College and University Materials, Libraries and Listening Presentation
Four-year investigation of extensive reading with restriction
In terms of implementing extensive reading (ER), instructors often let students choose what they want to read. Thus, instructors do not exercise any control over the difficulty level of students’ reading materials. The present study is a four-year investigation of ER with restriction, which attempts to address this issue by setting restrictions on students’ choice of reading materials. 206 third-year Japanese university students participated in this study. The first group (free-reading group) was permitted to read books of any length, whereas the second group (restricted-reading group) had to choose books of at least 1,000 words in length. The findings revealed that both groups read a similar number of books over the same period of time. However, the restricted-reading group read more words than the free-reading group because the restricted-reading group had to choose books of at least 1,000 words in length. Requiring students to read longer books might encourage them to read more and thus reach their reading goal more easily.
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Takayuki Nakanishi is a professor at Dokkyo University in Japan. He is an active member of JALT (The Japan Association for Language Teaching) and he was a former president of JALT Ibaraki Chapter. His latest articles are entitled Learner perceptions and attitudes toward learning styles in Japan and Taiwan (Japan Language Testing Association Journal, 2008) and Extensive reading and the effect of shadowing (Reading in a Foreign Language, 2011) and, A meta-analysis of extensive reading research (TESOL Quarterly, 2015). He also co-authored three textbooks of NAN’UN-DO English Vocabulary Series for Academic Purposes (2016).