Students learn to read in different ways (e.g., skimming, scanning, more careful reading) and for different reasons (e.g., entertainment, information, passing the time).ģ.
Different kinds of reading material also encourages a flexible approach to reading. Having variety allows students to find material they want to read, regardless of their interests. There must be a wide variety of reading material on a large range of topics. Students discover that they can read FL material, and as they read more and more books, they see themselves as readers in the target language.Ģ. In addition, reading easy material helps the affective dimension of learning to read. When students find no more than one or two difficult words on a page, then the text is appropriately easy it is well within their reading comfort zone. One way to get them to read a lot is to make sure that they read material that contains vocabulary and grammar well within their linguistic competence. The benefits of ER come from students reading a great deal. Day and Bamford (2002: 137-140) provide the following ten principles of an ER program:ġ. Student self-selection gives this approach a great deal of flexibility, which caters to the different needs and interests of individual students and allows them to develop their foreign language (FL) competence at their own pace. Students select which books they are interested in reading, and read at their own speed. In an ER approach, students read large quantities of books and other material that are well within their linguistic competence. This is followed by a discussion of the outcomes of the program.
Next, we describe Jpn 102, and then discuss six key issues that we had to address as we sought to incorporate ER into this course. We begin with a brief outline of the nature of ER. Our aim is to provide information about incorporating ER into a low-level foreign language course we hope it will be of interest and benefit to others who might want to use ER with other less widely taught foreign languages. Specifically, we discuss how we used ER in a first year, second semester Japanese class (Jpn 102) at the University of Hawai`i in Spring 2000. We seek to broaden the scope of ER literature by reporting on our use of ER in an Asian language course. There are no reports, to our knowledge, of ER and Asian languages in formal classroom settings. There is one report (Leung, 2002) of a learner using ER on her own in learning Japanese. There have been a few reports of ER programs in Spanish (e.g., Rodrigo, 1995). There are numerous reports of ER with students learning English in both foreign and second language settings and of the benefits of reading extensively in English (e.g., Bell, 2001 Camiciottoli, 2001 Elley and Mangubhai, 1983 Mason and Krashen, 1997 Nash and Yuan, 1992 Renandya, Rajan, and Jacobs, 1999 Tsang, 1996 Tse, 1996 and Walker, 1997). There has been a great deal of interest in extensive reading (ER) over the past decade. Keywords: teaching Japanese, extensive reading, teaching reading, curriculum
We also found positive results in an affective questionnaire that measured attitudes toward and motivation for learning Japanese. We also discuss the outcomes of this ten-week program, which showed that the students improved their scores according to a traditional measure of reading comprehension. After summarizing the ten principles of ER, we describe how we addressed six critical issues faced while introducing ER into the course. This article discusses how we incorporated an extensive reading (ER) program into a second semester Japanese course at the University of Hawai`i using Japanese children's literature. Reading in a Foreign Language: Extensive reading in Japanese
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