Sophia University Junior College Division Faculty Journal
第 45 号, 2024, 155-175

Teaching Practice

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in
the Active Learning Classroom
Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano
Abstract
The place of English picture book reading and of extensive reading in the classroom
has grown in Japan in recent years. These two different types of activities have takenplace at Sophia University Junior College Division (SUJCD) and have contributed
to increasing students’ skills and interest in English learning. This article traces theimplementation and evolution of an extensive reading Skills course as well as an
English picture book read-aloud activity practiced as part of a service-learning programon teaching English to young learners. We will showcase activities used in read-aloudand extensive reading which developed in response to challenges in implementation
and which met the needs of active learning language classrooms. Both activities,
administrated in active learning type classes, suggested positive outcomes for SUJCD
students.

Introduction
The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology(MEXT) has issued a revised course of study for K-12 education emphasizing
competences in three areas: knowledge, skills, and values (MEXT, 2017). It also has
issued guidelines encouraging the use of active learning in the classroom in Japanesehigher education (MEXT, 2020). According to the MEXT glossary, active learning
includes teaching and learning methods that incorporate learners’ active participationin learning as opposed to a one-way transfer of knowledge from the instructor to thelearners. Examples of such teaching and learning methods in the glossary are group
work, experiential learning, debates, and discussions, but reading activities are notexplicitly mentioned as active learning.
Nevertheless, in the domain of language teaching both inside and beyond Japan,
reading and extensive reading (ER) have been given increasing attention. Stephen
Krashen (2004) has argued that reading offers the language input necessary for─ 155 ─

Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

language acquisition, while I. S. P. Nation has proposed that a balanced language
curriculum should include “four strands” in which reading accounts for 25% of the classtime (2013). Nation includes reading both in the fluency strand of the class design andin the “learning from input” strand in which listening to stories constitutes an importantpart of listening input.
This paper shows how two separate classes offered at SUJCD have attemptedboth to introduce reading activities as suggested by Krashen and Nation and to createan active learning classroom environment as defined by MEXT. While the two classesfeatured here differ in the students they attract and the types of reading activities used,
they come together in addressing the common challenge of integrating reading activities
into active learning.
We will introduce specific reading activities conducted in these two different classes.
In doing this, our aim is not to correlate quantitatively certain variables with increased
reading or motivation in a highly controlled setting, but rather to share how documented
high-impact reading practices such as read-aloud and ER were applied to our individual
institutional settings and the activities we used to meet needs and overcome challenges
in our cases. Our hope is to suggest ideas that might be extrapolated and applied more
widely.

1. Read-Aloud Picture Stories to Young Learners
This section will report on a type of reading activity SUJCD students took part in
as one of the service-learning (SL) programs held by the college. Reading picture story
books may seem to be a passive, receptive type of learning for readers. However, throughthe procedure, the SUJCD students and the elementary students both showed active
engagement. The lessons focusing on read-aloud activities turned out to be lively, active
learning opportunities for both groups.
An English SL program named “English Friend” (hereafter referred to as EF)
focusing on teaching English to children in local elementary schools has been carriedon by the SUJCD students since 2008. EF has become a systematic teaching programaiming at young learners, specifically elementary school students. Each year orsemester, the EF SUJCD students have created original lesson plans with different
themes and topics. As for the outline of the SUJCD English SL programs, refer to thepapers by Kano (2019, 2014). In the fiscal year 2019, the EF lessons focused on readaloud activities using picture stories for young learners. The picture story read-aloudsessions were held both in spring and fall semester of that year, and students visited─ 156 ─

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroom

one hundred sixty-nine classes of thirteen elementary schools in the municipal district
where the campus is located. Twenty-eight students enrolled in the program during
spring semester, and twenty-one students in the fall semester.
In this activity EF SUJCD students chose two books each semester for readingaloud. In the spring semester, Don’t Push the Button! by Bill Cotter (2013), and Don’t
Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems (2004) were used, while in the fall semester,
Skeleton Hiccups written by Margery Cuyler and illustrated by S.D. Schindler (2003),
and Ketchup on your Cornflakes? by Nick Sharratt (2006) were selected. The four books
were chosen among a selection of various picture story books introduced by the instructorof the course. The EF students picked two books for each semester class considering thetarget audiences’ age, interest, and English proficiency. The familiarity with English of
the elementary students varied according to their grade, as they had thirty-five periodsrdthof English activity lessons during their 3 and 4 grade, then took seventy periods ofththEnglish classes in 5 and 6 grade respectively. The spring semester activity was aimed
at children in grades 5 and 6, who had already attended some English classes during
grades 3 and 4 as part of the mandatory subjects in elementary education. In contrast,
the fall semester target grades were grades 3 and 4 who had little exposure to English
compared to the spring semester learners.
The lessons consisted of two read-aloud sessions. One of the two books had aworksheet created by the EF students. The purpose of the worksheets differed according
to the book. For the book Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, the worksheet was intended
to let the children see what they had listened to and enhance comprehension, so thatthey felt more secure and satisfied. A copy of the worksheets and the detailed lessonplans for the spring and fall semester EF read-aloud activity are provided as appendices
A to D.
At first, the SUJCD students perceived the read-aloud activity as a one-way,
receptive type of learning. They expected the elementary students to listen to themquietly and obediently. However, as they practiced with each other before visiting theelementary school, they started to understand the elements of building a good readaloud activity.
The students reading the story book started to use more gestures, facial expressions,and voice inflections. As they read through the pages, they carefully synced the picture
and the words and phrases on the book. Sometimes, different characters in the bookwere read with different tones of voice, making the character distinguishable and more
attractive.

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Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

The SUJCD students who acted as the elementary listeners in the practice sessions
also showed changes. They were looking at the pictures of the book intently. They also
started to nod, smile, or laugh more, and responded in short utterances such as ‘Oh,’‘Wow!’ and ‘No!’ The more the listeners showed reaction, the more the readers got
livelier. What we saw during the practices was a development of two-way communication
skills between the reader and the listener as they were encouraged by each other’sinteraction.
The whole read-aloud practice grew to a communicative, interactive activity
as they did it many more times. After they started visiting elementary schools andactually did the read-aloud activity several times, the SUJCD students’ reading became
even more expressive. As many of the children intently listened to the story read andresponded with genuine interest, the readers were encouraged to be more expressive andcommunicative as they read.
Through observing the SUJCD students grow into good readers during thesemester, the authors were strongly convinced that read-aloud is a powerful activity thatfacilitates the learning of the reader as well as the listeners. It requires commitment andcreativity. It is a two-way, communicative, and active learning experience. The English
skill element that showed most improvement was pronunciation, both in phonetics andprosody. As the students carefully prepared and practiced the read-aloud sessions theygained secure knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar related with the content of
the book. In addition to the language-related elements, basic pedagogical skills such as
using a clear and audible voice, moving closer or kneeling to the elementary students tobuild rapport and ease anxiety were observed. SUJCD students also demonstrated classmanagement techniques to maintain class discipline.
For the listeners, listening to the story being read and following along with thepictures in the book is an effective way of gaining language input. The meaning can be
grasped more easily through the visual aids. When the book is read aloud, the sound isincorporated with the meaning in a more holistic way. The listeners can guess or predictthe meaning and storyline from the picture and the reader’s verbal and non-verbal clues,
such as gestures, voice inflections, or facial expressions as mentioned earlier. Also, thenon-linguistic clues included in the picture story books, such as the situation, setting,and characters, can enhance the understanding of the story. Listening to picture stories
can be a very “active” form of learning.
Pinter (2017) mentions the effect of active listening when the teacher/reader elicits
information from the children listening to the story in a read-aloud activity. The teacher/─ 158 ─

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroom

reader will comment on the story, make links with the listeners’ experiences and build
understanding upon their schema. The teacher/reader can keep them engaged by asking
them to predict what would happen next. The SUJCD students tried to put these into
practice.
Read-aloud activities using picture story books have great potential in facilitating
language learning, especially with young learners. Thorough preparation, practice, andcareful procedure are essential to making the experience a fruitful one.

2. I mplementation of SUJCD’s Extensive Reading, Rapid
Reading Skills Class
Another attempt to bring reading into an active learning class setting is a semielective English Skills class called Extensive Reading, Rapid Reading. The class wasintroduced in 2010 and has undergone several transformations. These transformations
show the changing place of reading in the classroom due to changes in context and intechnology, and we will look at these developments in detail.
Implementing the extensive reading, rapid reading course required integrating
the course into the institutional curriculum, finding suitable reading material, andhelping students overcome initial challenges posed by extensive reading itself. In termsof institutional curriculum, the course needed to both fit the overall curriculum design
and to be feasible regarding the content taught and the reading resources available tostudents.
When the extensive reading class was introduced in 2010, it fit inside the overall
curriculum as a semi-elective English Skills class, one of twenty-one Skills classes that
fulfilled part of the three-semester or six-credit graduation requirement for English
Skills. Skills classes complemented the four-skills English classes that students are
required to take each semester. They focused either on a particular language skill suchas speaking (public speaking, debate, and discussion), listening, writing, or reading or
on a particular use of English (academic English, travel English, workplace English,
English for transfer exams or for language ability tests, etc.). Skills classes were offeredat different levels from basic to advanced.
As such, the curriculum already included reading skills class offerings at thebasic, intermediate, and advanced levels prior to 2010, but the extensive reading, rapid
reading class introduced that year distinguished itself from other reading classes byusing reading materials from vastly different fields and genres, available in a convenient1

textbook. The textbook emphasized strategies to use in reading different types of─ 159 ─

Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

texts. The course paired this varied reading with training in reading quickly. It was
categorized as an advanced-level language course. While this course may not meet all
characteristics of extensive reading as popularized by the Extensive Reading Foundation(2011), it showed an institutional will to introduce more reading into the curriculum,
especially extensive reading.
Specifically, some proponents of extensive reading would argue that the use of atextbook runs contrary to doing extensive reading because students should be readingmaterial which is at their individual reading level with very few unknown words so thatthey can read in large quantities. It is therefore better to have students self-select thereading material according to their needs rather than to use a textbook. Nevertheless, at
SUJCD the same basic course configuration with a textbook was used until 2014.
During this time, the school was continuing to acquire resources for extensive
reading. Prior to 2010 the school library had collected graded readers from publishers
such as Penguin, Oxford, and Cambridge, but with a formal class on extensive readingcame an impetus to collect more graded readers and from a larger selection of publishers
including Macmillan and IBC publishing. A special section of the library for graded
readers was also set up at around the same time as the extensive reading course.
From 2015 Melvin Andrade introduced a new syllabus design for the extensive
reading, rapid reading class. The syllabus continued to pair extensive reading with
rapid reading skills and speed reading, but the extensive reading component no longer
used a common textbook for all students. Instead, students were trained to self-selecttheir reading from the growing collection of graded readers that could be borrowed fromthe school library, especially those published by Cambridge, Macmillan, Oxford, andPenguin.
A unified textbook was assigned for doing the rapid reading skills portion of the2class, but although students used that book (a TOEIC test prep book) to practice reading
skills such as chunking and becoming aware of their purpose in reading (to understandthe main idea or to look for specific information), students were marked mostly on their
vocabulary quiz score for work done in that textbook and not on their reading speed or
the acquisition of a specific reading skill.
The overall grading scheme clearly reflected the priorities set in the course design
by Andrade: 50% of the course grade was connected to extensive reading with 25% being
the amount of reading done and 25% being book reports presenting a graded reader
that the student had read. The other 50% was participation in the class and score on
vocabulary quizzes, each 25%.

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Andrade significantly labelled the book reports “interactive” book reports inreference to Rod Ellis’s principles (2005) for successful instructed language acquisitionand specifically the principle concerning opportunities to interact with the L2 (Andrade2008). Andrade organized the book report activity as a presentation of the book madeby one student at a time in a small group with the other students listening and taking
notes on the presentation. Students needed to use the L2 both when they were speaking
and when they were listening to other students. The book report presentation thus
became an information transfer activity involving multiple skills. To facilitate students’tasks the teacher provided highly scaffolded worksheets for both the presenter andthe listeners. Student presenters needed to provide specific information such the title,
author, and length of the book (in number of words), the number of main characters(with a few details about each), as well as the number of main events in the story with asentence or two explaining each event. The listener’s worksheet contained a form wherethe various data about each book needed to be filled in, and listeners were encouraged toquestion the presenter to get information they missed or could not hear. Each memberof the small group prepared a book report for the same class session, so that one small
group session with each member taking a turn presenting while the others filled in theirnote-taking sheets would involve considerable amounts of time and interaction in the
L2.
While some aspects of Andrade’s interactive book reports are similar to Tadahiro
Taniguchi’s “bibliobattle” (2013), in which learners introduce a book to the group for
five minutes, answer questions from other participants about the book for two to threeminutes, and then vote for the “Champion Book,” Andrade’s focus on scaffolding forpresenters and listeners in the interactive book reports allowed him to conduct theactivity more frequently. For its more pacific name, the interactive book report activity
was no less aggressive in its goal of using the L2. Andrade’s syllabus required students
to prepare a total of fourteen book reports during the thirty class sessions of the fifteenweek semester. A comparable ER class syllabus using the mini version of “bibliobattles”
where the time for each presentation and question session is shortened, has less thanhalf of that amount (Yamauchi, 2023, p. 23).
In the following year, however, Andrade made significant changes to his fifteenweek syllabus. Some of the extensive reading with graded readers was replaced byreading using the SRA reading laboratory kits that already existed in the classrooms,
and the interactive book reports were also reduced to three times during the fifteenweek semester. Instead, the skills portion of the class was increased to include TOEFL

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preparation perhaps to respond to the interest of some students or because TOEFL
reading material was more readily available.
Several factors can explain the decrease in the number of interactive book reports ofthe 2016 class, the primary one being lack of resources. The graded readers used in classwere the ones from the school library and it was the students’ responsibility to borrowthe books and bring them to each class. The burden was on the student to self-selectboth the appropriate level of books and a sufficient quantity of books to read during classtime. Given the limited collection of books at the library, it could be difficult to ensurethat each student had enough books at the appropriate level available to them. If they
had not foreseen enough books, they might also not have enough reading material inclass. Consequently, the lack of books put limits on the number of interactive book reportsessions that could be carried out. Using the SRA laboratory material solved some of
the logistical issues related to reading material, but a better solution was still hoped for.
The online platform Xreading.com had already been launched in 2014, and Andrade had
first-hand experience with the platform at another institution, but SUJCD’s network
only offered internet in a few classrooms at that time. Unfortunately, staffing needs in2017 and 2018 resulted in temporarily suspending the Skills class on extensive reading
and rapid reading.
When the extensive reading class was again offered in 2019 and entrusted to Lupas,
Wi-Fi was available in all SUJCD classrooms. Andrade shared valuable materials andexperiences teaching extensive reading. He advised introducing the Xreading platform
for reading materials. Xreading’s president Paul Goldberg and his associates responded
quickly and enthusiastically to inquiries, and it was decided that the Xreading
subscription would become the textbook used for the class along with a TOEIC test prep
3

book.

Since the Xreading virtual library solved the previous problems of appropriate
reading material for extensive reading, students were again required to read graded
readers and write twelve book reports during the fourteen weeks of classes. Reading andbook reports accounted for about a third of the final grade with word count alone being
11%. This was less than in Andrade’s syllabus since it was the first year using the new
online platform. Reading 55,000 words or more would result in the maximum grade andthe Xreading platform included a learner management system that tracked the word
count. Class participation and scores on vocabulary quizzes accounted for the other 30%
and 35% of the final course grade respectively.
The Xreading platform gave students online access to graded readers from many─ 162 ─

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroom

publishers on a subscription basis. Many of the readers were also in the SUJCD librarycollection as printed books. The online platform contained over a thousand different
titles when SUJCD began using it and now (2023) has over two thousand books with new
titles often being added and a range of difficulty levels and genres being represented.
Selecting a book by level was simplified because all books were given a reading levelfrom one to fifteen making it easier to compare book levels across different publishers.
Another advantage of the online platform over library copies was that multiple students
could read the same book.
Looking back on the journey of SUJCD’s extensive reading course from 2010 to2019, it seems that the decisive first step was devoting part of a course to extensive
reading in 2010 when extensive reading was less known and researched. Of the4

Extensive Reading Foundation’s Bibliography of works on extensive reading whichtoday (November 2023) contains 856 titles only 61% existed in 2010. The next challenge
was finding suitable reading materials. It took several years to put in place the readingmaterials needed to allow students to do large amounts of reading. The introduction of
the Xreading platform into the course in 2019 was the game changer. It made possible
the application of Andrade’s intuition that interactive book reports would give students
opportunities to get language input and interact with the L2 resulting in better learningand active learning.

3. Classroom Practices and Activities to Supplement Learningwith ER
Extensive reading can be integrated into a language course in several ways: asa component of a language class (Nation & Yamamoto, 2012; Nation, 2013) or as anadditive that is assigned to be done outside of class time (Robb & Kano, 2013). For those
who, like us, were lucky enough to have part of a course devoted explicitly to extensive
reading, the challenge was then to make the best use of extensive reading in theclassroom and to motivate students. Prior to 2023 when Xreading launched the Links
textbook with integrated use of graded readers, the burden of integrating extensive
reading into class time fell largely on the teacher. Below are several reading activities
used in SUJCD’s extensive reading class from 2019 when we began using the Xreading
platform for extensive reading. The number of students in the class ranged from thirtyfive to sixteen and the activities described below easily scaled up and down withinthat range. The shift to remote learning in spring 2020 did not significantly impact theactivities. Details on the five cohorts of students in the class appear in Appendix E.

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Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

In-class Reading TimeThe amount of silent, individual reading done during the class sessions was
gradually increased during the semester. At the beginning of the semester students wereasked to read silently for ten minutes, and once that pace seemed sustainable, it wasincreased. The amount would increase to twenty-five minutes out of the hundred-minuteclass sessions, and students were told before the start of each reading time how longit would last. The reading time was strategically placed after the book report sharing
so that students whose interest had been piqued during someone’s presentation could
use that momentum and read. After the reading time, students were asked to quickly
share with a pair the title of one of the books they had read and whether or not they
recommended it.

Interactive Book Reports
Andrade’s interactive book reports (cf. above, section 2) were assigned twelve
times during the fourteen-week semester, with two modifications to lighten students’burden. First, students who were listening were no longer required to take notes on thepresentations of other students. This simplified the number of tasks students needed toperform. Second, the evaluation scheme for the book reports was simplified. Students
received two points for turning in a completed report and one point if the report waslate or had hardly any information. Grammar and spelling mistakes would not lower
the evaluation. In this way, students were asked to focus more on regular reading
and completion of reports than on accuracy in writing. Several examples of completed
reports were also made available to students as a scaffold. The overwhelming majorityof students in all cohorts completed all the book reports and did so on time. The inclass book report sharing time was often a lively moment in which students actively
performed authentic information sharing.

Explicit Teaching of ER Rationale for Choosing Books
Starting with the second cohort, the rationale, principles, and benefits of extensive
reading were explicitly taught and reviewed at the beginning of each class session forabout ten minutes. This seemed necessary in order to help students select appropriate
books for themselves. Otherwise, some students would choose books that contained
many unknown words because they thought their reading would improve faster by sodoing, while others needed to be reassured that time spent reading would benefit them.
The content included basic definitions of reading and of extensive reading taken from─ 164 ─

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroom

Day and Bamford’s seminal 1998 book, explanations about high-frequency word lists
and graded readers taken from Nation (2013), Nation & Waring (2019), and others,
and the merits of reading taken from works by Krashen (2004), Nation (2013), andothers. The key acronym READ for choosing one’s book for extensive reading: “Readsomething quickly and Enjoyably with Adequate comprehension so you Do not need a
dictionary” was also introduced. Occasionally students were asked to look at key pagesof the Extensive Reading Foundation’s Guide to Extensive Reading (2011) or watch shortvideos showcasing extensive reading. The concepts were introduced on PowerPoint
slides and then reviewed the next class as cloze activities in which students received
the PowerPoint slides again but had to fill in the missing words as they took turns
explaining the slides to each other in pairs.

Book Recommendations From Other Cohorts
Starting from the 2021 cohort, on the last day of the semester students were asked
to recommend books to the next cohort. Students anonymously uploaded an image fileof the cover of their book recommendation onto an online bulletin board or shared file.
Students were asked to post their favorite book titles into the following seven categories:
1. Best Fiction Book, 2. Best Non-fiction Book, 3. Best Book in Levels 1 to 4, 4. Best Bookin Levels 5 to 14, 5. Best Book under 2500 Words, 6. Best Book over 2500 Words, and 7.
Worst Book. The file or screenshot of the bulletin board of “Best Books” was then sharedon the first day of the next semester with the new cohort who were encouraged to use it
if they were having trouble choosing books.

Presentation on “How I Read”
Presentations were part of the course syllabus since 2015, but their connection
to extensive reading seemed to need justification especially given that students werealready doing short presentations when they shared their book reports. One way
to better integrate the presentation into the syllabus was to make the topic of thepresentation focus on extensive reading itself. In 2021 the topic for the presentation was
set rather freely as “What I Learned in This Class.” For later cohorts it was rephrased as“How I Read,” and students were encouraged to analyze their own Xreading data which
included the number and level of the books they read, the number of words, and theirreading speed. They could investigate correlations in their own reading data between
such variables as book level, book length, and their own reading speed. The Xreading
platform recorded and provided this data conveniently and students could integrate it─ 165 ─

Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

into their presentations. The teacher also created a presentation in which she analyzed
her own reading data for that semester and shared it with the class as an example.

Incorporating Word Counts Into the Final Grade Evaluation
One tool used for motivating students to read was explicitly evaluating students on
how much they read. On the first day of the class students were told how many words
they would need to read during the semester to get full marks. In 2019 the word countfor full marks was set at 55,000 words during the fourteen-week semester. Detailed
word count requirements for each cohort appear in Appendix E. Since many students
read above and beyond the required word count, it was progressively raised, and by 2023
the required word count for full marks had become 180,000 words in fourteen weeks. To
encourage students and show that the proposed word count goal was realistic, data fromprevious cohorts was shown to them. The data was stored in Xreading and could easily
be downloaded on a spreadsheet. The data from a given cohort could also be downloaded
and presented, anonymized, to current students so that they could see for themselves
the reading habits of students who successfully reached the target word count. Students
could see the number of books read, the average reading speed, the average level ofthe books chosen by any given student, and what the total reading time was for one
semester. Since readers who reached the target word count often read lower levels ofbooks, the teacher emphasized this point in the data. In addition, during the semester,
the teacher could consult one-on-one with students desiring to improve their word countor with students who seemed to be having trouble with extensive reading. Teacher andstudent would look at the student’s data including book titles and talk about it. “Whatis your favorite book and why?” could be the starting point to suggest ways to choose
appropriate books and increase word counts.

Test Prep Activities
Because the course title included both extensive reading and rapid reading, since2015 the class also included a textbook focusing on the reading passages in standardized
tests such as the TOEIC or the TOEFL. The passages in the test-prep book were used
for practicing skills such as skimming the different parts of the passage, scanning forthe desired piece of information, looking for main idea and details, and summarizing
and learning vocabulary that often appeared on the given test. Test-prep skills such asskimming, scanning, main ideas, and inferences took up ten minutes of the class toward
the beginning, and vocabulary drills were often the last ten minutes of the 100-minute─ 166 ─

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroomclass. In all, about 20% of each class session was test prep with the remaining time being
the extensive reading activities described above. Vocabulary quizzes on the common
vocabulary learned in the test-prep book were part of the final grade.

4. Qualitative and Quantitative Results From Five Cohorts ofthe ER Rapid Reading Class, 2019-2023
One notable trend in the ER, rapid reading course has been the increase in student
word counts since the introduction of the Xreading platform. The 2019 syllabus with
Xreading used a similar grading scheme and required word count as the 2015 syllabus
which relied on paper books in the school library. Over 70% of the students were able
to reach the target word count in 2019. The availability of books on Xreading and theease of tracking how much was read on the platform have contributed to increased word
counts.
One notable benefit of using extensive reading was that it was easy to adjust theclass content to students having a range of language abilities since each student could
read books at their level. As a semi-elective course which students could select fromamong several options, the extensive reading, rapid reading class attracted students
with varying language levels as demonstrated on standardized tests administered toall students. In practice students entering the class with lower standardized test scores
sometimes read more and had a higher final grade than their peers who had scoredhigher. In addition, overall engagement levels remained high since the ER content wasaccessible to all from the start of the class. Interactive book reports which were heavily
scaffolded and presentations analyzing one’s own reading also permitted the class to betaught at multiple levels of linguistic ability, and by putting significant weight on thesemester word count, the final grade reflected how much reading the students had done
rather than the language ability students already possessed when entering the class.
The time-on-task principle would therefore suggest that because those students spent
more time reading, they also improved their reading (Nation & Yamamoto, 2012). The
overall high level of engagement seemed to be reflected in course evaluations for theextensive reading, rapid reading class which were consistently higher than the school
average.

Conclusion
Although differing in the type of reading materials and the students involved, thetwo experiences of reading aloud to young learners and of extensive reading at SUJCD

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Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

have a common goal of motivating language learners through reading activities. We
have shared these experiences here because our students seem overall to have enjoyed
the activities and the instructors have as well. Both experiences rely on adequate
reading materials as well as suitable activities to frame the reading. The thirteen-year
journey of the extensive reading, rapid reading class illustrates well how the availabilityof suitable reading material is key to increased amounts of reading. For young learners,
carefully choosing suitable books and crafting lesson plans to both prepare the reading
and to reinforce the reading with suitable worksheets has contributed to engaging andenjoyable lessons. In the process of preparing to do read-aloud, SUJCD students also
became more engaged as they practiced reading. This paper has introduced two practices
held in a junior college situation. The findings are based mostly on observations inclassrooms, and thus have limitations as empirical studies. However, the main purposeof this paper was to introduce actual cases of reading related activities in active learning
settings, providing situations and methods that could be implemented and put into
practice in other institutions. The increase availability of reading materials in Englishthat can be used in the classroom and better access to online resources for reading inJapan are reasons to hope that reading activities might be enjoyed by more students inthe future.

Notes
1

	The textbook used was Ediger, A. & Pavlik, C. (1999). Reading connections: Skills
and strategies for purposeful reading. Oxford University Press.

2

The book was 松本 茂 et al. (2011). 速読速聴・英単語 Core 1900 ver.4. Z-Kai.

3

The book was 松本茂 et al. (2018) 速読速聴・英単語 Core 1900 ver.5. Z-Kai.

4https://erfoundation.org/bib/

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Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

Yamauchi, K. (2023). The benefits and challenges of multiple mini-bibliobattles in asingle extensive reading course. The Language Teacher, 47(4), 21–28.

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Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroom

Appendix A: Worksheet for spring semester (Grades 5 & 6) read-aloudclass─ 171 ─

Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

Appendix B: Lesson Plan for spring semester (Grades 5 & 6) read-aloudclass─ 172 ─

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroom

Appendix C: Worksheet for fall semester (Grades 3 & 4) read-aloud class─ 173 ─

Maria Lupas and Akiko Kano

Appendix D: Lesson Plan for fall semester (Grades 3 & 4) read-aloud class─ 174 ─

Motivating Students with Reading Activities in the Active Learning Classroom

Appendix E: Five Cohorts of SUJCD’s extensive reading class using the
Xreading platform
2019

2020*

2021

2022

2023

Weight of ER incourse grading scheme(book reports andword count)

35%

35%

40%

40%

60%

Word count required
for full marks

55,000+words

100,000+
words

130,000+
words

130,000+
words

180,000+
words

Number of students inthe class

27

35

31

23

16

Average word count72,29947,019.1

101,601.3

116,940.9

129,672.9

Total class word count1,952,072

1,645,668

3,149,639

2,689,640

2,074,767

Number of students
who attained the
maximum word countfor full marks

20
students(74%)

6
students(17%)

14
students(45%)

13
students(56.5%)

6
students(37.5%)*10-week semester─ 175 ─