Interview

Richard Day & Junko Yamanaka

Richard Day is Chair & Co-Founder of the Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF). he is currently a Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii. He is also co-editor of the online journal Reading in a Foreign Language. He has developed teaching materials, including Impact Issues and Impact Topics, both with Junko Yamanaka, and Journeys Reading 3, with Jim Swan and Masayo Yamamoto. Junko Yamanaka is Chief Instructor and Teacher Trainer at Trident College of Languages in Nagoya and is Vice-Chair of the ERF.

Richard and Junko gave this interview by e-mail in November, 2004.

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ELT: Before we talk about the work you do today and the concepts behind it, can you tell us how you first got into English teaching?
RD: I was in the US Army in Seoul, Korea, when I started tutoring high school students. I really enjoyed it, and then joined the US Peace Corps to continue teaching English.

JY: I went to a teacher's college hoping to be a Junior or Senior High English teacher. After graduating I had this great opportunity of post-graduate studies in the State University of New York as a Rotary Fellow. There I was determined that I would teach real communication rather than test preparation, so I took a teaching job at a language school.

You have worked together on several books. How did that come about?
RD: Junko had made a contribution to a book I edited for the International TESOL organization, New Ways in Teaching Reading. Then, when I started work on Impact Issues, I thought that she would be a great person to work with. And I was right!

JY: Just to add a few things. Mike Rost, who is the series editor for our books, was actually the go-between for us. He asked me if I was interested in working with Richard on Impact Issues. It was, by chance, just after I had contributed a few ideas for New Ways in Teaching Reading

What's different about the teaching materials you developed?
RD: We think that the topics that are in our books are directly related to the lives of our students. For example, we deal with issues of gender identity, sex before marriage, being different, living together before marriage. Publishers do not want to have these topics in their books because they might offend someone. Longman ELT, to its credit, did not shy away from these issues.

JY: Controversial and at the same time interesting and relevant issues are introduced in easy English, not heavy in vocabulary. Each chapter makes students really want to say something.

You have, I believe, one particular language interest in common - extensive reading. Can you give a little background for teachers who may not be familiar with ER?
RD: Extensive reading is an approach to learning a foreign language that involves reading a great deal of easy and interesting books. Students choose the books that they want to read. If a book is too easy, or too hard, or boring, the student is free to stop reading and select another one. There is a great deal of research that demonstrates that students who engage in extensive reading become better readers, enlarge their vocabulary, and improve their listening, speaking and writing skills.

How easy or difficult is it to get students to actively participate in an extensive reading program? What practical advice can you offer a teacher thinking of setting one up?
RD: My first piece of advice is to start early and small. You need to order a good supply of books, the kind that I call language learner literature ­ books written especially for language learners. They are often called graded readers.

Then you need to set up the extensive reading library. You will also need to decide if the extensive reading will be part of an existing course, a separate course, or an after-school club.

Teachers often wonder what their students should do when they finish reading a book. Do you have any suggestions?
RD: The best answer is that students should pick another book and continue to read! But I know that teachers really want to do more than sit in class and watch their students reading. I have my students do activities that build on the reading their students have done.

ER activities that allow students to respond on a personal level to their books often work well. This is because they encourage learners to relate what they read to their own world of knowledge and experience. They contribute to student motivation and make student reading a resource for language practice and use in reading, vocabulary learning, listening, speaking and writing. They can also help teachers monitor and evaluate their students' reading.

The book I edited with Julian (Bamford) has 106 ER activities (Bamford, J. & Day, R. R. (Eds.) (2004) Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language. Cambridge University Press.)

Many years ago, Stephen Krashen referred to a "relaxed, tension-free learning environment" as one of the necessary conditions for success of a reading program. Has the concept enjoyed more or less success within the usually formal Japanese educational model?
JY: I would say it still has a long way to go. In Japanese classrooms, intensive reading using difficult texts still seems to be the standard. Still many teachers have their students translate, and grammar is emphasized. However, I sense that the idea of extensive reading is slowly but steadily spreading. I hear some teachers mentioning it, even though they have not started it yet.

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