After a long break that we took following the beginning of the academic year in Japan, we are back with a new episode and a new interview. This time we deal with extensive reading in Chinese. We do so in the company of Chinese language consultants Jared Turner and John Pasden, who have put together a collection of graded readers in Chinese called Mandarin Companion. In the interview they discuss their experiences reading and doing extensive reading in Chinese, and also the challenges of creating Chinese reading materials that are both interesting and useful to learners of the language.

For our nineteenth episode we have an interview with professors Naeko Naganuma and Patrick Daugherty, from Akita International University, in the north of Japan. In the interview they tell us about the research that they have recently carried out on academic dishonesty in extensive reading programmes and they suggest a number of ways in which teachers can discourage cheating while making the student’ extensive reading more engaging and rewarding.

In the second part of the interview, Professor Nation discusses different ways of doing extensive reading depending on whether one’s target is more fluency or vocabulary oriented, the need to make sure that the students know the reasons why they should be doing ER, the amount of reading that students ought to do, questions of vocabulary and frequency, and of course, the role of output in language acquisition and learning.

Professor Paul Nation, our guest for this and the following episode, needs no introduction. His name has been recurrently popping up in previous shows, mostly in discussions about the role of extensive reading within language teaching in general. In this first part of the interview he discusses just that: his ‘four strands’ approach to language teaching, and also their implications for the way we understand teachers’ roles and extensive reading. In the context of this discussion, Professor Nation also comments on Professor Akio Furukawa’s celebrated ER programme, and on the role of speed reading courses to improve reading fluency.

Our guest for this episode is an English teacher in a secondary school in Malaysia who has been using extensive reading in her classes for many years in spite the isolation and the budget limitations. In this interview she tells us everything about motivating her students to read without recurring to external motivation, and we also discuss issues like the need to properly orient students before they start doing ER, or the role of ER-related activities besides sustained silent reading.