1. What is Extensive Reading?
Extensive Reading (ER) is a teaching approach that aims to help learners develop their reading fluency and literacy in a target language (Day & Bamford, 1998). In ER, learners read for pleasure, for meaning, and for information. Waring (2011) provides a succinct summary of ER using the acronym “READ”: “Read quickly and Enjoyably with Adequate comprehension, so they Don’t need a dictionary” (p. 3).
When explaining ER to my students, I often emphasize that they should understand 98% of the content of the reading materials following the 3Es principles:
- Easy: Understand what they read.
- Enjoyable: Enjoy what they read or have fun doing it.
- Extensive: Read a lot and repeat what they read.
2. Why is ER important?
Research has indicated that ER supports language and literacy development in many ways (see Nakanishi, 2015; Jeon & Day, 2016 for relevant research syntheses). For example, ER has been shown to motivate learners to read in their target language, improve reading fluency and proficiency, and promote incidental vocabulary and grammar learning in rich and meaningful contexts. ER has even been shown to enhance learners’ writing ability (Mermelstein, 2015). It is important to note that most of these studies have focused on English language learners rather than on learners of less commonly taught or endangered languages.
However, the benefits of ER still hold and can be explained from several theoretical perspectives. For example, the Input Hypothesis put forward by Stephen Krashen (1985) stresses that people acquire language when they understand what they hear and what they read in that language. ER provides learners with opportunities to make sense of what they read, thereby supplying them with “language nutrition” to grow their linguistic ability. ER is also aligned with usage-based theories of language acquisition, which emphasize the role of meaning and language use as a driving force for language emergence (Tomasello, 2015). ER empowers learners to read for meaning and pleasure while acquiring language structures implicitly without being aware of what they learn.
3. What is StoryWeaver?
When it comes to ER, there are abundant reading materials for learners of English available from various publishers such as graded readers, short stories, and illustrated children books. However, it is not easy to find accessible and interesting reading materials in less commonly taught languages such as Vietnamese. Children’s books can be a good source of reading materials for Vietnamese learners, but they are constrained by copyrights and are usually limited to physical hard copies. Fortunately, StoryWeaver is an excellent resource for teachers and learners who want to embrace ER in their classroom to enrich learners’ language learning experience.
StoryWeaver is a digital repository of multilingual stories for children curated by Pratham Books based in India. Since 2015, StoryWeaver has become a leading platform for book creation and distribution. The platform connects writers, illustrators, translators, educators and readers in a single hub so that they can all make meaningful contributions in various ways. Likewise, the platform connects key stakeholders such as governments, educators, librarians, publishers, NGO partners, and parents to promote literacy development for children around the world. StoryWeaver has also grown impressively, from 800 books in 24 languages in 2015 to 41,467 storybooks and 308 languages in 2021. There are currently 229 stories in Vietnamese at four different reading levels covering a wide range of topics and categories.
What I find most fascinating about StoryWeaver is their open access philosophy. The books on StoryWeaver are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license so that anyone can copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon the materials for any purpose.
As such, it is an excellent Open Educational Resource for language and literacy instruction. Educators can use storybooks available on the platform, contribute their own stories, translate stories into different languages, or encourage their learners to translate or write their own stories using illustrations on the platform.
4. How to use StoryWeaver for ER?
There are several ways you can use StoryWeaver to promote ER in your classrooms. Here are several ways I have used storybooks from StoryWeaver with Vietnamese heritage learners at the intermediate level since Fall 2020. Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, all the activities have been implemented online.
- Read aloud: Each week, I select a story related to a certain topic or theme to read with my students. This activity can be done during class time or can be recorded and sent to students for them to work on their own. I usually read the story aloud, explain the key vocabulary or grammatical points, and highlight cultural differences in the book. I then encourage students to read part of the story or read with their classmates in breakout rooms. At home, they are asked to read the story aloud until they become comfortable reading it. I also ask the students to record themselves reading using a screencasting tool (e.g., Loom, QuickTime…), and finally submit their recording to me.
- Read more: I instruct my students to browse the StoryWeaver library and select another story to read on their own, and ask them to keep a reading log that includes a simple summary of the story and what they thought about it. The students are also encouraged to write a brief report reflecting on and reacting to each story in Vietnamese (strongly recommended), in Vietnamese with some English (recommended), or English with some Vietnamese (okay) depending on their Vietnamese proficiency.
- Read together: In subsequent class meetings, I ask the students to share what they have read with the class and pick one of the most interesting books to read together. They can work in pairs, in small groups or with the whole class to take turns and read aloud one or two pages of the book. I encourage them to use Vietnamese to share their stories, but I am not too strict about a Vietnamese-only policy because these activities focus on reading proficiency, not speaking proficiency.
These are the three core activities that I use to promote ER in my classroom. Other ER-related activities and projects I have used include recording an audio book by acting out the characters in the story or writing a new story using the same illustrations from the original storybooks. Many student-generated books are of high quality and publishable for other learners to read and learn. These activities also involve peer feedback and revision, thereby providing additional language practice.
5. What more can you do with StoryWeaver?
There are many things you can do with StoryWeaver beyond ER depending on your students’ interests and proficiency levels. Because StoryWeaver is a crowd-sourced platform, I can envision many people contributing to the initiative while learning a new language. Learners can translate storybooks from other languages into Vietnamese and vice versa. What is most interesting about the stories and illustrations on StoryWeaver is the multicultural and multilingual values they add to your classroom. Each story often has a core message that can be a great jumping off point for a meaningful discussion with your students.
However, because StoryWeaver uses a crowd-sourced model, its stories and their translation quality varies accordingly. Sometimes you may find a typo in tonal placement, unusual word choice, or a problematic translation in a story, but these mistakes and differences are excellent opportunities to teach learners about Vietnamese grammar and dialects. Likewise, while StoryWeaver is an exceptional resource, there are many other similar resources that can be used to promote ER in your classrooms (e.g., https://letsreadasia.org; https://literacycloud.org).
References
Day, R. & Bamford, J., (1998). Extensive reading in the second language classroom. Cambridge University Press
Krashen, S. D. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. Longman.
Jeon, E. Y., & Day, R. R. (2016). The effectiveness of ER on reading proficiency: A meta-analysis. Reading in a Foreign Language, 28(2), 246- 265.
Mermelstein, A. D. (2015). Improving EFL learners’ writing through enhanced extensive reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 27(2), 182-198.
Nakanishi, T. (2015). A meta-analysis of Extensive Reading research. TESOL Quarterly, 49(1), 6–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.157
Waring, R. (2011). Extensive reading in English teaching. In H. Widodo & A. Cirocki (Eds.), Innovation and creativity in ELT methodology (pp. 69–80). Nova Publishers.
Tomasello, M. (2015). The usage-based theory of language acquisition. In E. L. Bavin & L. R. Naigles (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language (2nd ed., pp. 89–106). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316095829.005
