A visit to SEG: the best extensive reading program in the world?
Ben Shearon
I’d wanted to visit SEG for years so I was delighted when the opportunity to do so came up in March 2014. I’mvery grateful to Akio Furukawa for inviting me and to all the teachers and students who welcomed me sowarmly into their classes.

SEG (Scientific Education Group: www.seg.co.jp) is anacademic prep school (学習塾) located in the heart of
Shinjuku in Tokyo. It is a successful business, serving
around 3,000 students a year and helping many ofthem toward academic success. Alongside science andmathematics courses, the school also offers an Englishprogram based around extensive reading. SEG wasfounded in 1980 as a math/science prep school, but in2000 started offering extensive reading classes, whichwere changed in 2006 into the current format ofclasses split between an ER part and an oral
communication part.
For extensive reading practitioners, SEG is important because of the activities of its founder, Akio
Furukawa. Originally a mathematician, Mr Furukawa is perhaps best known for the YL (yomiyasusa,or readability, level) scale and the extensive lists of word counts he publishes in the English ER
Complete Book Guide (英語多読完全ブックガイド) currently in its 4th edition, and online at
http://www.seg.co.jp/sss/.
Mr Furukawa has also been very active in promoting ER in Japan through his activities with the SSS(Start with Simple Stories) movement, JERA (the Japan Extensive Reading Association), and his
numerous publications on ER.

First Impressions
SEG is just a few minutes’ walk from Shinjuku station,
just off the main street. The first hint that you might bedrawing near is the various staff members wearing blue
SEG armbands as they keep an eye on the students
walking to and from the school.
The school is actually spread out among a number ofdifferent buildings in its neighbourhood, each holding
several floors’ worth of classrooms. The English
classrooms are essentially mini-libraries, with eachone holding around twenty thousand books. The
desks are standard Japanese school issue, with 20-30
or so per room.
Glancing at the shelves reveals an eclectic mix of graded readers, levelled readers, picture books,
children’s books, young adult, and regular fiction and non-fiction. There are two types of classrooms:

1one for beginners consisting mainly of Oxford Reading Tree, picture books, and easier graded andlevelled readers, and one for more advanced students with higher level books and novels.
I saw several of my own favourite books at the school, including the Dune series, Heinlein’s Citizen of
the Galaxy, the Millenium trilogy, Nick Sharratt’s Pants books, and pretty much all of the books I use
with my students. I also managed to read a couple of new ones (I was supposed to be observing theclass, but the books proved too tempting) that I really enjoyed: The Giver by Louis Lowry and The
Report Card by Andrew Clements. To be honest, I could have spent months there reading.
The second thing I noticed was how focused the students were: they all had books to read or listen
to (on personal CD players) and were quietly getting on with things. Between books they would fill in
their reading records and consult with the teacher.

The Curriculum
SEG’s English curriculum is divided into two strands: extensive reading classes taught by Japaneseteachers and communication classes taught by native speakers. The ER classes are conducted inJapanese and the communication classes are conducted in English.
Classes contain up to about 15 students and are led by one teacher, occasionally assisted by traineeteachers.
The communication classes start out as
speaking/listening for junior high school 1st year
students, and add intensive reading and writing later on.
These classes use textbooks and are held in the English
classrooms/libraries described above.
In the current SEG system, students stay in the sameclassroom for both ER and communication classes while
their teachers switch halfway (both classes run for 80 in
the a three-hour block with a 20 minute break in themiddle).
During the extensive reading classes, students mainly read silently. There are supplementary
activities such as listening, shadowing, and speed reading, but for much of the class there is a quiet
hum of concentration. Each student reads at their own level, and can choose whether to read, listen,or listen while following along in their book. Most of the books I saw for lower-level students hadCDs to accompany the text.
SEG teaches a purist approach to ER: students read without dictionaries and stop reading if they findbooks difficult or uninteresting. There are no tests or book reports to write: instead students make arecord of the book title and write a short comment about it.
Students record their reading in special notebooks, and many of the students I saw had incredible
cumulative word counts (including one high school girl who was approaching 4 million words!).
Students were reading a range of books, from Oxford Reading Tree to compendiums of famous
murder cases.

2Discovery: Guided Extensive Reading
It wasn’t actually until the morning of the second day that I realized the significance of what I wasseeing in the SEG extensive reading classes. I’d been distracted by the amazing libraries, theorderliness, and the student achievement.
The real point of interest, however, is the teaching method. It doesn’t say much for me that I’d readabout SEG, talked to teachers at SEG, and observed half a dozen classes, and still hadn’t realized
what was going on.
At SEG, students don’t choose books. Instead theteachers, based on their knowledge of the students’level, their interests, and the books, suggest books
that they think are appropriate for the students toread next.
This method is similar to what Donalyn Miller
describes in her book The Book Whisperer. An
experienced teacher can make better
recommendations than students can choose forthemselves, because they have actually read all thebooks and know which books have appealed to which
students in the past.
A skilled teacher can push students to read a little more, to read something a bit more difficult, or totake a break and read something easy if they are tired or low on energy.
Seeing this in action is impressive. Teachers flit around the classroom chatting with students as theyfinish reading, grabbing specific titles from the shelves in passing and dropping them in front ofstudents. Occasionally the teacher will look at a student’s comments in their reading record, or
pause to write something in their own notes.
I talked to a couple of the teachers about this central aspect of their classes, and they confirmed that
it was not as effortless as it looked.
Teachers keep detailed records of what each student has read, including notes on whether they
liked it, found it difficult, or gave up. They spend time before class mentally preparing and lining up
possible books. One teacher I spoke to spends most of her 90-minute commute thinking about andmaking notes about which books to recommend to each student.
The students are not passive in this process, but are involved in a constant dialogue with theirteachers, both through their reading notebooks and also by talking about each book as they finish it.
Students are free to stop reading books if they find them boring or difficult, and often make requests
or suggestions. One student in a class I observed asked his teacher for a book featuring water polo, arequest that had both of us stumped!
Teachers at SEG try to balance graded and non-graded material to maximise the benefit to students.
While graded readers are often a better fit in terms of accessible language, levelled or native
materials tend to be more attractive and interesting. A judicious mix of books allows students to get
the best of both worlds.
The other key ingredient in the ER program is in-class reading (sustained silent reading), whichmeans that the students do at least 70-80 minutes of reading in English a week. Many students also
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take books home with them, and of course starting them in class makes it much more likely thatthey will finish them as homework.
Mr Furukawa told me that roughly a third of his students attain high proficiency in English (asmeasured by independent test scores). As a point of reference, I would say that maybe 10% of mine
go on to master English and make it a part of who they are.

Conclusion: Lessons to Take AwayMy visit to SEG blew me away. The size and success of the school, the richness of the resources, theachievement of the students, and the skill and knowledge of the teachers changed my view of whatis possible.
I don’t think I will be able to adopt guided extensive reading in my university classes (with over 40
students per class, I just won’t be able to give each student enough attention) but I can certainly try
to increase the number of interactions I have with students. I have resolved to contribute more tostudents’ reading choices by recommending books and giving advice.
Mr Furukawa and SEG welcome visits from teachers, and I recommend that any teacher interested
in extensive reading or English teaching consider giving them a visit.

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