TACON 2013 Proceedings

Activities for Bookworms: Strategies in Extensive Reading Iman Abdulsattar, Rasha Abdulmunem Azeez & Alison Camacho University of Baghdad & Georgia State University Abstract Reading fluency is a challenging skill that requires students to both interpret and understand the information from the text at the same time. It has a great impact on academic success as typical university students are required to read hundreds of pages for every class; nonetheless, it is not always an easy skill to teach. This article examines an extensive reading approach to teaching reading and describes five specific activities that can be incorporated into a reading class to improve reading fluency, including the benefits and drawbacks of each activity.

Introduction A mastery of several skills is required of university students in order for them to achieve success with their academic endeavors. Without a doubt, good writing, critical thinking, time-management, note-taking, research, oral communication and processing skills are all necessary to make progress with academic studies.

Nevertheless, there is one skill that is of particular importance: reading. No matter whether the student is majoring in English, philosophy, biology, or law, reading assignments are commonplace. In fact, university students typically encounter hundreds of pages of assigned readings per week. This workload is challenging for native speakers of English to complete, but how about nonnative speakers of English? Nonnative speakers often find this aspect of their studies to be especially challenging. Therefore, they need to develop a specific skill set in order to master a heavy reading load. One of the main skills that can aid them in this process is reading fluency. Reading fluency is an essential skill for success in any academic program. Language teachers can support students with their reading fluency by incorporating extensive reading strategies in their reading courses. This article highlights extensive reading strategies that language teachers can incorporate in any reading class to help students develop reading fluency. It begins with some background information about extensive reading, including the benefits of this approach. The authors also explain some factors to consider when developing an extensive reading course and selecting materials for the course as well as five specific techniques that can be incorporated into reading classes to make them engaging and rewarding for students.

Background: What is Extensive Reading?

Extensive reading is, in a sense, exactly as the term implies: reading extensively.

In other words, reading a lot of material. However, there is more to this definition.

Day and Bamford (2004) describe extensive reading as “an approach to language teaching in which learners read a lot of easy material in the new language� (p.1).

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