College and University ER program for the development of reading fluency of Japanese EFL learners more

Wed, Aug 9, 15:30-16:05 Asia/Tokyo

This research investigates how Japanese EFL learners improved their reading fluency in an extensive reading and listening program, which is designed based on the findings from research emphasizing the importance of bottom-up processing (Kadota, 2015). It consists of 12 sessions in four months including lectures and tasks to develop students’ lower-level language processing, such as phoneme, word recognition practices, and syntactic analysis. The participants were the students who expressed an interest in enrollment in the program. They were required to read more than 10,000 words per week. In this presentation, we will discuss how well the tasks worked and the reading fluency of the students improved, analyzing the results of the tasks including the scores from pre/post tests, the word per minute (WPM) of timed reading exercises, and the responses of the pre/post questionnaires, which asked about their beliefs and attitudes toward reading in English.