Using extensive reading to improve students’ reading ability

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 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 48 
with explicit teaching during the relatively 
short period of time that L2 learners spend in 
the language classroom [13]. Besides, 
extensive reading can also encourage students 
to gain new vocabulary through reading and 
thus their vocabulary recognition is built 
naturally. In the study by Lai (1993) (cited in 
[13]), the findings showed that there were 
three experimental groups which displayed 
better scores in vocabulary recognition 
compared to the control groups. Furthermore, 
there is no reason to doubt the finding that 
students incidentally gain small amounts of 
vocabulary knowledge from each meaning 
focused reading an appropriate text and with 
the characteristic of an Extensive reading 
approach such as students read as much as 
possible, that will help students remember their 
vocabulary for a long time. It is obvious that 
extensive reading can help students develop 
vocabulary. Educators and researchers have 
known that there is a strong correlation 
relationship between vocabulary development 
and reading comprehension. The more words 
students know in the reading texts, the better 
they comprehend the texts. Moreover, this also 
helps them improve their reading speed 
because they can guess the meanings of other 
new words quickly and do not waste of time 
looking words up in the dictionary. 
3.2. Extensive reading deals with fluency 
problem 
A number of researchers indicate that good 
reading ability is virtually impossible in the 
absence of reading fluency. Therefore, 
efficient ways of increasing reading fluency 
must be found to improve reading ability. 
According to Day and Bamford [14] 
Extensive reading promotes reading fluency. 
As students are asked to read a large amount 
of comprehensive materials, speed becomes 
important to facilitate the enjoyment and 
comprehension of materials. In studies on 
reading rate, extensive reading has been 
shown to increase students’ reading speed. 
Iwahori’s study [15] showed that students’ 
reading rates improved after a 7-week 
extensive reading treatment. The meaning 
reading rate from the pretest to the posttest 
improved from 84.18 to 112.82. Besides, 
decoding words automatically is needed for 
reading fluency. Words that students can 
recognize rapidly accurately and 
automatically have been called sight 
vocabulary. Sight vocabulary is essential for 
improving reading fluency. When students 
have a great deal of sight vocabulary, they 
can decode more words automatically. As a 
result, they can save their finite cognitive 
resources to comprehend a text. Also, sight 
vocabulary was proven to be increased by 
extensive reading above. That means 
extensive reading can improve students’ 
reading fluency.That means extensive reading 
can improve students’ reading fluency. With 
specific reference to reading fluency 
development, extensive reading has shown to 
be effective in increasing their reading speed 
and comprehension [16]. 
3.3. Extensive reading creates reading habit 
Lacking reading habit is one of students’ 
problems mentioned above. Students do not 
have interest in reading partly because their 
vocabulary and reading fluency is not good 
enough. After these problems are solved by 
extensive reading, students’ are more 
confident in reading. In other words, 
extensive reading indirectly improves 
students’ reading ability. Furthermore, to 
have reading habits students also need to have 
pleasure and motivation. 
Reading for pleasure requires a large selection 
of books that is available for students to choose 
and these books should be fit their level. 
Extensive reading can deal with this because 
some characteristics of an extensive reading 
approach from Day and Bamford [14] are: 
students can read as much as possible inside or 
outside classrooms; a variety of materials on a 
Pham Thi Hoang Ngan et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 45 - 50 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 49 
wide range of topic is available to encourage 
students to read for different reasons and in 
different ways; students select what they want 
to read and have freedom to stop if they are not 
interested in them; and the purposes of reading 
are usually related to pleasure. 
One of the key factors to make students have 
reading habits is good attitude and 
motivation. Day and Bamford [2] reported 
that positive effects of extensive reading are 
facilitating growth of student’s attitudes 
toward reading and increasing their 
motivation to read. Since extensive reading 
supplies materials that are interesting to the 
students, they will be far more likely to be 
stimulated motivation to read. In addition, the 
findings of previous research prove the effect 
of extensive reading on learners’ attitudes 
towards reading in the second language. 
Likewise, with motivation to read and good 
attitude to reading students will gradually 
have reading habit everyday. Perhaps this is 
because the more one reads, the easier reading 
becomes. 
4. Discussion 
On the whole, extensive reading with its 
characteristics has helped students overcome 
their difficulties in learning to read. The 
reason why extensive reading is considered to 
be better than the other methods on improving 
reading ability is that it can solve students’ 
difficulties at the same time. It is very likely 
that their reading abilities will increase in the 
long term if this reading is kept up and 
students are supplied with suitable materials 
and attention from their teachers. 
However, students at NDUN have faced a 
number of challenges in using Extensive 
reading including lack of time, shortage of 
appropriate reading materials. Furthermore, 
English is taught at the first year while the 
students have not adapted to new learning 
environment. They seem to be too busy to 
have time for reading something apart from 
their course books. Also, their levels of 
English are not the same so the teachers find 
it difficult to provide them the appropriate 
reading material. Moreover, the reading 
materials are not available in the library. 
Therefore, the teachers play crucial roles for 
the sucessess of the approach. They should 
introduce the Extensive Reading programme 
to their students, help students to choose 
appropriate books, encourge students to read 
as much as possible, and monitor students’ 
reading as well as reward them if they reach 
the target number of books. 
5. Conclusion 
In conclusion, this paper has pointed out that 
students’ lack of vocabulary, reading fluency 
and reading habit are three major problems 
that students are likely to encounter, which 
make them entangle in vicious circle of 
reading, then become bad readers. Although 
extensive reading is not without problems, it 
is considered to be able to deal with all these 
problems which help students improve their 
reading ability. However, extensive reading is 
still the missing ingredient in the EFL context 
of Vietnamese universities. Due to this 
situation, this paper was written with the hope 
that teachers and students in Vietnam will 
have right perception about the role of 
extensive reading and will apply it on 
improving students’ reading ability. 
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