Developing reading fluency: A study of extensive reading in EFL

By Yurika Iwahori. Reading in a Foreign Language, 2008

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Due to the great interest of practitioners on reading fluency in first language (L1) and second language (L2) English classroom settings, fluency has become a hot topic. A number of studies have suggested that an extensive reading (ER) program can lead to improvement of L2 learners’ reading rate; however, studies about high school students are scarce. Inspired by current issues in reading and previous ER investigations, this study examined the effectiveness of ER on reading rates of high school students in Japan. In this study, students were provided with graded readers and comic books as reading material they would find enjoyable. Pretests and posttests of reading rate and language proficiency were administered and a t test was used to compare means of the rates and language proficiency within groups. Results indicate that ER is an effective approach to improve students’ rate and general language proficiency.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fca3cd15238cf217fb27dd6dfba6596946427fd1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. D. Beglar
2. A. Chang
3. Alan Hunt
4. J. Yamashita
5. W. Grabe
6. T. Robb
7. Makimi Kano
8. Stuart Webb

Citations in the corpus

• Effective extensive reading outside the classroom: A large-scale experiment (2013, background): “See Iwahori (2008) for her review of these studies, which deals with some aspects not covered below.”
• The effect of a timed reading activity on EFL learners: Speed, comprehension, and perceptions (2010, result): “This notion has been supported by several extensive reading studies exploring reading rates after reading abundantly in the L2 (Bell, 2001; Iwahori, 2008; Sheu 2003; Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass, & Gorsuch, 2004), all showing a positive effect.”
• Fluency in reading—Thirty-five years later (2010, background): “Several studies are reviewed in Grabe (2009), Horst (2009), Iwahori (2008), Nation (2005), Schmitt (2008), and Waring and Nation (2004).”
• Effects of extensive reading on reading attitudes in a foreign language (2013, background): “…an approach to reading pedagogy that encourages students to engage in a large amount of reading, is an instructional option that has been steadily gaining support and recognition in the field of second language (L2) reading pedagogy (e.g., Day & Bamford, 1998; Grabe, 2009; Grabe & Stoller, 2011).”
• Pleasure reading and reading rate gains (2014, background): “Participants in short-term studies of less than one academic year (i.e., Imamura, 2012; Iwahori, 2008; Lai, 1993; Lao & Krashen, 2000) read between 12,000 to 330,000 standard words (6-28 books; Iwahori [2008] did not report how many books her participants read) and showed reading rate gains ranging…”