Making Extensive Reading Even More Student Centred

Jacobs, G., & Renandya, W. (2015). Making extensive reading even more student- centred. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(2), 102-112. Retrieved from http://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/IJAL/article/viewFile/691/499

Background

This article explained the various features of a student-centred approach to education and highlighted how extensive reading (ER) had already incorporated characteristics of a new paradigm in education – student-centred learning (SCL). Learners engage in ER when they read in quantity.

Aims

The writers suggested ways to develop ER’s SCL features further to make ER more learner-centred so that the cognitive, linguistic and affective benefits related to the use of ER, such as better reading skills, grammar and spelling, and greater confidence by the learner in their own reading ability could be enhanced.

Sample

As this is a theoretical article, there is no experimental sampling involved. The authors substantiated their views with literature primarily from the fields of behaviourist and socio-cognitive psychology and paradigms such as positivism and post-positivism.

Method

The writers discussed ER with reference to seven key features of SCL: student control, learning to learn, learning with peers, diversity, connections to students’ worlds, teachers as fellow learners, and motivation and the self. They linked each feature to the post-positivist paradigm. The last segment of the article presented ways to enhance the fit between SCL and ER.

Findings

The authors illustrated how students, not teachers or resources, were key determinants of the content and quality of learning. They emphasized that, as educators still kept to the dominant teacher-centred learning paradigm that they were familiar with during classroom discourse, this made the integration of SCL with ER challenging.

Implications

The authors believed that the shift to the adoption of SCL in ER would take careful planning and perseverance. They suggested some measures such as the careful selection, storage and marketing of reading materials, the integration of ER into the school curriculum and the enhancement of student motivation to read in the short and long term.

Original article retrieved from Google Scholar.