Critical Reading 3

I’m recently interested in extensive exposure of second or foreign language acquisition, especially extensive reading, so I decided to find articles related to it. Willy A. Renandya inspired me by his article about English Foreign Language learning process conducted in Asia. The one I read recently entitled “Extensive Reading Coursebook in China”. In the introduction, he mentions some experts of L2 scholar that give Extensive Reading a respectable place in language teaching by given many positive advantages in their scholar. The experts including ELT experts, L2 reading specialist, course book researchers, and SLA researchers. Extensive reading is not fully embraced by teachers. Renandya summarizes about some concerns that might hind the application of Extensive Reading in the classroom, those are : the pace of Extensive Reading impact, the activity of silent reading that might be uncomfortable for teachers, and the legitimacy of class learning.  One of the way to solve that issue is by integrating extensive reading into coursebook. That is why Renandya conducted a research to evaluate the overall quality of several dedicated extensive reading coursebooks published and used in many universities in China and identify those that close to what we think an ‘ideal’ ER coursebook should contain. He casts many coursebook based on some criteria such as highly reputable publisher, should include those written for both English Major and non-English major and graded coursebook. Finally he decided to evaluate 8 kinds of books.

In evaluating the coursebook, Renandya uses 9 principles suggested by Second Language acquisition. The coursebook should contain of interesting and comphrehensible material, plenty reading material, task designed to develop student’s reading fluency, authentic text, multimodal text, text and tasks that are cognitively and affectively engaging, reflecting how English used today, opportunity for learners to develop autonomy and various topic material. By using those principles, Renandya can decide which is the most suitable coursebook for extensive reading integration.

In the conclusion, we can apply extensive reading program in teaching learning process in order to help the student develop their second language acquisition by integrating it into coursebook. However, we should choose the most suitable course book by using the  9 principles. The aim is to get the optimal benefits of extensive reading in EFL learning. 

"When student understand what they read, they tend to enjoy reading and become more motivated to do more reading on their own" 

Citation :

Renandya, W. A., Hu, G., & Xiang, Y. (2015). Extensive Reading Coursebooks in China. RELC Journal, 0033688215609216.