Extensive Reading Podcast Jose Camino and Travis Past

Last August we went to Kyoto Sangyo University to interview Professor Amanda Gillis-Furutaka. She has been teaching there for over twenty years, contributing to establish and maintain a large extensive reading programme at this university. Over the last few years, she has been carrying out qualitative research on the thought processes that occur when we do ER in a second or foreign language. In this episode, Professor Gillis-Furutaka tells us about some of the most interesting insights that she has obtained through her interviews with students of different ages and levels. Listen and learn about the various factors affecting graded reader readability besides the number of headwords, about the many ways in which the L1 is involved while reading in an L2, and about the interplay between working memory and the practice of extensive reading. 

Resources: 

In this 2012 article you can find information about the ER programme at Kyoto Sangyo University. 
http://erfoundation.org/proceedings/erwc1-Gillis-Furutaka.pdf

Here is an article that Professor Gillis-Furutaka wrote for the Journal of Extensive Reading that focuses on graded readers’ readability. 
http://jalt-publications.org/content/index.php/jer/article/view/7/1

And finally, here is her most recent article, which focuses on working memory and the use of the L1 by students doing ER. 
https://687a7f01-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/neuroelt/publications-journals/1%20MindBrainEd%20Journal%20Vol%201%20May%202018.pdf

We have dedicated our 25th episode to the future of ER research. There are so many things that we still don’t know about ER that it is not easy to decide where to start looking. In our case, we begun by seeking out the opinions of two long-time ER practitioners and advocates with extensive experience conducting research in this field: Rob Waring and Tom Robb. Both of them have already been on the podcast in the past, Professor Robb in episodes 3 and 4, and Professor Waring in episodes 21 and 22. From different perspectives, they suggest a myriad ways in which we can broaden our knowledge of everything that surrounds extensive reading.

In this article by Professor Waring he lists many questions concerning ER that remain unanswered today and that he discusses in the podcast.
http://www.robwaring.org/papers/various/assesser.html

There are so many ways in which Tokyo Oberlin University Professor Marcos Benevides, our guest for our 24th episode, is connected with ER that it is hard to chose one to start with. For one thing, for the last six years he has been using extensive reading as part of an English programme for 2,000 students that he coordinates at his university. Also, he is an author and editor of graded readers, and the founder of a very particular collection: Atama ii Books, which you can sample here [http://www.gtcpub.com/Class/atamaii/tada/2016se/content/page1.htm]. Finally, he has also experienced first-hand the effect of reading on successfully learning and acquiring a new language (he was born in Brazil and moved to Canada with his family when we has eleven years old). Professor Benevides tells us in detail about all these experiences in this interview.

I first saw Dr. Charles Browne a few months ago at JALT’s PanSIG in Tokyo. He was giving a talk in a room that was almost as packed as a Japanese train during rush hour. He was introducing ER Central, which is a website that he created with Rob Waring, where students and teachers can find a myriad ER-related resources, and he was glowing. You could tell that he was passionate about it. I immediately thought that we had to have him on the podcast. So I told Travis and we got in touch with him. We asked him if he would give us an interview and, to our delight, he said yes in no time. Our original idea was just to have him introduce his website to our audience, but the interview flowed in different directions and became something that I find even more interesting. Among many other things, it included a really nice section on what Dr. Browne calls a symbiotic relationship between extensive reading and intentional vocabulary learning, for example, by means of flashcards. 

Check out https://www.er-central.com/

In the second part of our interview with Dr. Rob Waring, he tells us about his experiences as author and editor of graded readers in general, with particular reference to a very successful collection whose books he co-authored with Maurice Jamall: Heinle Cengage’s Foundations Reading Library.

For those of you who want to know more about the topic of this podcast, here are a couple of nice readings: First, a text by Rob Waring on the art of writing graded readers.

https://www.er-central.com/authors/writing-a-graded-reader/writing-graded-readers-rob-waring/

Second, an article by Stuart McLean on the graded reader collection we discuss in the interview.

http://jalt-publications.org/content/index.php/jer/article/view/5

Note: we recorded this episode before this week’s horrible floods in Japan and feel a little embarrassed about how lightly we talk about the rain in the episode.

Whenever we asked our guests for tips on who to interview next, Dr. Rob Waring’s name popped up almost immediately. When we asked Paul Goldberg, he told us that nobody made the case for extensive reading like he did, and that if you were in the same room with him and did not support extensive reading yet, he would be fast to make you change your mind about it. In this episode, which includes the first part of our interview, Dr. Waring tells us about his experiences with ER, including the first ER colloquium in 1997 and the creation of the ER Foundation. He also tells us about how vocabulary research shows that there is a no other way but to do extensive reading if our students are to learn the many words and lexical units they need to learn the target L2.

Here’s a link to an article by Dr. Waring whose title says it all: The inescapable case for extensive reading. [insert link: http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_why/er_is_vital.htm]