This presentation will highlight the usefulness of students’ personal stories and experiences in developing inferencing as a reading skill, particularly when reading literature. To better understand inferencing, students can be asked to recall times in their own lives where they made assumptions based on observing details. When recalling these assumptions and their conclusions, an easy-to-understand parallel can be drawn with inferencing, or forming hypotheses based on details in a text. This is especially useful when reading literature, as a story’s plot and background is often suggested through details and is not explicitly declared. The presentation will give examples of connecting these “real-life” inferences to inferring personality traits of a novel's characters based on details about their actions, wardrobe, settings, etc. Attendees will come away with a fresh perspective on teaching inferencing as a reading skill and a greater appreciation for the use of personal experiences to inform reading skills.

During read-alouds, a great deal of the benefit and enjoyment learners gain is due to the interaction from sharing the picturebook and the use of open questions is often recommended in Western-focused research. However, in the Asian classroom conversational norms as well as teaching styles can mean both teachers and learners can find open questions very challenging. This presentation discusses a small-scale case study which examined how 10-12-year-old Japanese low-level English learners respond to open and closed questions during interactive picturebook read-alouds. It will cover four main areas: the amount of interaction created by each question type, the different types of responses elicited, the situations where students could not respond to questions, and how class dynamics affected student responses. Participants will leave the presentation with a clearer idea of when the use of closed questions may be more appropriate than open questions during read-alouds in the low-level English language classroom.

Being able to read fluently is important for any language learner. It may be helpful for their academic achievement, career advancement, or improving their general language proficiency. One of the most effective and efficient ways for students to improve their reading fluency is by engaging in a dedicated speed reading course such as those advocated by Paul Nation (Nation, 2018). These courses are available for students at all ability levels. However, such courses are challenging to implement because they typically involve a textbook specifically created for speed reading, and require students to track their reading time, calculate their reading speed and report their progress. While these print resources are useful, an online system that can calculate a student’s reading speed and track their progress automatically would provide significant advantages for both students and teachers. In this practical workshop, the presenter will discuss and demonstrate several free and commercial online speed reading applications which the participants can try out for themselves.

Xreading is the only digital library in the world that provides unlimited, simultaneous access to over 1500 graded readers from major ELT publishers including CUP, Cengage/National Geographic and Macmillan. It was created to give students unlimited access to graded readers, and make it easier for teachers to implement and manage extensive reading programs. Besides books, Xreading also has audio narrations, quizzes, character lists, glossaries, journals, and a timed reading component, all to enhance the reading experience for students. Xreading also benefits teachers because it allows them to track and assess their students’ reading progress, including the number of books read, words read, reading time, reading speed, and quiz results. With of all of the tracking, Xreading is an ideal tool for doing research in extensive reading. In this workshop, the founder of Xreading will give a demonstration of the system and preview some features coming later this year.

Reading is one of the four main pillars of language acquisition. By engaging in a wide reading curriculum, students can acquire vocabulary, experience new grammar patterns, and reinforce their language acquisition. However, a wide reading curriculum can be tricky to incorporate, especially in the elementary classroom. In this workshop, we will discuss exactly what wide reading is, talk about strategies to make an extensive reading curriculum enjoyable for you and your students, and discuss in detail some of the challenges that are often faced when beginning your own wide reading journey in the classroom. Furthermore, we will consider some engaging pre, during, and post reading strategies you can incorporate directly into your teaching practice.