Extensive Reading : Student Perceived Benefits and Getting Students to Read More

The term extensive reading (ER) was said to have been coined by Harold Palmer (1921/1964, p. 111) to mean reading “rapidly, book after book and with a focus on the meaning and not the language of the text”. Palmer contested for the need for language learners to be able to enjoy reading large volumes of text for the real−world purposes of gaining information and pleasure from reading. Importantly, the level of the text needs to be slightly easier than the learner’s ability in order for language acquisition to take place. Samuels (1994, p. 834) refers to this level as “i minus 1” whereby i refers to the learner’s current level of acquisition. It is said that by having students choose reading material that is easy for them results in improvements in reading fluency and sight vocabulary development (Nation, 1997). One of the main assumptions underlying an ER program is that students will benefit from large amounts of comprehensible input outside of the language classroom whilst making advances affectively. In contrast, intensive reading (IR) concerns itself with language learning and is deemed to be using reading in order to study vocabulary and grammatical structures. Undoubtedly, the predominant approach