College and University Practice and Strategies Presentation
Using extensive reading to support content in a university CLIL curriculum
Leaders in the field of extensive reading such as Nation, Waring, Day, Bamford, Robb, and others have emphasized the principle of having students pursue personal interests by freely choosing from a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books. This presentation explores a different approach by explaining—in detail—how extensive reading can also be used to support content in a CLIL curriculum. Juntendo University’s semi-intensive first-year English program of 200 students in Tokyo recently underwent extensive reform and shifted from using a commercial EFL textbook to focused study of liberal arts areas such as natural history, earth science, sociology, and zoology. It subsequently adapted its extensive reading so that about half of the assigned online books are thematically related to particular content topics. This allows students to see target vocabulary in new contexts, re-encounter concepts central to content, while improving reading skills and reading speed. It also resulted in 140% higher one-year ITP TOEFL gains compared to previous years.
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English teacher in a CLIL program. Reading teacher and ER practitioner. Skills courses teacher in an M.Ed TESOL program.
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Paul Wadden is the author of many books and articles on language teaching and language learning, editor of A Handbook for Teaching English at Japanese Colleges and Universities (Oxford, 1993) and Teaching English at Japanese Universities: A New Handbook (Routledge, 2019). He is a professor in the Faculty of International Liberal Arts at Juntendo University, Tokyo.