Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods (MJLTM)
ISSN: 2251-6204
www.mjltm.org

Effect of a six-year long extensive reading program for reluctant
learners of English
Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, and Yuri Ichikawa
National Institute of Technology, Toyota College, 471-8525 Toyota, Japan

Abstract

English as a foreign language (EFL) education in Japan especially in engineering major had suffered its ineffectiveness forseveral decades. Engineering students were reluctant to learn the language and the graduates had to struggle long after thegraduation. One reason for the failure was the absolute lack of exposure to the target language. Learners used English only in theclassroom, and English grammar and vocabulary were taught as knowledge using Japanese for the explanation.
To guarantee the necessary exposure to English, we added extensive reading (ER) lessons once a week through the year fromsecond to seventh grade to our seven-year engineering course in 2004. The effect was measured by the TOEIC tests, which thethird and sixth graders took every year. As the graduates in 2009 and later academic years received the full advantage of the sixyear ER lessons, we could compare their TOEIC scores with the ones of former students.
The effect was rather fragile in the third grade, however, we found significant TOEIC score increase in the sixth or seventh
grades, which was comparative to the score increase caused by studying in English speaking countries for 10 months. After acertain threshold, around four years or later in our program, the students become free from anxiety, relaxed in reading andlistening, and eager to speak or write in English. In this paper, the authors would like to share the role of comprehensible input
upon EFL learners, installment and practice of ER programs, and improved attitude of reluctant learners through ER.
© 2017 The Authors. Published by EBSCO.
Keywords: Extensive reading; English as a foreign language; Total words read; Duration of the program; TOEIC

1. Background
Japanese students’ English proficiency is generally low as is shown in the national average scores of the Test ofEnglish for International Communication (TOEIC). The TOEIC is a standardized proficiency test of receptive
English skills for non-native speakers of English (Woodford, 1982) widely used in Japan. The test scores are
categorized in five levels: A (860 - 990); B (730 – 855); C (470 – 725); D (220 – 465); and E (10 – 215) by the
proficiency scale (IIBC, 2015: 23). From the description of the can-be lists on the proficiency scale, we call the level
C as lower-intermediate, the level D as elementary, and the level E as beginner in this study. The institutional
program of the TOEIC had 1.29 million test takers in 2014 academic year (IIBC, 2015: 5), where 62% belonged tothe score zone almost match to the beginner or the elementary levels (10 - 490) and 31% stayed in the score zone
almost match to the lower-intermediate level (495 - 740). While the average score of university students major in
English improved to the lower-intermediate level in their fourth grade, average scores of students in National
Institution of Technology (NIT) colleges and university students major in Science, Engineering, and Agriculture
stayed in elementary level for almost the decade.
One possible reason for the low English proficiency of Japanese Engineering students was the absolute lack of
exposure to the target language. The students learnt English as knowledge for examinations, used grammartranslation as the default method, and did not use the language outside the classroom. Because Japanese students had
little experience of actually reading English books without translation or listening English narrations and did not use
English in daily life, they naturally lacked the exposure to the language necessary to read or listen it fluently. Their© 2017 The Authors. Published by EBSCO.

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reading often meant translating English texts into Japanese word by word, and they did not believe it possible thatthey were able to comprehend English texts without translation.
Extensive reading (ER) was a potential remedy to increase the students’ exposure to the language in English as aforeign language (EFL) settings, where the language was not used outside the classroom. Day and Bamford (1998)
clarified ten characteristics of successful extensive reading programs, two of which were “students read as much as
possible” and “reading materials are well within the linguistic competence of the students in terms of vocabulary andgrammar” (pp.7-8). However, the influence of ER on English education in Japan was limited until the beginning of
21st century when Sakai (2002) proposed one million words as a milestone for ER, Sakai and Kanda (2005)
proposed a detailed methodology of conducting SSR programs, and Furukawa & Itoh (2005) published an
introductory guidebook of ER for adult learners. They stressed the importance of the amount to be read along withthe easiness of the English texts as the means of comprehensible inputs.
The benefits of ER should also be shown quantitatively because Japanese teachers were wondering if the benefits
of ER were large enough to alter the current teaching practices. They were especially uncertain if the promised
benefits would transferred to their students’ academic performances at school, or scores at high-stake examinations
or standardized tests. They also needed to know the quantity and quality of their students’ effort to enjoy thebenefits, in other words, how many total words elementary EFL learners should read and start from which
readability levels.
There were several studies, where the benefit of ER was measured with standardized tests. Mason (2004)
evaluated the effect of ER with reading section of TOEIC. 104 Japanese college students majoring in English had
read about 500 thousand words in three semesters (1.5 years). 88 students’ TOEIC/Reading scores were measured as
pre-test and post-test, and the average was 121 and 157 respectively. If we assume the same score ratio of reading
part and total score: 0.446 (123.64/277.26) was kept, their TOEIC total score was estimated to be 272 and 353
respectively. The score of the post-test, however, remained still in elementary level (< 470), and thus a half million
words may not be large enough.
Nishizawa, Yoshioka, and Fukada (2010) reported students’ TOEIC score increases in a 4-year long ER program.
Their average TOEIC scores were 435 for a group (N = 9) who had read 310 thousand total words in median, 498
for another group (N = 13) who had read 660 thousand words, and 604 for the last group (N = 8) who had read 1.8
million words. For achieving a large enough score gain in the TOEIC test, the students in elementary level had toread a million total words or more in an ER program that lasts more than several years.
A million total words were proposed by Sakai (2002) as a milestone for ER in Japanese EFL settings based on theexperience of his ER program for university engineering majors, and were about eight to ten times of the total words
read by the university students in Robb and Susser’s ER project (1989) who had read 641 pages in average.
There were a few ER programs in which the students actually read the amount close to a million words. Mason’s(2004) students, college English-majors read an average of 2,300 pages (about 500 thousand words), and a group of
students spent 150 hours reading. Furukawa (2008) reported the average total words read by ninth graders was 680
thousand words in 2.2 years of his ER program. And the average total words were extended to 1.2 million words by
12th graders staying in the sixth-year form of his program (Furukawa, 2011). Nishino (2007) followed the ER of
two third-year junior high school students for 2.5 years and they read 36 or 42 graded readers. Their estimated total
words by Beglar & Hunt (2014: 31) were 333 and 402 thousand standard words, or 392 and 473 thousand words
calculated by the coefficient binding two measures: 0.85 (Beglar & Hunt, 2014: 45). Kanda (2009) studied the ER ofa university student for three years, who had read a million words. Nishizawa, Yoshioka, and Fukada (2010)
reported that their students’ median total words read was 690 thousand words in their 4-year long ER program.
Based on the background, we would like to answer the following practical research questions to evaluate the sixyear long ER program for reluctant Engineering students:
 Is it possible to improve Engineering students’ average English proficiency from elementary level (TOEIC 300):
the estimated level of K9 students to lower-intermediate level (TOEIC 550): the expected level for newly
employed university graduates (IIBC, 2015: 23) in a six-year long ER program?
 How many total words of English texts do the students need to read to achieve the target TOEIC score?

Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, and Yuri Ichikawa / Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods (MJLTM) ISSN: 2251-62043

 Does the duration of an ER program effect on the students’ achievement?
2. Method
The ER program was conducted at one of NIT colleges that was a specialized institution for early engineering
education in Japan. There were 57 NIT colleges and their new students occupy about 1% of all K10 students inJapan. The NIT college had five Engineering departments, and each department had a 5-year foundation course(class size from 1st to 5th grade was 40 students each) and a 2-year advanced course (class size for 6th and 7th grade
was 4 students each). The college accepted graduates from junior high school, where they had already learnt English
for three years. Fresh students’ English proficiency was estimated to be around TOEIC 300. From 10 to 20 % of
graduates from the foundation course, whose English skills were in middle range of the class, proceeded to theadvanced course.
The subjects of this study consisted of twelve cohorts who had entered the foundation course from 2000 to 2011,
stayed in the college for seven years, and graduated from the advanced course from 2006 to 2017, which were calledfrom 2006 cohort to 2017 cohort in this study. All of them belonged to the same Engineering department, andattended the ER lessons from three to seven years. The students who had studied abroad or stayed in the college
shorter or longer than seven years were excluded from this study. Two students who had read extraordinary amountof English books in the program were also excluded.
English education in the college consisted of traditional and ER lessons (Table 1). The ER lessons had been
introduced in 2004 for all six grades from the second to the seventh grade of the course, and 12 students of group A(cohort 2006 – 2008) started their ER in different grades, from the fifth grade for cohort 2006 to the third grade forcohort 2008. From 12 to 19% of their total lessons was ER. 14 students of group B (cohort 2009 – 2011) started
their ER lessons in the second grade and attended from five to six units of ER lessons, which was from 18 to 22% of
their total English lessons. The students of group C (cohort 2012 – 2013) and group D (cohort 2014 – 2017) stayedin the ER program through the first six or all seven grades in the college. The students of group C took 6.7 units of
ER lessons (23 – 25% of their total English lessons), and the students of group D took from 8 to 9 units (29 – 33%of their total English lessons). One unit was a 45-minutes weekly lesson through the year or a 90-minute weekly
lesson for half a year. Traditional lessons were five units in the first grade, three or four units in the grades from thesecond to the fourth and the sixth grade, and one unit in the seventh grade. The units varied by student from zero to
two in the fifth grade, which made the variation of lesson units in Table 1.
Table 1. Subjects and English lessons.
Group

A

Cohort2006 – 2008

N of subjects

12

Traditional
Units ofEnglishlessons

B

C

D

2009 – 20112012 – 20132014 – 2017

14

13

11

21 – 23

21 – 23

20.3 – 22.3

18 – 20ER

3–5(12 – 19%)from 5th – 3rd grades

5–6(18 – 22%)from 2nd grade

6.7(23 – 25%)
from 1st grade

8–9(29 – 33%)
from 1st grade

Total

24 – 28

26 – 29

27 – 29

26 – 29* One unit is a 45-minute weekly lesson for 30 weeks or a 90-minute weekly lesson for 15 weeks

Main ER activity was sustained silent reading (SSR), plus some shadowing, and reading while listening (LR).
Shadowing was conducted mostly at the first grade for the students to familiarize English sound. LR was a practice
to read English texts along with listening to audio narration of the text. Students were not supposed to pause orinterrupt the narration and were force to read the text at the same speed of the narration. They comprehended thestory mainly from the texts but not from the narration at first. The narration decided the reading speed, and was
expected to protect the students from their habit to analyse English texts grammatically or translate the English texts

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into Japanese. It made a good introduction to ER. Around 30% of the students in from second to fifth grades did LR
as the in-class activity. Typical reading rate of the third-grade students was around 120 words per minute (WPM).
ER lessons from second to fifth grade were done in the college library where the books and portable CD players for
LR were kept. The students were not allowed to talk aloud in the library but they could select their books to readdirectly from the bookshelves and also check them out for out-of-class readings. We have introduced output
activities such as writing and speaking into the ER lessons for the sixth and seventh grades since 2015 academic
year. They aimed to encourage out-of-class reading because the theme of activities was to talk about a book they had
read during the week.
All the students had recorded their reading histories in and out of the class in their logbooks, which wereperiodically reviewed by the teachers. Typically they were collected a day or two before a lesson, examined by theteacher and added a comment or a message, and returned to the students at the beginning of the lesson. Each record
contained the date, title, series name, readability level and word count of the book, cumulated total words, fivegraded subjective evaluation of the story, and short comment describing what the students thought about the story or
how they felt about their reading.
We used the total score of TOEIC tests to evaluate English proficiency of the students because the test had highreliability necessary for a long-term study and was sensible to English skills of elementary and intermediate levels,and students’ scores of reading section and listening section increased in balance in the past studies (e.g., Nishizawa,
Yoshioka & Fukada, 2010). All the students took at least two TOEIC tests in the middle of their third and sixth
grades. From the date of the tests and total words at the tests recorded in student’s reading log, we could analyse therelation of each student’s total words and TOEIC scores to estimate the expected TOEIC scores when they would
read a million words. We also analysed the influence of duration the students stayed in the ER program.

3. Results
The total words read by the students were shown in Table 2. They were expressed in median to avoid theinfluence of a few students who had read outstanding amount or skewedness.
Table 2. Total words read (Median, thousand words).
Group
CohortN of subjects

A
2006 – 2008
12

B
2009 – 2011
14

C
2012 – 201313

D
2014 – 201711

3rd grade

–*1

410*2
(in 1.5 years)
273 / year484
(in 2.5 years)
194 / year679
(in 2.5 years)
272 /year

6th grade372(in 1.5 – 3.5 years)629(in 4.5 years)
140 /year

1,000(in 5.5 years)
182 /year

1,220(in 5.5 years)
222 / year

7th grade770*3(in 3 – 4 years)

1,060*4(in 6 years)
177 / year

1,300
(in 7 years)
186 / year

2,240*5(in 7 years)
320 /year*1 no record was available, *2 three students of cohort 2011, *3 two students of cohort 2006 and four
students of cohort 2007, *4 one student of cohort 2009 and three students of cohort 2010,*5 one student of cohort 2014 and three students of cohort 2016

The students of group A, who had joined the ER program from the third to fifth grades, read 372 thousand wordsof easy-to-read English texts during from 1.5 to 3.5 years until they took the TOEIC tests in the middle of the sixth
grade. Six students continued the ER lesson in the seventh grade and read 770 thousand total words in the program.
The students of group B joining the ER lessons in the second grade read 629 thousand words in 4.5 years. Four
students continued the ER lesson to the seventh grade and read 1.06 million total words in the program. The students

Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, and Yuri Ichikawa / Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods (MJLTM) ISSN: 2251-62045

of group C had joined the ER lessons in the first grade, read 484 thousand words in the first 2.5 years, 1.0 million
words until the middle of the sixth grade, and 1.3 million words until the end of the seventh grade. The students ofgroup D had taken five units of ER lessons in the first three grades, read 679 thousand words in 2.5 years and 1.22
million words until the middle of the sixth grade. Four students continued the ER lesson to the seventh grade andread 2.24 million total words in the program.
All the students took the TOEIC tests in the middle of the sixth grades, and the students of group B, C and D took
the test also in the middle of the third grade (Table 3). There were no significant differences among the average
TOEIC scores of three groups in the third grade. Additional 269 thousand words of ER cumulated by transforming
2.5 units of traditional lessons into ER in the first 2.5 years did not increase the average TOEIC score of group D
compared to group B.
Table 3. TOEIC score (average ± standard deviation) and yearly increase rate.
Group
CohortN of subjects

A
2006 – 2008
12

B
2009 – 2011
14

C
2012 – 201313

D
2014 – 201711

3rd grade–*1

378 ± 59348 ± 29

380 ± 68

6th grade

411 ± 58491 ± 74
+38 / year

484 ± 51
+45 / year

490 ± 80
+37 / year

7th grade(N)

468 ± 70
(6 *2)

540 ± 32(4*3)

548 ± 69
+43 / year

575 ± 54
(4*4)

*1 TOEIC tests were not taken, *2 two students of cohort 2006 and four students of cohort 2007,*3 one student of cohort 2009 and three students of cohort 2010,*4 one student of cohort 2014 and three students of cohort 2016(a) TOEIC 412 at a million words(b) TOEIC 484 at a million words(c) TOEIC 525 at a million words

Fig. 1. Relation of total words read and the TOEIC score.

In the sixth grade, the differences of the average scores of group A and the other groups were statisticallysignificant (t < 0.01), but the differences among groups B, C, and D were not. 591 thousand words of ER, which wasadded by transforming three units of traditional lessons into ER in the first three years, did not increase the average
TOEIC score of group D compared to group B. In the seventh year, there were differences between the average scoreof group A and the other groups B, C, and D (0.014 < t < 0.032) although the sample sizes were small except group
C. Comparison between group B and D was inappropriate because of the small data sizes of both groups.
Although the student who had read more tended to get higher TOEIC score, there was also an influence of theduration of an ER program. To clarify the influence of the duration more in detail, we divided the samples into threeranges of ER duration and analysed the distribution of the total words read and TOEIC scores separately (Fig. 1).
First range of ER duration was from 1.5 to 3.5 years (Fig. 1(a)). Three samples from group B and all samples from

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Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, and Yuri Ichikawa / Vol.7 , Issue.8 , August (2017) 116–123

groups C and D in the third grade belong to this range. All samples of group A in the sixth grade and six samples ofthe seventh grade also belonged to this range. Second range was from 4.0 to 5.5 years (Fig. 1(b)), and all samples
from group B, C, and D in the sixth grade belonged to this range. Third range was from 6.0 to 7.0 years (Fig. 1(c)).
Four samples from group B, all samples from group C, and four samples from Group D in the seventh grade
belonged to this range.
The students who stayed in the ER program longer tended to have higher TOEIC scores than the students whostayed shorter period if they had read the same amount. The regression lines of three ER durations in Fig. 1 were farapart, and the expected TOEIC scores when a student would read a million words were 412 for the duration of 1.5 –3.5 years, 484 (+72) for the duration of 4.0 – 5.5 years, and 525 (+41) for the duration of 6.0 – 7.0 years. The
students stopped to hesitate in speaking or writing about their recent reading experiences when they stayed in the
program for six or more years. Their phases or sentences were not always accurate but they did not need longpauses, which many EFL learners needed for translating what they wanted to say in English. They did not seem tohave anxiety for using the language.
4. Discussions
The ER program in this study demonstrated it was possible to improve Engineering students’ average English
proficiency from elementary level (TOEIC < 400) to lower-intermediate level (TOEIC 550). It needed, however, theduration of seven years as shown in the average score of group C in the seventh grade (TOEIC 548). Six years were
not long enough, as the average TOEIC scores of all four groups did not exceed TOEIC 500 at the sixth grade, andan additional year made an apparent difference.
Increasing ER lesson units from once a week to twice a week in the second and third grades did not increase the
TOEIC scores measured in the sixth grade as the TOEIC score of group D (490) was not higher than the one ofgroup C (484) even though the total words read increased from 1.0 million words of group C to 1.22 million wordsof group D. The yearly reading pace of group C (186 thousand words per year) might be high enough because theproposed yearly pace by Nation (2014) was 171 thousand words per year for meeting 2nd 1,000 word families
twelve repetition in average and learn the vocabulary incidentally.
The duration of the ER program had larger influence upon the students’ achievement once the reading pace was
kept through the ER program. ER duration of seven years was also supported by the questionnaire to nine students in2013 cohort (Nishizawa and Yoshioka 2015) that “they felt that that they could read English texts fluently when they
had read 821,000 words in 4.0 years, and they felt that they could avoid Japanese in reading English texts when they
had read 876,000 words in 4.3 years in average. To either of the questions, the slowest learner answered that theyneeded 6.5 years to feel that way.”
Table 4. Comparison of the learning histories of three groups.

Group
Grade
N of subjects

A
6th
12

B
6th
14

B
3rd
14

Duration of ER

1.5 -3.5 years

4.5 years

1.5 years

19 – 21

19 – 21

12

ER

1.5 – 3.5

4.5

1.5

Total

Units ofEnglishlessons

Traditional*1

20.5 – 24.5

23.5 – 25.5

13.5

Total words (thousand)

372

629

410*2

TOEIC

411 ± 58base

491 ± 74
t = 0.002

378 ± 59
t = 0.08*1 the units of ER lessons are equal to the duration of ER lessons for group A and B,*2 three students of cohort 2011

Hitoshi Nishizawa, Takayoshi Yoshioka, and Yuri Ichikawa / Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods (MJLTM) ISSN: 2251-62047

One million total words was not enough to achieve the target TOEIC score (550) because the students of group C
needed to read 1.3 million words in median to receive TOEIC 548 in average at the seventh grade. 1.3 million total
words could be reached at the end of seven years with the reading pace of 186 thousand words per year.
It was hard to explain the higher TOEIC scores of elder students by the increased units of concurring traditional
lessons. Of course, the students of group B at the sixth grade had longer duration of ER and more units of traditional
lessons than the students of group B at the third grade (the middle and right columns of Table 4).
However, the comparisons of the students of group A at the sixth grade with the students of group B at the sixthand third grades showed larger influence of the duration upon the units of traditional lessons. Firstly, significantly
higher (t < 0.01) TOEIC average of group B (6 th grade) over group A (6th grade) could not be explained by the sameunits of traditional lessons but the longer duration of ER program or larger total words read by the students.
Secondly, the difference of TOEIC average between group A (6 th grade) and group B (3rd grade) was
insignificant (t > 0.05) even though group A (6th grade) had 58 – 75% more units of traditional lessons. The durationof ER lessons of both groups were shorter than four years and the total words read by the students were almost thesame. More (7 - 9 units) traditional lessons of group A (6 th grade) could not cause significantly higher average
TOEIC score than the one of group B (3rd grade).
Limitations of this study are firstly its sample size. We have to assume the estimation is rather inaccurate. Further
studies may find shorter or longer duration of an ER program necessary to achieve the TOEIC 550 target as five
years or eight years instead of the seven years. Secondly, this study assumes that the concurrent traditional lessons,at least their effect on TOEIC scores, stayed the same for more than ten years. We do not count the unknown effectof improvement in concurrent traditional lessons. We only presume the same small change as the small change ofnational average in TOEIC scores (IIBC, 2015). Thirdly, the recommended duration of an ER program may dependon the initial English proficiency of the students. It is highly probable that more proficient EFL students need shorter
duration than seven years to achieve the same goal.
5. Conlcusions
A long-term ER program at a Japanese technical college demonstrated it possible to improve engineering
students’ English proficiency from elementary level to lower-intermediate level with 45-minute weekly ER lessons
for consecutive seven years. The students who had read 1.3 million total words of easy-to-read English texts with ayearly pace of 186 thousand words had the average TOEIC score of 548 at the end of the program. Six or sevenyears of the duration had an apparent advantage upon shorter duration of three years. They became free from anxiety
and eager to use the language for their communication.
Acknowledgements
This article is a result of the research project supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) of Japan Society
for the Promotion of Science, No. 16K02913.
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