The digital age presents challenges and opportunities for extensive listening and extensive viewing as well. While traditional modes of listening and viewing have been replaced with digital platforms, they have opened up new avenues for learners to engage with materials in a more personalised and interactive way. For instance, audiobooks and podcasts offer a convenient way to access a wide range of content, while interactive videos with captions and subtitles can aid in language learning. In addition, learners can benefit from the collaborative and social aspects of digital media through online forums and social media groups. Educators and researchers need to consider how digital media can be leveraged to enhance extensive listening and viewing programs and promote engagement and comprehension. They should also examine the potential impact of digital media on listening and viewing habits and ensure that learners develop sustainable habits for long-term learning. This presentation will explore the benefits of digital media for extensive listening and viewing and provide examples of how they can be incorporated into learning programs. The speaker will draw on experiences from extensive listening and viewing programs in Indonesia to illustrate these points.

Reading skills textbooks are often inadequate in catering to the needs for students with various reading ability levels, content-related suitability, the and aims of the course. This research context involves 3rd year Japanese university English majors undertaking a 15 week Rapid Reading course. In order to address the related issues and course goals, an online reading system using the Xreading website was implemented as the core reading material, and included supplementary activities. Course evaluation was conducted by administering a Likert scale questionnaire and indicated positive results in terms of reading skills, vocabulary, satisfaction of reading materials in terms of genre, reading level and speed, and advantages in using features of the website. The presenter aims to highlight key features of the course, evaluation methods, questionnaire results, suitability, and practicality of the Xreading website from both the student’s and teacher’s perspective.

This session will be a fun quiz to test your knowledge about extensive reading, graded readers, people and so on surrounding our world. It will be conducted via Kahoot.

Reading strategies, particularly the ability to guess meaning from context, are valuable tools for developing vocabulary knowledge. The current research project, supported by a Japanese federal grant, is investigating how access to an integrated dictionary during ER affects learners’ usage of these reading strategies. First-year English majors use the ER application Xreading which now offers instructors the option of allowing learners to access glossary definitions while they read. At the start of the year, learners completed a survey of how often they use particular reading strategies. Using contextual clues and guessing meaning were among the strategies learners used most regularly. Pre- and post-tests were also given to determine how accurately they were able to guess meaning. Interestingly, results indicated that the experimental groups with access to the integrated dictionary showed greater gains in this ability. Later stages of this research will include replication, the addition of follow-up interviews, and the inclusion of non-English majors.

Xreading is digital library that gives students access to over a thousand graded readers from major publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Macmillan, and National Geographic/Cengage Learning. Students have unlimited access to all books as well as audio narrations, ratings, and quizzes. In addition, the system tracks students' reading progress (books read, words read, reading speed, quiz scores, etc.) so it makes management and assessment much easier for teachers. Since it’s launch is 2014, the system has been continuously evolving and growing in terms of the number of books and features. In this presentation, the founder of Xreading will explain the new functionality that has been added over the past year, and what is planned for the future. Current users of the system are encouraged to provide feedback and suggestions based on their experience.

This presentation will introduce and demonstrate the Online Graded Text Editor (OGTE), a free, web-based tool developed by Dr. Charles Browne and Dr. Rob Waring to assist teachers doing extensive reading with turning ungraded webpages and content into student-friendly texts at just the right level. OGTE takes inspiration from previous well known tools made for researchers such as VocabProfile by Tom Cobb and AntWord Profiler by Laurence Anthony, but with an eye towards making the tool more user-friendly for practicing teachers and content developers. OGTE allows users to analyze and write texts utilizing a wide range of popular corpus-based vocabulary lists including the many lists from the NGSL Project, CEFR wordlists, Cambridge wordlists, the Oxford 3000 and the 20 levels used both at ER-Central.com, the free extensive reading site developed by Dr. Browne and Dr. Waring as well as the Extensive Reader Foundation Graded Reader Level Scale.

Listen to a debate about ebooks and paper books. You can help decide the winner.

This presentation will highlight the features on Extensive Reading Central. Extensive Reading Central (www.er-central.com) is a free website for students and teachers that has thousands of texts at 20 different levels. Students can choose texts from the Reading Library or Listening Library as well as do Speed Reading. After sign-up, students take a placement test which suggests a level for them to select texts at. Students have the option of taking a quiz if they wish. Teachers can create an Institution account, classes and and bulk-register their students. This allows the teachers to track what the students have read and monitor their progress and then download these data is they wish, Students can also look up any unknown word and save them to their private learning environment. ERC works best on the browsers in tablets and computers. ERCentral also has a support area which contains many resources and advice for teachers.