Event

Three presentations on Extensive Reading (followed by a beer garden party)

Saturday, July 12th, 2014, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Speaker: Rob Peacock, Trevor Holster, J. Lake, William Pellowe, Paul Goldberg

This meeting consists of three presentations on the topic of Extensive Reading. After the meeting, Fukuoka JALT will hold its annual summer beer garden event. Sign up early to reserve your space at the beer garden!

• Have Students Share Their Reading Experiences in an ER Program
  Rob Peacock
  In this session, after reviewing the benefits of extensive reading and how to run a successful ER program, I will introduce some classroom activities which give students the opportunity to share their reading experiences with their classmates. Through these simple projects, students are encouraged to talk to each other about what they are reading, exchange opinions, make suggestions, and inspire each other to read more.
  
  Rob Peacock currently works at Oxford University Press as a teacher trainer. He has spent many years in Japan teaching to students of all ages as well as providing teacher support and workshops.
• Assessing Gains in Extensive Reading
  Trevor Holster, J. Lake, William Pellowe
  Reading is an important skill to acquire for overall language proficiency. Sustained reading skill improvement and reading motivation is needed to become a fluent reader and to develop a positive reading identity. Students are better able to maintain ongoing reading development by becoming autonomous active readers. This presentation explains the benefits of developing autonomous readers through an extensive reading program, where students read many interesting books at an appropriate level of difficulty.
  
  Students and teachers made use of an extensive reading module for an open-source audience response system. The development and use of the system has been funded by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Using this system provides autonomous active learning conditions in an extensive reading program as part of the reading curriculum. Teachers can monitor students through summaries of the number of books read by each student, difficulty estimates of books, and popularity ratings of the books. Additional empirical data will also be presented to show how extensive reading leads to gains in reading speed, reading motivation, and a positive reading identity.
• The Power of Online Extensive Reading
  Paul Goldberg
  Online extensive reading means much more than students being able to read graded readers on their smartphones. It puts powerful tools like an interactive dictionary, character lists, audio-on-demand, and book ratings, right at their fingertips. Also, it allows teachers to track and monitor their students' reading progress with greater accuracy, providing data such as word count and reading fluency. In this workshop, I will explain these and many other benefits of online extensive reading.
  
  Paul Goldberg is the founder of Xreading VL, the first online library of graded readers. Previously, he taught at Kwansei Gakuin and Kansai Gaidai universities where he enthusiastically promoted extensive reading.

Post-meeting social: Beer Garden!
Time: 20:00~22:00
Price: 3,500 yen
Location: Fukuoka Building Shibafu Beer Garden (map and details)
RSVP by July 7 with cell phone number to Yoshie if you are planning to come to the social. Yoshie Shimai: angels123@grace.ocn.ne.jp

Organization: Fukuoka Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (Fukuoka JALT)

Cost: free

Venue: Fukuoka Building, 9th Floor, Room 6, in Tenjin (just north of Tenjin Core; 'Tsutaya' is on levels 2&3; see map)

Location: Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan

Contact Fukuoka JALT

Trevor Holster