Extensive Reading: What Is It? Why Bother?

Teachers are (rightly) concerned with developing in their students the ability to read, but how much attention do teachers pay to developing a habit -- indeed, love -- of reading in their students? And yet not to do so risks reducing reading lessons to an empty ritual, akin to, as David Eskey once memorably put it (1995), the teaching of swimming strokes to people who hate the water.

As was demonstrated in papers such as "Simplification" by John Honeyfield (1977), artificial, simplified texts for language learners lack features of authentic texts, and so simplified texts were considered a less-than-useful preparation for students learning to read in the real world.