Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read
Autonomously in a Foreign Language
Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
NIT, Toyota College, Japan
Abstract
In the last decade, extensive reading (ER) had been incorporated into English
as a foreign language (EFL) education in various Japanese institutions. It restored
the once broken balance of accuracy and fluency in traditional English education,
and assisted reluctant EFL learners to start reading. However, ER required rather
longer term for elementary learners to enjoy its benefits and the learners neededan extra encouragement to continue ER for the longer term. Book-talk was suchan activity to encourage learners to read voluntarily and to improve theirlanguage skills additionally. In a book-talk, several learners sat around a table,
introduced the books they had read during the week, and accepted questions andcomments from the others in turn. It also fitted well in lessons because 3-minutetalks and 2-minute Q&A of six members took only 30 minutes. We will report how
the activity motivated elder students, who had three or more years’ experience ofER, to continue their reading outside the class, and how it encouraged
autonomous ER of adult EFL learners, who were reading English books borrowing
from the college library. A combination of few talks and many readings worked
well in EFL settings.
Key words: Book-talk. Extensive reading. Encouragement. Longer term. English as
a foreign language.

1 ER in Japanese EFL settings
Japanese people learned English for six years or more in school but asa foreign language without using it daily outside their English lessons, andEnglish education in Japan long dedicated to educate students preparing

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Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

for entrance examination to colleges, which required grammaticalknowledge of English and translation skill of English texts into Japanese
but not much communicating skills. Because English was a far distantlanguage grammatically and phonetically from their mother language, andalso because they had almost no opportunity to actually use it in life,
many lacked the fluency to use the language including receptive skills suchas reading and listening even if they had enough vocabulary andgrammatical knowledge. The institutional program of the TOEIC showedthat 62% of the test-takers belonged to the score zone of beginner orelementary levels (10-490) (IIBC, 2017).
A major reason of Japanese students’ lower TOEIC scores was theirlower fluency in reading and listening, which prevented them from using
their knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary in any language
activities. Because Japanese learners did not use English in daily life, they
had little experience of actually reading English texts without translation
or of listening English narrations with instant comprehension. Theirreading often meant translating English texts into Japanese ones word byword, and they did not believe it possible that they were able tocomprehend English texts without translation. Conversation in English wasoften disturbed because they hardly comprehended what they were told.
When they needed to speak in English conversation classes, they simply
repeated the known patterns or struggled to translate their idea fromJapanese into English on the spot, resulting mostly in uttering a few words
but not a sentence. Stephens (2015) had observed the mental struggle ofher students when responding to her in English, and speculated that thiswas because of the preponderance of the yakudoku (grammar-translation)
method in their formative years of learning English. Lower fluency oftypical Japanese EFL learners is caused by their lack of actual reading and40

Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

listening experiences. Because translating while reading was a demanding
activity that needed concentration to handle two languages
simultaneously and consumed a large part of reader’s mental resources, it
was not easy to relax doing it or enjoy it. Only few Japanese read English
books for joy and many books were kept in major public libraries without
being read for a long time.
ER employed by some adult EFL learners and educational institutions
has been changing the situation gradually after Sakai (2002) proposed tostart ER from very easy-to-read picture books according to his three
golden rules of ER for EFL learners: dispose dictionaries when you read,skip unknown words, and stop reading the texts you cannot enjoy. Sakai’s
golden rules encouraged adult learners to transform their reading style
from translating every English word into Japanese counter part, to trying
to comprehend the English texts for grasping the main idea directory. The
rules also helped EFL learners of elementary language skills to start their
ER from picture books with short and easy-to-read sentences, so thelearners did not need to translate the texts to comprehend the stories.
ER itself was not a new approach then (Day & Bamford, 1998), as it
had decades of history among European learners, and graded readers (GR)
had been well organized as reading material. Studies in EFL settings
showed various benefits of ER, such as higher reading comprehension(Robb & Susser, 1989), improving attitude to reading (Yamashita, 2013),
and improving reading fluency (Beglar, Hunt & Kite, 2012). However, thebigger obstacle for Japanese EFL learners was that even the easiest GR
were not easy for them to read without English-Japanese translation
because of larger linguistic distance of English and Japanese than the onesof English and European languages. Sakai’s proposal and the practice ofStarting with Simple Stories (SSS) method (Furukawa and et al., 2005)

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

paved the road to ER for Japanese EFL learners. Japanese practitioners of
ER also pointed out the importance of periodical Sustained Silent Reading(SSR) in regular lessons for elementary EFL learners, who did not have thehabit to read English books continuously (Takase & Nishizawa, 2010).
ER in public libraries also became a trend in Japan (Nishizawa, 2015).
More than 20 public libraries in Tokai region installed special bookshelvesof easy-to-read English books for ER, and the number of such libraries was
still increasing. Majority users of the books were adult EFL learners who
had long graduated from schools and did not have professional need touse English but wished to enjoy reading English novels or using English forvarious purposes. This trend had a potential to reform lifelong learning of
foreign languages in Japan in the long run.

2 How EFL learners were guided to read extensively
Typical books collected in those libraries for adult EFL learners were
graded readers (GR) from major English publishers, leveled readers (LR)for English speaking children, and easiest-to-read picture book series suchas Oxford Reading Tree (ORT) series or Foundations Reading Library (FRL)
series. GR of starter and beginner levels were found to be more important
than the ones of intermediate or advanced levels, and ORT or FRL were
the indispensable series for most Japanese EFL learners to start their ER.
Without reading these easiest-to-read picture books, many EFL learners
could not stop their translating habit from school days, and thus could notcontinue their ER for a long enough time to improve their reading skills.
ORT was the most popular series even for adult EFL learners who had
graduated from schools or colleges a long time in the past and had not
believed that they could really read English texts without translation. With
the help of pictures, very few unknown words, and a whole new world42

Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

told by more than 200 books, the EFL learners could transform theirreading style gradually from word-for-word translation to directcomprehension of the stories.
When there were not any guidance how to start ER at first, typicaladult learners tended to ignore the pictures, and tried to translate theEnglish texts word-for-word into Japanese sentences. Then they usuallyfound a few unknown words, started to consult with a dictionary, andsometimes stacked in the middle of the story wondering what a certain
word or expression really meant. It was not easy to enjoy the stories withthis traditional “reading” style, so they were required to be guided tofocus more on the story instead on the expressions.
In an introductory lesson to ER, for example, we usually asked ER
beginners to look at the pictures closely, sometimes by hiding the English
texts at the first round, and to try to have a visual image of the story. With
this visual image in their mind, they were guided back to the first page,
and to read the whole book again by paying more attention on the text
this time to understand the story more in detail. After this introduction,
many of them understood that the method was quite different from the“reading” they had learned in their old school days, started to read picture
books with interest, and tried to avoid English to Japanese translation.
For this transformation of the reading style, a large number of picture
books, hopefully sharing the same background such as ORT or FRL, werenecessary. We usually recommended elementary EFL learners to readabout 100,000 words from 200 to 300 picture books when they started ER.
Such a large number of picture books was not feasible for most learners topurchase by themselves, but recommended to be shared as the common
assets in public libraries.

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

When an EFL learner felt it easy to read ORT (stage 8) or FRL (level 4),
it was usually the right time for her to start reading GR of starter level
along with more picture books, where each of those books told an
independent story in a short text of 1,000 words with easy English of YL
0.8. Because of this independence, the reader must redefine the wholeworld of the story every time without the background knowledge suppliedby the previous books in the same series.
For this second stage of ER, short and easy-to-read English texts wereindispensable, and beginner and elementary levels of GR were suited forthe purpose. We usually recommended EFL learners to read additional
100,000 – 200,000 words from GR of YL0.8 – 1.5. Starting ER from higher
readability levels of GR by bypassing these two steps often caused typicalfailure of adult EFL learners. They could not unlearn their translating habit,
tried to tackle with very difficult stories to understand, hardly enjoyedreading, and finally gave up reading any English books. The libraries thathave GR but fewer easy-to-read books have the unintentional but large
risk of inviting such failures.
In the third stage of ER, text length exceeded 6,000 words. It was
longer than the texts read in the first two stages, where text length wasfrom several hundred to 4,000 words, with the majority from 1,000 to
2,000 words per book, and could be read easily in an ER lesson of 45
minutes. Because longer texts read in the third stage took more than anhour to complete, they were likely to be read not in one occasion but inplural separate occasions. Reading a book in separate occasions was
naturally achieved in the mother tongue, but an EFL learner had toremember the former stories when he started to read the continuation,
which required deeper understanding of the story and thus more difficult
to achieve. We usually recommended EFL learners to read a million total

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Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

words of texts of YL 3.0 or easier before graduating from this stage, whichmeant the end of ER beginners.
The third stage was the most difficult stage to overcome (Furukawa etal, 2007), and even the earnest EFL learners took slower average reading
pace (40,000 words/month) than the first stage (136,000 words/month) orafter reading a million words (134,000 or more words/month). One
possible cause of difficulty in the third stage was expressed as “easy-toread books become rather boring, but interesting books are still difficult toread”. Finding favorite series, authors, or genres might be a generalsuggestion to the learners in this stage, but actual advice for each learnermust differ from person to person. The reading history of a veteranlearner of similar taste often helped, and thus periodical meetings of EFL
learners and exchange of experience and information were found to bevaluable.

3 Promoting ER for lifelong learning
ER books were complex mixture of English books from various types,
genres, and publishers. At least two groups of books were widely used by
EFL learners in Japan. One group was the books for English speaking
children including picture books, chapter books, and literature for young
adults. There were popular books for English speaking children, famousbooks and awarded books, and even classical stories for children. They
were popular and interesting books for children, but they did not always
attract adult readers. They sometimes included expressions common to
English speaking children but hard to understand for EFL learners. The
other group was graded readers (GR) published for ESL/EFL learners. Theirreadability was controlled by the vocabulary and grammar restrictions andthey sometimes included rather artificial or monotonous expressions, but

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

the topics such as murder mysteries or romance were selected to attract
adult learners.
Because the ER books were so different in readability and genre, users
needed some guide to select appropriate books for each of them. Aligning
the books, for example, by the readability was one method but rather
difficult for a librarian to manage because each must have certain
knowledge of ER books to maintain the condition. Alternative method was
putting an information sticker, which displayed readability level and text
length, on the front or back page of each book to aid the book-selection of
the users. Gathering the books in the same group was easier than aligningthem by readability.
Collecting ER books might be the first step for libraries but they also
had to promote ER books in their second step because ER was rather new
and not-well-known approach in Japanese schools, in where not ER but
grammar-translation had been and still was the major approach. For mostJapanese people from children to senior citizens, “reading” English texts
meant word-for-word translation, and even most English teachers did not
expect that their students could read English texts without translatingthem into Japanese sentences.
Introductory lessons were necessary to promote ER books in thelibrary. Two types of guidance, telling how to read and how to selectbooks, were also necessary in the introduction. Monthly circulation of
Tahara central library clearly showed that such annual introductorylessons increased the number of checked-out books for the following
three months (NIT, Toyota College, 2015). The lessons invited new users to
ER books and also activated ER of veteran users. Several libraries hold such
lessons several times a year for the promotion.

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Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________How to motivate elementary EFL learners for the several years’
duration needed for them to get significantly higher scores at standardized
tests was another serious issue for an ER program in Japanese settings if itwere to be employed as a major educational practice. Furukawa’s (2011)
students increased their ACE scores after they joined the ER program forthree to five years, and Nishizawa, Yoshioka and Fukada’s (2010) students
needed four years to increase their TOEIC scores significantly, and anothergroup of the students in the same ER program increased their TOEIC
scores after they stopped English-to-Japanese translation and had read amillion total words (Nishizawa & Yoshioka, 2015). The students whostayed in the ER program longer years from six to seven years scoreddistinctively higher average scores in TOEIC than the students who stayedin the same ER program only from 1.5 to 3.5 years even if both groups ofstudents had read the same amount of a million total words (Nishizawa,
Yoshioka & Ichikawa, 2017). As they could not expect instant effect from
ER, they would need an effective encouragement to continue ER for thenecessary duration.
Setting up the periodical meetings of library users was a method of
encouraging ER users (Nishizawa, 2015). The meetings did not need
instructors but the participants talked their experience of reading easy-toread books and exchanged information related to ER books to each other.
In these book-talks, a novice user often found a role model among theveteran readers and followed her reading record as the guide. Veteranreaders also enjoyed sharing their reading experience with other users.
They were sometimes lightly pushed to start reading new books since theywanted to introduce the books in their next book-talks.

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

4 Book-talk in English
Book-talk is an oral activity in a small group of students (Nishizawa,
Ho, Yoshioka & Ichikawa, 2016). They try to introduce to each other one of
the stories from the books they have read in the recent weeks. Because of
the topic, all the participants are required to read at least a bookbeforehand and to be ready to tell their reading experience. Successful
book-talk in EFL settings is the opportunity to use the target language (L2)productively without the interference of their mother language (L1), as
successful ER in EFL settings avoids translation from the L2 texts into L1.
Book-talk in English at NIT, Toyota college had started as a kind of
stimulus for veteran users of the library. After reading more than a million
words of English texts in several years, the veteran library users wereready to use their English skills productively without having suchopportunities in their daily lives. Starting English book-talk among themwas easier than expected possibly because they had already been talking
about the books they had read in Japanese at monthly meetings of libraryusers, and the only change was the language used in the talks fromJapanese to English. Book-talk was also found to be easier activity thanother English conversations maybe because the topic was what they had
great interest and could share the joy.
Looking at the apparent success in the book-talks of veteran libraryusers, we also started book-talks in regular English lessons (Table 1). If theactivity could encourage veteran users to read continuously, it would also
become an effective encouragement for other EFL learners who needed tostay in an ER program for a long time, we thought. We started to include
book-talks in regular ER lessons, where the students’ English skills werefrom elementary to intermediate levels.

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________
Table 1 Procedure of Book-talk
Step

Time

Preparation

5 min.

Activity
Participant writes a memo for thetalks(optional activity)

Talk

3〜5
min. / session

The talker is not interrupted
until the time limit

Q&A

2〜5
min. / session

The other members
questions about the talkask

One session consists of a three-minute talk of one member and thefollowing Q&As among all the members, typically in three minutes. If agroup has three members, one round needs 20 minutes or fewer. Typical
EFL learner feels three minutes a long time to speak English sentences
continuously at first, but he gradually starts to feel it too short to present
a meaningful story. Anyway a talk is interrupted by the limited time, so thestudents are advised to start talking from conclusion and then to movetowards the detail or circumstance for minimizing the damage from theinterruption.
In the ER program, book-talk was tried in the lessons of from third toseventh year students in 2013. It was welcomed by the sixth and seventh
year students, admitted by many of the fourth and fifth year students, butdisliked by most of the third year students. For the third year students,
whose TOEIC scores were lower than 450, it was too hard to utter ameaningful sentence in a limited time as a talker, and the listeners werefrustrated for the long waiting time. According to the responses of thestudents in the former year, we adjusted the frequency of the book-talk to49

Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

none for the third year students, once in a few months for the fourth andfifth year students, and every week for the sixth and seventh year
students in 2014.
A feature of the book-talks was to try to talk without preparation orwith as less preparation as possible because preparation meant for many
Japanese EFL learners to write translated scripts from Japanese. We
wanted the talkers to avoid Japanese-to-English translation at their booktalks, as avoiding translation was a major key to success for ER in EFL
settings. Without preparation the talks became messy, but we sacrificed
accuracy instead of fluency in our book-talks in a sense.
In a book-talk session, keeping equal session time for each participant
had a vital importance for involving users of varied English fluency,
because it stopped veteran readers who tended to forget their time limit
and tried to keep talking, and because it also allowed novice readers totake their time struggling to pronounce just a few sentences. For that, we
needed a timekeeper with a stopwatch to organize the sessions in control.
In a book-talk session, a participant talked about the book he had recently
read in a limited time, typically from three to five minutes, and answeredquestions from the other participants or received friendly comments. If asession used six minutes in total, ten participants could talk and answer inturn during an hour.
In regular lessons of 40 students, the students were divided into
several groups so that every student had the opportunity to talk at least
once in every lesson.

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

5 Temporary results
Veteran users of the college library were enjoying book-talks. The
monthly meetings of library users in 2017 had more than ten regularmembers who wanted to talk in English. Many of them continued to readnew books partly because they wanted to talk about the book in booktalks.
The sixth or seventh year students liked book-talks because they felt
more reality than other conversation lessons as a talker. The talking
content was more meaningful than just exchanging greetings or patterned
sentences but their genuine ideas or unknown information to thelisteners. They tended to recognize the limit of translation, and to start
selecting easier books for deeper comprehension or searching moreinteresting books in their ER. Book-talk became a good motivator of ER.
They were reading at least a book for their book-talk at weekly ER
lessons, and their anxiety for using English seemed to evaporate on theway. In such a way, book-talks allowed intermediate EFL learners totransform their in-class activity from receptive activity such as reading
silently to productive one such as talking with each other without
decreasing their amount of reading, because the students had to readbooks outside the lessons for their book-talks at the next lesson, even if
they did not have time to read in the lessons anymore.
However, book-talks by younger students had a smaller impact on thelearners. Elementary EFL learners could not compose meaningful talks in
the limited time as long as they translated their ideas from Japanese to
English on the spot. Book-talks did not promote much out-of-class reading
and invaded their reading time in class because they needed to read only
short texts out of the lessons for their next talks. Book-talk let them51

Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, Yuri Ichikawa
Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

recognize the fact that they needed to read more to use English fluently.
Occasional book-talk might be enough for that purpose. They only seemedto accept the fact that book-talk was a relatively painless transient activity
from their ER to conversation in their future.
Since book-talk was confirmed to be a hard task for elementary
learners, we have removed book-talk from mandatory work in regularlessons for the third year students, and have set it up as an elective out-ofclass activity since the autumn semester of 2015. For this activity, we
invited the students who had read more than a million total words ofEnglish texts in their ER and were ready to book-talks. Thus conductedbook-talk confirmed that the students could enjoy and be benefitted fromthe activity as their elder students did. As they proceeded into the fourthyear in 2016, they still continued to attend the book-talk activity in every
Friday evening and started to invite their classmates to join the group.
Book-talk is planned to be a main activity in the Student Exchange
Program, too.
We also used book-talk in a students’ exchange in 2017. The students
in two ER programs in Japan and Vietnam did book-talks in groups of
mixed students, with three Japanese and three Vietnamese students ineach group (Ichikawa & Ho, 2017). The procedure was the same, and theonly difference was the diversity of the participants. English was thecommon language to communicate with each other, and English books
they had read were the common topic. These common features paved theroad to fresh and meaningful conversations among the students indifferent cultures. Book-talk made a good introductory activity for theexchange of both groups.
As students’ exchange could not be a regular activity, we invited52

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

instead several adult learners, who had rich experience of ER and read
English books continuously, into the book-talks in the regular lessons ofelder students. The students and adult learners were different in age,experience, and learning history of English but had common interest inreading English books. Book-talk with such different learners became fresh
experience for both groups, and it activated heated discussions after eachtalk. All participants were happy because fluent talkers found earnest
listeners and less-fluent talkers found kind atmosphere that accepted theirslow talk and did not mind mistakes. Book-talk of mixed groups ordivergent participants has two advantages: unexpectedly fresh experienceand confidence upon the method, especially the long-term effect of ER.
As a productive activity by language learners, successful book-talkseemed to have the following features:
1) Learners of different reading skill in L2 were able to participate andenjoy the activity because they shared the interest in books written in
the language or to the others’ reading experiences. Because of thecommon interest, it also served the opportunity to meet divergent
people.
2) Book-talk in L2 was easier than other conversational activities because
talkers were able to use pictures and sentences in the books for the
support.
3) Book-talk might guide the talkers to fluent speaking in L2 by theiravoiding simultaneous translation from the mother language if they
could already read the books without translation.
4) Regular book-talks nudged the participants to read beforehand as amaterial of the next talks.
5) Book-talk guided novice learners to read easier-to-read books withhigher comprehension rather than to challenge harder-to-read books

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

with lower comprehension, thus showing the appropriate readability
levels for the leaners.

6 Discussion
The authors asserted that successful book-talks improved
participants’ speaking fluency because the participants could avoid
Japanese-to-English translation when they spoke. However, it is only
supported by the participants’ subjective remarks and the authors’observations. Further study is needed to confirm it.
The long-term effect of book-talk on ER, especially if book-talks keep
motivating lifelong learners of English to read continuously for a long term
also needs to be confirmed, as the book-talk practices reported in thisarticle only lasted a few years even if the participants had read extensively
for longer years.

Conclusion
Book-talk was introduced as an activity to encourage EFL learners tocontinue their ER for a long term so they could improve their language
skills and enjoy the benefits. In a book-talk session, several learners sataround a table, talk about the books they had read during the week, andaccepted questions and comments from the others in turn. It also fitted
well in lessons because 3-minute talks and 2-minute Q&A of six members
took only 30 minutes.
Book-talk motivated elder students, who had three or more years’
experience of ER, to continue their reading outside the class, and veteranusers of the college library, who had been reading English books for many
years. However, its impact on younger students was limited because
elementary EFL learners with less fluency could not compose meaningful

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Book-Talk: An Activity to Motivate Learners to Read Autonomously in a
Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

talks in a short time. Book-talk was also used well in exchanges of different
cultures and multi-generations. A combination of few talks and manyreadings worked well in EFL settings.

Acknowledgement
This article is a result of the research project supported by Grant-inAid for Scientific Research (C) of Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science, No. 16K02913.

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Foreign Language____________________________________________________________

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Contact
Hitoshi Nishizawa
Professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
NIT, Toyota College, 471-8525
Eisei-cho 2-1,
ToyotaJapan
nisizawa@toyota-ct.ac.jp

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