“I Love Creepy Pasta”: EFL Students’ Book Selection for Extensive Reading

Abstract

The important element in extensive reading, a second language reading approach, is materials to read. Finding suitable reading materials is the biggest mission to achieve the goal of the approach which is reading for pleasure or reading engagement. The current paper aims at uncovering a trend of books selected by EFL students for extensive reading and elaborating students' perception on what makes them engaged with the chosen books. To meet the purpose, this research employed a mixed-method design by distributing a questionnaire about book choices to 123 university freshmen. Interview was also conducted to two male and four female students who joined an extensive reading class to understand of the book that influenced their reading engagement. The findings showed top six favorite books based on the genre which were romance (65.85%), comedy (53.66%), children story (46.34%), adventure and fantasy (45.52%), horror and creepy pasta (24.39%), and mystery and detective (24.34%). Meanwhile, according to the interview results, aspects of the books affecting their reading engagement were students' connection toward the books and language appropriacy. The drawn conclusion is that in order to gain reading engagement, both students and teachers should understand students' personal information and their English level so that they could choose books which suit their level of English proficiency.

The THE STUDENTS’ VIEWS ON THE USE OF COMIC IN TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH

“…Students feel that the story contained in the novel is very easy to understand and can easily understand the storyline well. It is said that adult books always present fresh themes that describe the daily lives of young people in addition to using vocabulary that is simple enough for students to understand (Puspitasari, 2019). Therefore, books that contain about the daily lives of teenagers tend not to discourage students from reading.…”