Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Teaching extensive reading
Turning now to techniques for encouraging extensive
reading it will be found that this territory has already been
partly covered, in that setting assignments for skimming, or
finding one fact in a substantial body of text, involve one
kind of extensive reading at least.
The practice of extensive reading needs little justification.
It is clearly the easiest way of bringing the foreign learner
into sustained contact with a substantial body of English. If
he reads, and what he reads is of some interest to him, then
the language of what he has read rings in his head, the
patterns of collocation and idiom are established almost
painlessly with a range and intensity which is impossible in
terms of oral classroom treatment of the language, where the
constraints of lock-step teaching and multiple repetitions,
however necessary they may be, impose severe restrictions on
the sheer volume of the amount of language with which
pupils come into contact.
Given properly graded readers whose language and
subject matter suit the capabilities of the pupils using them,
there is no reason why extensive reading should not form a
part of regular EFL teaching from the most elementary
stages. Every well-devised reading scheme for native speaker
uses this principle. Graded readers do exist, the grading is
almost entirely in terms of vocabulary control, and every
major publisher in the field has them listed in the catalogue,
but the grading and classification is very far from uniform.
Even those readers written within a vocabulary of 1,000
words may be written within a different 1,000 words for
each publisher. Most publishing houses seem to have private
lists specifying the vocabulary and the house style for their
graded readers. It is therefore wise to treat publishers’ claims
with caution. There is a substantial literature on this topic;
the main points are well discussed in Teaching English as a
Second Language by J.A.Bright and G.P.McGregor.
Ultimately the only way that a particular simplified reader
can be shown to be suitable for a particular pupil or group of
pupils is by trying it out. In some countries information on
which books have proved successful with pupils has been
collected but it appears to be available only in mimeographed

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form from local teachers’ associations or educational
authorities, and it often requires persistence to get hold of
it—though clearly it is well worth doing so.
There appear to be basically three ways that extensive
reading may be encouraged, first by having class sets of titles,
second by operating a class library system, and third by using
the school library.
Having class sets has the advantage that the teacher can
control the rate of progress of all pupils, it is convenient where
the class is taught together; particular linguistic or content
difficulties can be tackled with the whole class at once; themes,
textual structure, character development and so on can be
explored in class discussion; technical or historical
background information can be supplied to the whole class as
necessary. This is perhaps the best treatment for a book which
is likely to present difficulty for the class so that it would not
be easy and straightforward for them to read the book entirely
on their own. It is probably best to set the reading to be done
out of class in terms of specific assignments of certain
nominated chapters or sections. Such assignments do not need
to be directly sequential through the book, they may be
discontinuous. For example in reading the Arabian Nights if
the pupils were to pick out only the story of Scheherazade it
might be proper to assign only those sections of the book
which dealt with her and omit the sections in which the stories
she tells are to be found. In this way the basic framework of
the book could be made clear. It is valuable too to set specific
questions to which answers must be found; four or five are
enough. (What story did Scheherazade begin on the second
night? Had she really finished the first one?) It is possible by
these means to reduce the amount of class time that needs to
be given to checking whether the reading has actually been
done and in discussing difficulties that may arise, since these
usually are quite closely defined by virtue of the work pupils
have done, but it is also of course possible to spend a great deal
of time on the discussion. In general this should be
discouraged and attention focused on the reading and on
deriving meaning over the long term.
A class library system has the advantage that with limited
funds available for the purchase of books it is possible to
have four copies of ten different titles—and hence the

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possibility of exposing the pupils to a greater range of
language—instead of forty copies of one title. The books are
distributed among the pupils, who read them more or less at
their own rate. The teacher can exercise as much or little
control over this reading, as he wishes. He can set deadlines
or not, he can devise assignments on the same sort of lines as
those for class sets suggested above—but unless these are
made with MCQs to check on the reading they become
burdensome and complicated to keep track of. More usually
pupils may be required to keep a record of the books they
have read by making an annotated bibliographical entry—
ideally on a 10X15 cm index card—showing in the usual way
the author, title, number of pages, publisher and date of
publication, then might follow the date of beginning to read
the book and the date of completing it; a star grading, one to
five stars showing how much the pupil enjoyed and valued
the book (a symbol for books which pupils find totally
repellent is also useful, say Ø) and the pupil’s own summary
of what he thought the book was about. Index cards like this
as they accumulate give the pupils a real sense of
achievement and provide a ready means of refreshing the
memory. Cards also have the advantage that they are easy to
sort and keep in alphabetical order. The same information
can equally well be recorded in an ordinary exercise book of
course but this somehow seems to lack the effectiveness of
index cards. Many teachers find that keeping a class reading
chart for the extensive reading done is useful. This shows
pupils’ names on the vertical axis of a grid and the titles of
the books available in the class library on the horizontal axis.
As each pupil takes out a book the date is entered on the
intersection of his name and the title, when he returns it that
date is entered too. Thus it is easy to see at a glance who is
reading many titles quickly, and who is reading few slowly
and appropriate encouragement can be offered in each
quarter. The demands on class time of this class library
system may be a little higher than when using class sets but
the sheer volume of reading done is likely to be much higher.
The pupils’ index cards provide a cross check on this record
and allow some of the recording to be done out of class time.
Books chosen for use in class libraries like this should on
the whole be easy for the pupils to read, preferably with high

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intrinsic interest and the least possible linguistic difficulty—
one rough guide is that fewer than one word in every one
hundred should be unfamiliar enough to require glossing or
the use of a dictionary; that level is the extreme upper limit,
ideally the pupil should not need to look up any words at all
in the dictionary and provided context and in-text definition
is used this is quite feasible. Obviously for both class sets and
class libraries of this kind graded or simplified readers are
likely to be required. It must be understood that the kind of
extensive reading work being discussed here really has very
little to do with the study of ‘literature’. It appears to be a
very common misapprehension that reading a simplified
version of Robinson Crusoe or Oliver Twist has something
to do with the study of Defoe or Dickens as literary artists—
the fundamental changes in language and even in the
organisation of material which simplification may involve
clearly mean that this is just not so. The fact that ‘Robinson
Crusoe’ and ‘Oliver Twist’ are famous names may contribute
to the motivation of the reader, but literary study of ‘great
writers’ is clearly something which requires substantially
greater experience of all that is written in English than can be
expected of most pupils, who need the kind of extended
exposure to the written medium in English that graded
readers are intended to provide.
Class libraries of the kind suggested here do require some
small amount of storage space. Where this cannot be
provided in a classroom it is not difficult to fit all the books
needed into a small suitcase which may be no more
inconvenient to carry about than the average briefcase.
Using a school library for extensive reading has the
advantage that no storage space is required for books in the
classroom and the range of books available to the pupils can
be considerably widened, but it does depend on the school
library being well organised, with a good stock of books in
English—including graded and simplified readers such as
those mentioned above—it needs to be available and open
when the class teacher wants to use it, and it needs to have a
librarian who is prepared to co-operate with the teacher in
promoting the extensive reading programme. In using the
school library—even the best organised—the control and
checking of what is read always seems to become more

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difficult. If borrowing from the library is done in out-of-class
time then class time needs to be used to get the reading record
up to date unless the librarian is very co-operative indeed. If
borrowing from the library is done in class time then the
amount of time taken up always seems to be much more than
is ever anticipated and it always seems easy for those who
most need encouragement and direction to evade it. The
school library is probably most useful for that type of
extensive reading which relates to study skills, and where
skimming and fact finding assignments are set the resources
of even a modest library are likely to be far greater than can
be conveniently carried into a classroom.