Developing a Sustainable Extensive Reading Programme
Paul Collett and Malcolm Swanson
Paul and Malcolm discussed how they have implemented an extended reading programme at their institution with the primary goal of increasing student reading fluency, comprehension, and fostering the the growth of intrinsic motivation towards reading and language study. Over the course of a semester, students are assigned a goal of reading 180,000 words from a collection of graded readers available both online and at the school library. Two e-learning platforms, XReading and Moodle Reader, are used to monitor and manage student progress through the use of online quizzes. Other advanced statistics on student performance such as reading speed are also available to gauge student progress. One of the benefits of this approach is that students have concrete goals they need to reach but also have a degree of autonomy in terms of the reading items that are selected, important for both short-term and long-term programme success. Paul and Malcolm also stressed that the role of the teacher is crucial through the monitoring of student progress and giving frequent feedback on student achievement.
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