Rick Romanko
Wayo Women's University
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College and University Setting up and maintaining an ER program for first-year university students more
Tue, Aug 8, 14:30-15:05 Asia/Tokyo
The benefits of ER are now well established (Nation & Waring, 2020) and language courses which include an ER program developed with a principled approach can provide learners with quality opportunities to improve their language proficiency (Nation & Macalister, 2021). When the Foreign Language Division at a women’s university in Japan was established in 2018, its staff envisioned utilizing ER to provide its students with quality opportunities to improve their language proficiency. This presentation reports on how an ER program, now in its fifth year, was set up and maintained for 700+ first-year students in a university-wide compulsory English course. It describes how the ER program started with printed graded readers in 2019 and transitioned to digital graded readers with Xreading in 2020. It details how the program is managed, how it navigated the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, students’ achievements, and students, teachers and administrators’ perceptions of the program.
All levels Where can you find COVID, Ukraine, BTS and chatty mushrooms? more
Tue, Aug 8, 11:30-12:05 Asia/Tokyo
In this talk, the presenters will discuss Xreading News. This is an exciting feature of Xreading launched in April 2022. Xreading News offers real news stories each week achieving two main goals; 1- to expose students to current affairs, and 2- to expose students to more English. Five news stories from around the world, from a wide range of fields, such as Science, Technology, the Environment, and World News, are produced in graded language and uploaded to Xreading every Sunday. But how do writers select their stories? Why are some stories more suitable for Xreading News than others? Why are Ukraine and chatty mushrooms suitable and Roe Vs Wade is not? The presenters will talk about their experiences choosing, writing, and leveling real news stories. We will also look at the changes made from an original submission to a published entry and discuss why the editing decisions were made.
