Or too good to be true. Yet there is now a substantial body of research which supports these claims for extensive reading. The benefits of encouraging our learners to read for pleasure are now a matter of fact, not belief.
Pleasure is the key word here.
We are not talking about having a class reader, useful as that may be in its own right. We are talking about students reading books on their own, books that they have chosen to read for enjoyment, in or out of class. Certainly a class reader can be the springboard for many useful language activities, but in this short survey of current classroom research we will focus on reading for pleasure. Krashen summarises studies comparing the achievements of students who received traditional reading comprehension classes with those who simply read on their own. Pretty convincing though the research was done on students learning their first language, not an L2.