Three years of extensive reading lessons have improved engineering students′ reading and listening skills in English. The average TOEIC score has increased to 441 points, and the relative numbers of students of lower scores than 350 points have decreased to 14% in the third year when the median reading amount of easy-to-read English texts is about a half million words. The critical success factors are the reading amount and the easiness of English texts read especially in the first term. When students read extremely easy English texts with the help of pictures, they can finally avoid the translation into Japanese and grasp the meaning of the texts directly in English
