Summary 12: Extensive Reading: Why Aren’t We All Doing It?

Citation

Renandya, Willy A & Jacobs, George M. (n.d.). Extensive Reading: Why Aren’t We All Doing It?. Methodology in Language Teaching (pp. 295-302). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Summary

In this paper, Renandya and Jacobs also give brief explanation about what ER is; that the students will read in quantity, choose their own topic or genre of reading texts, select the materials which suit with their comprehension levels. The students also given post-reading activities as the project. The teacher, being a good model for the activities as well and monitoring the students progress. 

 Renandya and Jacobs also give some benefits of extensive reading. However, the implementation of the ER is not that easy. They also talk about why extensive reading [ER] is not really implemented by most of teachers. The reasons are practical such as the time allocation needed, the curriculum target, and the teachers’ duties. They still believe that they have not enough time to assist the students in doing the extensive reading activity and thet the curriculum time would be better spent on the other subjects tested, or especially doing the intensive reading as the teachers directly guide the students.

Application

Extensive Reading can be implemented in a class by doing teacher modelling and giving explanations about how to do it. The time allocation must be the urgency of this activity, so we can ask the students to do this ER outside the class. We can give them any charts as the instrument of the monitoring activity and make schedules for the individual consultation.