Ways to incorporate extensive reading in the classroom

Are you ready to get started with extensive reading? Here are ideas for sourcing reading materials for your students and encouraging the reading habit.

School Library

If you have a school or class library of graded readers, and there is a good choice of books, you can ask students to choose a reader that they would like to read.

• Give your student 15 to 20 minutes to start reading their book, silently.
• They can then turn to their partner and talk about their first impressions of the book.
• Then you can turn it into a class discussion by asking for some feedback from a few students.
• Students can read the rest of the book bit by bit for homework or in class.

Build a class library

You can build a class library. Each student could

• buy one book, then
• read that book, then
• pass it on to the next student.

If you have 25 students, this is a very cheap way for each student to have access to 25 books!

ER Activities

It’s nice to timetable slots for follow up activities -they don’t have to be long- where students can:

• talk to others in pairs or groups about their reading,
• give short presentations about their reading,
• have group discussions, or
• ‘sell’ their books to the class.

Class Reader

You could use a class reader. As long as you choose carefully, and make sure that students will like the topic, this can be nice too. Having a class reader makes it a bit easier for you to ask the students to read certain chapters by a particular deadline for work in class.

• You can do speaking work on characters and plot.
• You could read a chapter in class together.
• Students could group write short character descriptions.