines from something they've read.
Another means for students to inform their peers about what to read would be doing mini-reviews or just giving a quick rating, such as one to five stars, to let classmates know which books to select and which to neglect. Of course, as Willy points out, the key in ER is the reading, not the post-reading activity. Thus, students do the post-reading to build confidence, to use what they have learned in a productive mode, and to infect their peers — and maybe even their teachers—with the joy of reading and specific books with which to experience that joy.
Well, we're nearing the end of the discussion, so I guess my last question neatly falls within the medium of the interview, and how ER may develop through the Web. The Bangkok Post has a great resource page in its Student Weekly for graded newspaper reading. I'm wondering if both of you could mention some other web resources for ER for learners, as well as give your forecasts as to how technology may mix and match with book-based ER..
Jacobs: Thanks for raising the question about ER and the Web, Andy. It's an important one. Some people have predicted that the Web will go the way of other much-heralded innovations that eventually became at most only a marginal part of language teaching, like the language lab. However, I think the Web is destined to play more of a role, although I've got little experience with the Web and ER. What I use the Web for in my work is sending email messages and attached files, belonging to list serves, getting information from websites, and building websites. I've done some of this with the classes I teach, both those for language teachers and those for language learners. My students have never used the Web to do ER, except as they've read things on websites, but one change I am seeing is that earlier people wouldn't read things off the computer screen; they always wanted to print them out. Many people are still like this, but more and more — me included — are comfortable reading directly from the screen, which saves lots of paper. This comfort with reading from the screen paves the way for electronic books which — from what I've read — look like books and can be loaded with any book we want. We can read these electronic books while standing in a bus, sitting at a coffee shop, or lying in bed.
I also read in a United Nations publication about overcoming the problem of lack of books in poor countries by putting lots of books of CD-ROMs, but the article didn't say anything about overcoming the problem of lack of computers and lack of infrastructure such as electricity. This brings up the issue of whether the use of the Web for ER will lead to the same discrepancies between rich and poor that we see with ER via hard copies of books. Right now, that discrepancy looks likely to arise. That said, the Web does offer great possibilities for learner autonomy. As long as we've got the necessary technology — and every year I can see access expanding here in SE Asia — we can choose from millions of web sites offering a bewildering range of materials from a wide variety of perspectives. For instance, Project Gutenberg, <http://promenade/pg/> offers many books — for example, those by Dickens — for free, and the Encyclopedia Britannica website <http://www.eb.com:180/> offers not just the encyclopedia, but also lots of other resources. Derewianka (1997) offers more ideas on this.
As to collaboration, some people worry that the Web will cause us to live isolated lives, never going out and instead ordering everything we need via computer. On the other hand, computers offer so many new ways for us to connect and collaborate with others. In specific regard to ER, two examples of this Web-based interaction would be e-mailing a book we've enjoyed to classmates or sending them the address of a website we think they should check out. I'm not saying that electronic interaction, even if we have sound and video, is the same as old-fashioned face-to-face interaction, but it is a useful partner to live contact, and who knows what the future will hold for human relations.
Willy, over to you for your closing comments…
Renandya: Thanks again for the interview. I think George and I have covered a lot of ground. I just want to end by quoting Christine Nuttall (1982, p.168):
The best way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language is to go and live among its speakers. The next best way is read extensively in it.
For obvious reasons, living among native speakers for an extended period of time is not possible for the majority of L2 learners. So, that leaves us with the second option. But surprisingly, despite compelling evidence demonstrating the benefits of extensive reading, many of us are still not doing ER. So let me encourage you all, if you haven't already, to begin ER programme in your school now.
One last comment. ER is good for students. It is also good for teachers, especially EFL teachers. The Vietnamese EFL teachers that George mentioned earlier (whom I also taught) agreed that the ER they did at RELC was very useful for them. They hoped to continue doing ER when they returned to Vietnam, in addition to launching ER for their students. Many L2 teachers in the region I have talked to have indicated that they need to upgrade their L2 proficiency in order to serve their students better. I believe that ER can help them further develop their competence in the language.
That brings us full circle, and opens up many more interesting questions. Thank you again to both of you for doing this interview and for providing so much food for thought.
References
Day, R. R. (Ed.). (1993). New ways in teaching reading. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
Day, R. R., & Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive reading in the second language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Derewianka, B. (1997). Using the internet for extensive reading. In G. M., Jacobs, C. Davis, & W. A. Renandya (Eds.). Successful strategies for extensive reading (pp. 128-143). Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.
Dornyei, Z. (1998). Motivation in second and foreign language learning. Language Teaching, 31, 117-135.
Dupuy, B. (1998). Cercles de lecture: Une autre approche de la lecture dans la classe intermédiaire de français langue étrangère.[Literature Circles: A different reading approach in the intermediate French classroom] The Canadian Modern Language Review, 54, 579-585.
Gaudart, H. (1994). Selecting readers: Children's choice. In M. L. Tickoo (Ed.), Research in reading and writing: A Southeast Asian collection (pp. 63-78). Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.
Jacobs, G. M., Davis, C., & Renandya, W. A. (Eds.). (1997). Successful strategies for extensive reading. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.
Mason, B., & Krashen, S. (1997). Extensive reading in English as a foreign language. System, 25, 91-102.
Murphey, T. (1998). Language hungry. Tokyo: Macmillan Japan.
Nuttall, C. (1982). Teaching reading skills in a foreign language. London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Renandya, W. A., Rajan, B. R. S., & Jacobs, G. M. (1999). Extensive reading with adult learners of English as a second language. RELC Journal, 30(1), 39-61.
Toh, G., & Raja, M. (1997). ELT materials: Some perceptions on the question of cultural relevance. Guidelines, 19(2), 45-72.
Yu, V. W. S. (1993). Extensive reading programs—How can they best benefit the teaching and learning of English? TESL Reporter, 26 (1), 1-9.
Contact Information
George Jacobs looks forward to continuing the dialogue with any readers who wish to explore projects
of mutual interest by e-mail at <gmjacobs@ pacific.net.sg> or at
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/1650/index.htm> Willy Renandya can be reached at SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, Singapore.
Willy, George, and Julian Bamford are looking for nice and valuable people to join them in maintaining the ER in L2 bibliography.
Andy Barfield can be contacted at: University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan; e-mail
<andyb@sakura.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp>.
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