Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Teaching extensive reading
Turning now to techniques for encouraging extensive
reading it will be found that this territory has already been
partly covered, in that setting assignments for skimming, or
finding one fact in a substantial body of text, involve one
kind of extensive reading at least.
The practice of extensive reading needs little justification.
It is clearly the easiest way of bringing the foreign learner
into sustained contact with a substantial body of English. If
he reads, and what he reads is of some interest to him, then
the language of what he has read rings in his head, the
patterns of collocation and idiom are established almost
painlessly with a range and intensity which is impossible in
terms of oral classroom treatment of the language, where the
constraints of lock-step teaching and multiple repetitions,
however necessary they may be, impose severe restrictions on
the sheer volume of the amount of language with which
pupils come into contact.
Given properly graded readers whose language and
subject matter suit the capabilities of the pupils using them,
there is no reason why extensive reading should not form a