Extensive Reading and English Remedial Education

抄録

Extensive Reading (ER) has been introduced into college/university English education as a useful English remedial education (ERE) method. In ER learning, the student encouraged to read as many books as possible. This is because the more he/she reads, the more his/her reading ability is thought to improve. This emphasis on "quantity", however, overlooks a serious problem: "quantity" does not necessarily guarantee an improvement of "quality" (student reading competence). Even if the student reads as many books as possible, he/she still remains confined to the level in which he/she often arbitrarily misreads the text. This results from the student's failure to grasp the sentence structure of each expression correctly. The student needs to improve his/her poor knowledge of sentence structures. When he/she can "decode" the sentences correctly, then it is expected that "quantity" guarantees an improvement in "quality".