What is Extensive Reading, and how can we help students get started? What should they read, and how do we build and look after a library that will help them improve? How can we check if students are reading and making progress, without taking away the freedom that ER gives? This practical workshop gives an introduction to ER for teachers new to the approach. It also offers ideas for experienced practitioners who are looking for effective ways to introduce ER to their students, colleagues, or institutions. We will look at a range of rationales for ER including fluency development, vocabulary growth and affective benefits, and discuss how these can be communicated in different teaching contexts. The attendees will also share ideas about text selection, library development, assessment strategies, and the role of the teacher in an ER environment.

We will show how Xreading and reading clubs have benefited students and how diversifying activities lead to student engagement and material retention. We will then break out into four small groups, each led by a co-presenter, to share activities involving different life skills and subjects. Attendees will rotate through each fifteen-minute station. In one group, participants work together to answer trivia questions to solve a letter cipher and decode story titles. They will then match the titles and characters descriptions to the correct stories. In another group, participants will read a short story and then the reading will disappear. Exercising their reading comprehension and imagination, the participants will recall and draw a specific character from the reading. Afterwards, presenters and participants will discuss the workshop activities; how they can be implemented in different classrooms and with different leveled students.