When the books and reading friends are up to us: Students’ Responses about an Extensive Reading Program

Abstract

Extensive Reading is one of alternatives that help teachers to motivate the students to read. Regarding that main benefit, in one Indonesian university, a teacher established an extensive reading program for freshmen. In the implementation, the teacher allowed the students to choose books and with whom they read. In practice, they made a group of four and met once a week to share what they read. This qualitative research was conducted to investigate students’ responses about the program. By involving six students who joined the program, the data were gained through interviews and reflective essays. The selected participants had different level of English, reading interest, and motives to sign up the program which made the data rich and were able to capture the phenomenon from diverse students’ viewpoints. After the data were obtained, they were coded, categorized to find the themes and interpreted. The result showed, all activities in the program namely choosing own books, having weekly reading in groups, having discussion with their group, and sharing their weekly meeting in their social media got both positive and negative responses. The positive responses appeared from benefits that the participants got while the negative responses came up because of the challenges they faced during the program. All in all, an extensive reading program that accommodates students’ freedom in reading, becomes a successful alternative to cultivate students’ L2 reading motivation if it is implemented by considering some possible encounters.

Increasing English Reading Comprehension Through Literary Text Extensive Reading Program

“…The same research also shows that reading affects students' motivation (Ro, 2016). Overall, an extensive reading program that accommodates students' freedom in reading, becomes a successful alternative to foster L2 students' reading motivation if it is implemented by considering several possible meetings (Puspitasari, 2020).…”

Freedom to Choose Reading Material and Its Effectiveness to Reading Comprehension

“…It is also influence and empowers readers vocabulary and comprehension (Clark & Phythian-sence, 2008). However, give students more independency and freedom do have problems, one of them is let the students clueless about what they are going to read (Puspitasari, 2020).…”

“…Extensive Reading is taught by reading widely and in large quantities (Kirin, 2010). This method also comes with other benefits, including macro and micro skills, critical thinking, motivation, and attitude towards reading (R. R. Day, 2018;Husna, 2019;Kirin, 2010;Puspitasari, 2020).…”

“…It brings positive response on improving confidence in reading L2, promoting their reading motivation, and increasing students" writing skill. On the other hand, it sometimes makes the students" clueless about what they are going to read (Puspitasari, 2020). To let readers" freely choose what they are going to read means to minimize the intervention of the teachers, in which teachers" role is the guide and tutor of the reading class.…”

The Practical Use of Online Comic Manga: Facilitating Students’ English Reading Engagement

“…Much previous research related to reading learning and technology devices in the class. Reading sharing can do using social media (Puspitasari, 2020). Moreover, the student has used many e-books to get information (Kao et al, 2019).…”