Extensive Reading Podcast

Do you know when your favorite author died? Our guest probably does! In our tenth episode, we bring you part one of our two part interview with Nick Bullard, who has been in the graded reader business for a long time both as editor and as writer. As an editor, he has extensive experience managing the graded readers for Oxford University Press. As a writer, he has adapter some classic stories such as, Arnold Bennet’s The Card, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, H.G.Wells’ The Invisible Man, and Ian Fleming’s Octopussy and The Living Daylights.

In this part of the interview, Nick explains his background in graded readers, how Oxford University Press’s Bookworms and Dominos series began, and the challenges of adapting classic works.

I think it’s important that stories reflect the world in which young people live.

Welcome to the eighth episode of the ER Podcast. After having dealt with extensive reading mostly from the point of view of the teachers, this time we look at it from a different angle. We interview Dr. Antoinette Moses, three-time winner of the ER Foundation’s Language Learner Literature Award and author of highly successful books like Jojo’s Story, Book Boy and Let Me Out! Those of you who have read her books know how she manages to tell complex and rich stories in a very simple language, and among many other things, in this interview she explains how that can be done. She also tells us about how Cambridge University Press allowed her to tackle strong subjects such as war, depression, drug abuse or homelessness in her books, and generally, how it is possible to write engaging stories for students. Episode 8 includes the first part of this interview; the second part will be included in our ninth episode next week.

For our seventh episode we have the second part of the interview that Professor Atsuko Takase gave us. She tells us about teachers’ motivation to do ER, the need for teachers to do ER themselves so that they can understand the students’ experience with ER, and the role of manga in ER among many other things.

Our sixth episode features the first part of a long telephone interview with professor Atsuko Takase, long time ER enthusiast, practitioner and promoter, and co-chair of this summer’s Extensive Reading World Congress in Tokyo. Professor Takase tells us about when she was visiting a high school student in the States in the 1960s where she had to read extensively in English, and about her experiences doing extensive reading with high school students and university students as well as with private students of elementary and junior high school age. Finally, she gives advice on how to motivate reluctant readers and repeating students.

Welcome to our fifth episode, the first one after a long summer break. In this episode we interview Paul Goldberg, creator, founder and owner of X-Reading, an online subscription-based graded-reader library that allows students unlimited access to more than 600 books on their computers, tablets or mobile devices any time they feel like doing a bit of ER. Paul tells us extensively about his project, including how and why he created X-Reading, how he managed to get the publishers on board (Macmillan, Cengage, Oxford, Cambridge, ELI, Atama Ii and more), all that the project has accomplished and what it will look like in the future.