Extensive reading

[5] Richard Day, chairman and co-founder of The Extensive Reading Foundation, has outlined eight additional tenets of ER.

[4] He explains that since reading is its own reward, as stated in principle number six, there need not be quizzes, tests, or comprehension question afterwards, though there can and should be some form of follow-up activity.

In tenet eight he says that the teacher should guide the students by explaining the purpose of ER, since it differs so much from traditional classroom reading.

For foreign-language learners, some researchers have found that the use of glosses for "difficult" words is advantageous to vocabulary acquisition[6] but at least one study finds it has no effect.

[7] A number of studies report significant incidental vocabulary gain in extensive reading in a foreign language.

Day and Bamford gave a number of traits common or basic to the extensive reading approach.

In order to meet the conditions needed for learning from extensive reading at the students’ proficiency levels, it is essential to make use of simplified texts.

Some recent practitioners have not followed all of these traits, or have added to them, for example, requiring regular follow-up exercises such as story summaries or discussions and the use of audio materials in tandem with the readings.

As F. W. Newman writes in his introduction to a Latin translation of Robinson Crusoe: Laufer suggests that 3,000 word families or 5,000 lexical items are a threshold beyond which learners will be able to read more efficiently.

[16] Coady & Nation (1998) suggest 98% of lexical coverage and 5,000 word families or 8,000 items for a pleasurable reading experience.

This hypothesis is without empirical evidence, neither on the extent (% of global vocabulary acquisition), nor on the sufficiency of extensive reading for lexicon learning.

Those results should be higher than six to ten encounters, the number needed for stable initial word learning to occur.

ER pamphlet created by the Extensive Reading Foundation
About half of all children in rural Laos speak a minority ethnic language at home, and have difficulty in school, which is taught only in the Lao language . This primary school in Laos began a daily reading period in September 2013, in which children select a book to read simply for enjoyment. Big Brother Mouse, a literacy project that sponsored the program, began conducting a study in 2013 to measure reading and vocabulary improvements in schools that had this program.