Extended reading is an approach to language teaching in which learners read a lot of material in the new language. They choose what they want to read without the supervision from their teacher.
The purpose is that the reader chooses his reading according to his/her own interest and enjoys his reading.
- The reading material has to be easy
- You need a wide variety of reading material in different topics
- you have to choose what you want to read
- you have to read as much as possible
- Silent /individual reading
- No grading related to the reading
- The teacher can orient and guide the students
- The teacher is a role model of a reader
Many good things happen when students read for pleasure. Researchers have seen that students become more confident readers, write better, improve their listening and speaking abilities and enrich their vocabulary. In addition they become more motivated to learn and study the new language.
Many teachers use extended reading in their class. A common thing is to use Graded Readers i.e. novels, either shortened or made easier for learners. We have some at the library, but not enough according to my taste.
As students of International English, you are already learners at an advanced level, and you are all used to read authentic material. You are therefore going to read authentic articles on these websites I have recommended, and for the ones who do not feel that comfortable with these to start with, they could use the two websites, the Times in plain English and the Easier version of the New Internationalist. The purpose of extended reading is to read a lot of texts we do not feel too challenging. I do not want you to check every single unknown word in your dictionary. You have to keep on with your reading and guess from the context. If there are too many difficult words, it means that the text is too difficult for you and that you should go back to one of these two simplified websites.
information taken from this book : Bamford, J. DayR. Richard (2004). Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
