Extensive Reading Podcast

Our previous episode featured the first part of our interview with long-time promoter of ER in Japanese Dr. Tabata-Sandom, which dealt mostly with the particularities of the Japanese writing system and its effects on learning to read the language. In this episode we include the second part of that interview, which deals with topics such as the challenges that authors of Japanese graded readers face, the limitations of Japanese graded readers and of doing ER in Japanese, Japanese teachers’ openness and willingness to do ER, and the role of children books and manga in learning to read in this language. But maybe most importantly, this episode comes with a very rich account by our guest of the resources that are available for those who want to do ER in Japanese.

“Anyone can learn to read fluently in Japanese”

In this episode we start to explore a promising territory that has been tempting us for a long time: extensive reading in languages other than English. We look at ER in Japanese with the guidance of Dr. Mitsue Tabata-Sandom, who has been using extensive reading to teach Japanese to her university students in New Zealand for many years, and who has also carried out a number of most interesting research studies on ER in Japanese. She gave us a long interview that will constitute the bulk of this and the following episode. In this first part of the interview she tells us about the particularities of the Japanese writing system and its relationship with extensive reading. She also tells us about her experiences as an author of Japanese graded readers.

Reading aloud is often seen as a little more than a resource that can be used when the students’ level is too low for them to do extensive reading by themselves. However, there are those who argue that there is room in every class for reading books aloud, regardless of the age of level of the students. Our guest for this episode, Dr. George Jacobs, is one of them. In this interview you’ll find a most accessible introduction to the best practices and principles for reading aloud to students, and its connections with positive education and with sociocultural theory.

We recorded our last episode of the year with professors Kevin Ramsden and Aaron Campbell in a very nice studio at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, or Kyoto Gaidai, as it is commonly known. They told us about how they are putting altruistic motivation to work, having their students do much more extensive reading than they would otherwise, while at the same time helping to create a library at a rural school in Cambodia, among many other things. You can also hear the voice of the teacher at the receiving end this project, Sonita Sen, who tells us about how the library is being set up and the effect it is having. You can learn more about this project at swapnetwork.org, which is also the right site to visit if you are considering making a donation.

We are back after our one-week break with an episode that continues to deal with editing and adapting graded readers. Nick Bullard, long-time editor of graded readers at Oxford University Press as well as adapter tells us more about the issues surrounding these two complementary jobs. We learn, for example, how potential adaptations of George Orwell, Graham Greene and Truman Capote would have completely different implications and why that would be so. Nick also tells us about grading and headwords and the many issues that surround them.