Episode #26

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

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]