Creative and Meaningful Classroom Activities to Foster a Reading Community

Authors

  • Yuka Kusanagi Tsurumi University
  • Megumi Kobayashi Seikei University
  • Motoko Fukaya Tsurumi University

Keywords:

extensive reading, world cafe, post-reading activities, picture books

Abstract

This paper reports on a workshop conducted at the Fourth Extensive Reading World Congress (ERWC4) on the 4th of August, 2017. The workshop aimed to introduce a discussion format entitled the World Café (WC) as a post-reading activity. We have adopted the WC in our extensive reading (ER) programs and found it to have a positive effect on promoting ER, as it creates a collaborative reading community and helps stimulate students’ desire to read. Prior to the WC session, we also introduced a ‘read aloud’ activity using a postmodernist picture book, Voices in the Park, which served as the shared input for the WC session. After experiencing these two activities, the presenters provided a follow-up lecture on the book as well as the results of classroom trials. The workshop concluded with reflection and an open discussion with the workshop participants.

Author Biographies

  • Megumi Kobayashi, Seikei University

    Megumi Kobayashi is Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Seikei University, Tokyo, Japan. She also serves as Deputy Director of the Seikei Institute for International Studies at Seikei University. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She has a wide range of research interests including sociolinguistics, world Englishes, teaching English as a second/foreign language (particularly reading). Reading is one of her hobbies and she has been using extensive reading in her classes since 2004.

  • Motoko Fukaya, Tsurumi University

    Motoko Fukaya is an associate professor at Tsurumi University. Ms. Fukaya received her MA in English Literature from Waseda University. Her academic interests include American literature/culture and the effective use of literary texts in an extensive reading program. Among her latest publications are “The effect of reading guidance in an extensive reading program†(The Bulletin of Tsurumi University, 52, Part 2, Studies in Foreign Languages and Literature, 2015) and “The use of a literacy text in an extensive reading programme: Reading Murakami’s ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ in the World Café" (Literature and Language Learning in the EFL Classroom, Teranishi, M., Saito, Y., & Wales, K., eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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Published

2018-09-30

Issue

Vol. 4 (2018): Extensive Reading World Congress Proceedings

Section

Extensive Reading World Congress Proceedings

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