Roles of Extensive Reading

The idea of extensive reading comes up to get a well balanced on the four strands of language course; meaning focused input, meaning focused output, language focused learning and fluency development (Nation & Newton, 2009:6-7). Bell (1998) describes the role of extensive reading on students’ language learning exposure such as follows:

1.      It provides 'comprehensible input', including information and knowledge of language and idea or message of the text which improve ‘meaning focused output’- writing and speaking.

2.      It enhances learners' general language competence, such in providing learners with practice in automaticity of word recognition and decoding the symbols on the printed page using bottom-up processing which activate students’ schemata. It also develops their prediction skills.

3.      It motivates learners to read confidently, because reading materials are selected on the basis of students' needs and interests, as to the use of familiar material in tension-free environment.

Further, extensive reading provides large opportunities by which learners can improve their thinking skills and decide what essential aspect of foreign language learning is. Thus, the long term aim is that all language skills can be improved through advanced extensive reading. Mutoh (2006) describes some important changes that occur during students extensive reading activities. The incidentally learning influences students’ ability on:      

1.      Processing written English smoothly and more natural way.

2.      Grasping the flow of stories and organization of fiction or nonfiction texts.

3.      Acquiring better vocabulary and grammar foundation.

4.      Gaining high frequency vocabulary and grammar elements.

5.      Increasing confidence and satisfaction by enjoying reading many books on their own.

6.      Motivating and experiencing the foreign language practice.

Learners who have experienced successful English reading on their own are more eager to develop a reading habit. They are more likely to read outside of their courses and after their formal education ends.

Graded Readers for Extensive Reading

Because reading should be pleasurable, students may get more enjoyable reading when they read text or books at their level of ability. Graded readers are the main resource extensive reading materials. Those are books of reading texts or stories collection that have been simplified to help learners read and understand them. “The language is graded for vocabulary, complexity of grammar structures and also by numbers of words” (Budden, 2008). Graded readers are very important resources because they can provide material at a level which is suited to the learners' present proficiency level, and at a very wide range of levels. Use of graded readers is under the consideration that 95% to 98% of the words in the text are familiar to students. Thus, they can read and understand the texts with ease without any stops and find out unknown words in the dictionary (Nation & Newton, 2009).

Graded readers are appropriate to be used because they have varieties materials which utilize to enhance our students' language learning experience. Stories makes readers are different from other materials. Stories convey the meaning or message through their forms. Stories provide the language code, lexical, structural, syntactic and rhetorical elements. Some of them also present an attractive cover, clear and helpful illustrations. The content of the stories are on the basis of our life experience though many of them are fictions. The flow of how the stories carry out the message help learners understand and rationalize their world, and then enable them to share it with others. In graded readers, all those elements are grading appropriate for the target level and combining naturally to form a story (Bassett, 2010; Wright, 2010).

Graded readers are written in graded language including vocabulary and grammar complexity as device to raise readers to a proficiency level at which they can read. Another crucial function of graded readers is that they allow elementary and intermediate level learners to have genuine reading experiences, which is meant by reading with relative ease. Therefore, reading activity focuses, not on the language, on the content, just as native speakers do. Learners read and respond fiction or nonfiction texts as they read in second language interestingly. The exciting situation will move learners to critical and enlightened condition (Mutoh, 2006).

Basically, through graded readers for extensive reading, the learners are expected to:

a.       Read at least one graded reader every week in any level, so that unknown vocabulary will always be repeated.

b.      Read at least five books or stories at the same level before they take higher level.

c.       Read more books at later level than earlier because they provide good conditions for vocabulary learning at graded reader series.

d.      Read at least 15-20 readers in a year. These numbers of graded readers provide many vocabulary repetitions.

e.       Work their better way through fostering the levels of graded readers which provide good conditions for vocabulary development.

f.       Provide themselves dictionaries to help reading books or stories at higher level because the unknown words increase (Nation & Newton, 2009:56).

Extensive reading application through graded readers requires the provision of sufficient reading materials and facilities. Oxford Bookworm series is an example of printed graded readers. This presents many interesting titles with different level of difficulty (Nation & Newton, 2009:52). Another series is Penguin Readers. However, school library, as the domain of extensive reading, get difficulty to provide them for students. Generally, library has some collection of short stories books, but they are not available for all students to borrow for home reading.