ER Program for the Development of Reading Fluency of Japanese EFL Learners

Abstract

This research investigates how Japanese EFL learners improve their reading fluency in an extensive reading and listening program designed by the authors based on research findings emphasizing the importance of bottom-up processing. It comprises 12 sessions over four months: lectures and tasks to develop students’ lower-level language processing, including phoneme and word recognition practices and syntactic analysis. Participants were also required to read at least 10,000 words per week for self-study at home. The final number of participants was 3. They were students who expressed interest in enrolling in the program. They took the pre-post TOEIC test and answered the pre-post questionnaires on their beliefs and attitudes toward reading in English. In this study, we discuss the results of these tasks, including the scores from pre/post-tests and the responses to the pre/post-questionnaires to determine how well the tasks worked and how the students’ reading fluency improved. As a result, post-test scores were slightly improved, especially in the reading comprehension part, and the participants reported an increase in vocabulary and a better understanding of the reading process. These results imply improvements in their reading fluency.