College and University Extending Students’ ER Autonomy with Parallel Paper and Digital Assignments more

As many have argued (e.g., Nation, 2013), extensive reading is a prime method for making progress in a foreign language. While students read, teachers have an active role to play (Yoshida, 2014), guiding students as to what to read, and setting clear assignments to encourage them to read. This presentation reports on the use of parallel assignments involving both paper books and digital books on an ER course at a Japanese university. Each format has advantages (Altamura, 2024; Pardede, 2019), but some students only explored both formats when assignment settings encouraged them to do so. The assignments were set in a well-known online reading platform. The presenter will describe how the course was managed as student interest and confidence in reading seemed to be falling, and report on student preferences for each format, as given in survey responses and shown in the reading data.