The 9th Annual Extensive Reading Seminar held at Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan on October 1st and 2nd has now concluded. Thank you to our Plenary Speakers, Anna C-S Chan and Kiyomi Okamoto, all presenters and seminar attendees for making this a great success. A special thanks go to Nanzan University and our Green Team student volunteers! If presenters are willing to share their slides (PowerPoint or PDF version), handouts etc. with people who were volunteering and couldn't go to presentations, who had to choose between your presentation and others, or who couldn't attend at all, please consider uploading them to this Google Drive dropbox: here.

Seminar Reception

  • Saturday, October 1st 17:00-19:00

    Drinks and Italian Cuisine ¥4000

    Please register via the regular registration site http://member.ersig.org and PREPAY via bank transfer.

  • Accommodation: If you are looking for a hotel, keep in mind that the conference is at the main campus in Nagoya. Subway stops are Yagoto Nisseki or Nagoya Daigaku-Mae on the Meijo Line of the subway. There are a couple of hotels in the Yagoto area (20 minute walk to campus), or down by Motoyama Station, which is the transfer station from the Higashiyama Line. Along the Higashiyama Line, which runs out from Nagoya Station, is also convenient. Larger stations along the Higashiyama line (in increasing distance from the campus order) are Imaike, Chikusa, Sakae (downtown), and then Nagoya Station (probably about 40 mins from there to campus). Kanayama Station area, 20 minutes by subway to the Yagoto Nisseki station and one stop on JR from the shinkansen, is relatively convenient to both the campus and the airport.

    Nanzan University access information is available here: (English) or here: (Japanese). Please expect a 10 to 15 minute walk from the subway platform to the venue. The conference will be held in S Building, and it is suggested that you enter campus via the Yamate-dori Gate which is closest to S Building. S Building is number 14 on this map.

Plenary Speakers:

Anna C-S Chang - Presentation Title: Leading the horses to the river and causing them to want to drink: Some practical and feasible methods for ER practitioners.

Kiyomi Okamoto - Presentation Title: アウトリーチで広がる多読の輪 Extensive reading opportunities through educational outreach

Anna C-S Chang has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is a professor of the Applied English Department at Hsing Wu University, Taipei, Taiwan. Her main research interests focus on listening and reading development and vocabulary learning. She has published a number of articles on developing listening fluency and reading fluency through extensive listening and reading.

Presentation summary:

In my recent survey with 257 language teachers from 14 countries, mainly in Asia, I found that very few language teachers doubt the effectiveness of extensive reading in improving overall language competence and reading skills; however, many of them simply do not do it or do not experience success when doing it. In this talk, I will share my experiences in implementing extensive reading in an English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. The talk first will focus on the methods of guiding your students to the ER world, which will include how to make the printed page come alive to raise your students’ interest and curiosity; how to select reading materials for your students to start reading if they have had little previous experience; how to get students to relate their past learning background with extensive reading, so they do not feel a lack of connection between the past and the present experiences. Secondly, I will present a few ER approaches that I have used with students of different levels of English proficiency. Those will include such approaches as silent reading, audio assisted reading, and narrow reading. Finally, I will mention some frustrations of which both students and teachers should be aware before implementing ER, and how to get past the frustrations if they do occur.

Kiyomi Okamoto is Associate Professor at the University of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, where she is affiliated with Center for Fundamental Education and involved in the education of science and engineering students of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering. In addition to extensive reading, her research interests include instructional design and English for specific purposes.

Presentation summary:

多読は優れた英語学習法ですが、大量の本や指導者などの多読インフラが必要なため、学校以外の場では実践が容易ではありません。本講演では、教育機関からのアウトリーチという枠組みを利用した多読教育モデルを提案し、本モデルがどのように地方都市の中小企業や特別支援学校などで英語学習機会を提供しているかを紹介いたします。

Research Workshop

Robert Croker of Nanzan University and experienced research workshop leader will hold a workshop during the seminar. Space is limited to 16 attendees.

Details: Details: Saturday, October 1st 13:00-15:00

Using Mixed Methods Approaches to Explore Learners' Extensive Reading Experiences

Using both qualitative and quantitative methods to help build a deeper and broader understanding of learners' language learning experiences is becoming increasingly popular in classroom research. This workshop explains how to do such research, illustrating the four main mixed methods research designs: 1. exploratory designs (using qualitative data from language learning histories, learner diaries, classroom reflections and your own observations of your classroom to design a questionnaire or class reflection sheet to collect numerical data - the qualitative data helps you build a simple model which you can then test using the questionnaire); 2. explanatory designs (interviewing some students to help you understand the results of your questionnaire - this is useful when you want to better understand your questionnaire results); 3. triangulation designs (collecting qualitative data from learner histories, learning diaries, classroom reflections and classroom observations while at the same time collecting quantitative data from book reports, class reflection sheets and questionnaires, and putting the qualitative and quantitative results together - this helps you understand both the quality and process of learners' reading experiences, and also track their word count and quantify how strongly they feel about their reading experiences); 4. embedded designs (collecting qualitative and quantitative data within the same instrument, for example, using a questionnaire that has both open- and closed-response questions). These four main mixed methods designs will be illustrated using recent research into extensive reading. By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a mixed methods research design for their own research project.

Other Languages Room S43

In an effort to promote extensive reading in a variety of languages, this year our seminar will host a Languages Other than English Room. Please drop by and check out the sessions:

Saturday: 13:20-13:50 Extensive Readers for Learners of Japanese. Mie Goto

Saturday: 15:25-15:55 Integrated Learning in Extensive Reading Classes. Heather Doiron

Sunday: 10:00-10:30 Why We Need Publishers on Board: Extensive Reading in Languages Other than English. Sophie Muller