Using extensive reading to improve students’ reading ability

ISSN: 1859-2171 TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 45 - 50 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 45 
USING EXTENSIVE READING 
TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ READING ABILITY 
Pham Thi Hoang Ngan
*
, Mai Thi Thanh Thu, Tran Van Dang 
Nam Dinh University of Nursing 
ABSTRACT 
Reading is a source of learning and a source of enjoyment. Especially, in a second foreign 
language situation, a good reading ability is necessary for those studying English for academic and 
occupational purposes and many universities’curricula. Many previous studies showed that 
students devote large amounts of time to reading lessons in order to achieve such competence. Yet 
despite years of instruction and practice in reading, plenty of students have difficulty in improving 
their reading ability. Of course, there are a number of possible reasons for this such as the lack of 
vocabulary, reading fluency and reading habits. There are different ways to improve students’ 
reading ability and one of them is through Extensive Reading. Therefore, this paper aims to show 
problems students face while learning to read and identify benefits of Extensive Reading on 
improving students’ reading ability. 
Key words: extensive reading; reading ability; vocabulary; reading fluency; reading habit 
Received: 06/5/2019; Revised: 23/5/2019; Approved: 29/5/2019 
SỬ DỤNG PHƯƠNG THỨC ĐỌC MỞ RỘNG 
ĐỂ CẢI THIỆN KHẢ NĂNG ĐỌC CỦA SINH VIÊN 
Phạm Thị Hoàng Ngân*, Mai Thị Thanh Thu, Trần Văn Đăng 
Trường Đại học Điều Dưỡng Nam Định 
TÓM TẮT 
Đọc là một cách để học tập và hưởng thụ. Đặc biệt, trong việc học ngoại ngữ thứ hai, khả năng đọc 
tốt là cần thiết cho việc học tiếng Anh với mục đích học thuật và mục đích nghề nghiệp cũng như 
trong nhiều chương trình giảng dạy của các trường đại học. Nhiều nghiên cứu trước đây đã chỉ ra, 
sinh viên dành nhiều thời gian đối với các bài học đọc để đạt được năng lực như vậy. Mặc dù có 
nhiều năm được hướng dẫn và thực hành về cách đọc, nhiều sinh viên học tiếng Anh vẫn gặp khó 
khăn trong việc cải thiện khả năng đọc. Tất nhiên, có một số lý do cho việc này như việc thiếu từ 
vựng, đọc lưu loát và thói quen đọc. Có nhiều cách khác nhau để cải thiện khả năng đọc của sinh 
viên và một trong số đó là phương thức “đọc mở rộng”. Do đó, bài báo nhằm mục đích chỉ ra các 
vấn đề mà sinh viên gặp phải trong khi học đọc và tìm ra lợi ích của việc “đọc mở rộng” đối với 
việc cải thiện khả năng đọc của sinh viên. 
Từ khóa: đọc mở rộng; khả năng đọc; từ vựng; đọc lưu loát; thói quen đọc 
Ngày nhận bài: 06/5/2019; Ngày hoàn thiện: 23/5/2019; Ngày duyệt đăng: 29/5/2019 
* Corresponding author. Email: nganpham200178@yahoo.com 
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34238/tnu-jst.2019.06.1130 
Pham Thi Hoang Ngan et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 45 - 50 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 46 
1. Introduction 
Reading ability which refers to reading 
comprehension and speed is very important in 
our daily life and studies including EFL 
(English as a Foreign Language) courses. The 
aim of the syllabus of English for Nurses at 
Nam Dinh University of Nursing (NDUN) is 
that students will be able to read specific 
documents in English after an English course 
face to face. In fact, this aim seems not to be 
achieved because many students have 
difficulties in making sense of texts they want 
to read at the end of the course and even at 
their work in the future. The main reasons for 
their bad reading are: they lack vocabulary, 
reading fluency and reading habit. Thus, the 
question most teachers of English often 
concern about is how they can help their 
students overcome these problems so that 
they can improve their reading ability. 
Extensive reading has been considered to be 
an indispensable means of developing 
students’ reading ability [1]. Day and 
Bamford [2] defined extensive reading in a 
second language (L2) as “an approach to the 
teaching and learning of second language 
reading in which learners read large quantities 
of books and other materials that are well 
within their linguistic competence”. So far, 
many researchers such as Horst [3], Pigada & 
Schmitt [4] and Soltani [5] etc have provided 
evidence for the benefits of extensive reading 
on language learning including reading 
ability. Therefore, this paper is going to 
identify some common problems that students 
have while learning to read and how can 
extensive reading solve these problems to 
improve their reading ability. 
2. Problems students usually face while 
learning to read 
2.1. The lack of vocabulary 
If reading has been considered to be a 
significant and viable means of language 
development for second and foreign language 
learner by Day and Bamford [2], vocabulary 
plays an important role in reading. Most 
second language readers would affirm that 
their main obstacle to reading is their lack of 
vocabulary. Wang [6, p. 47] also stated that 
“Many students probably consider that their 
main problem in reading is not having enough 
vocabulary.” According to Hsueh-chau and 
Nation [7], most learners would need to know 
about 98% of the words in a text before they 
are be able to guess the meaning of a word 
from its context. This seems to be difficult for 
students because many of them do not have 
enough vocabulary like that. The results from 
the study made by a group of authors Mokhtar 
et al. [8] has shown that the majority of the 
students are still weak in terms of their English 
passive and active vocabulary knowledge. 
Then this lack of vocabulary makes it difficult 
for them to guess the meanings of words in 
context and cannot do reading comprehension 
well. Besides, this is the reason why many 
students use their dictionaries for the meaning 
of words so that they feel tired and time 
consuming. Furthermore, when they look up 
words in the dictionary, they often feel 
frustrated and confused by what they find since 
sometimes meanings in it are very common. In 
other words, that causes decrease of their 
reading speed. 
2.2. The lack of reading fluency 
The second problem in reading ability is that 
students do not have enough reading fluency. 
According to the National Reading Panel, 
fluency is reading with speed, accuracy, and 
expression [9]. Johns and Burglund (2006) 
extend the definition of fluency, to include the 
ability to comprehend the material being read 
[9]. A fluent reader can identify words in the 
text automatically. Grabe [10] also stated that 
fluent reading was what most good readers 
did most of time when they read almost 
anything either in their L1 or L2 and reading 
fluency had been associated with reading 
Pham Thi Hoang Ngan et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 45 - 50 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 47 
comprehension. From my experience of 
teaching English, I found that students often 
read texts without fluency. They read words 
by words slowly without accuracy and do not 
understand expressions in the texts. 
Explaining for this situation, teachers find 
that reading lessons in textbooks for L2 
students do not aim at improving students’ 
reading fluency. They often read texts in 
silent and do not take care of time or accuracy 
of reading. Then they try to translate them 
into L1. Besides, English is usually taught in 
large classes so teachers do not have enough 
time to ask each student to read aloud the 
texts and to give them good feedbacks. 
2.3. The lack of reading habit 
Although many students know that reading 
everyday seems to be the best way to read 
well, they still do not have good reading 
habit, especially in L2. In my previous study 
on self-study, 478 students at my university 
were asked “Do you have any books to read 
more apart from the one you have to use in 
the course?”, 3,5 % of these students 
answered “Yes”. That means most students 
do not have habits of reading. Students who 
seldom read had a much lower average score 
than students who often read. 
Explaining for their lack of reading habits, the 
students said that with a small amount of 
vocabulary they have, the texts in their books 
were often difficult for them to understand 
and sometimes they were not their interesting 
topics. After reading difficult texts without 
understanding and enjoyment, they begin to 
lose motivation and pleasure for reading. In 
addition to this, at school where English is not 
the main subject, there are few books, 
newspapers or magazines in English which 
are suitable for them to read outside classes. 
Gradually, they are afraid of reading and 
cannot create reading habit for themselves. 
3. Extensive reading – one way to deal with 
the above mentioned problems 
It is probable that the above-mentioned 
problems are in vicious circle. Students’ 
reading abilities are bad because of lacking 
vocabulary, frequency and reading habit. It 
doesn’t matter where you enter the problem 
because any of the problems will produce any 
of the others. For example, students who do 
not have enough vocabulary and frequency in 
reading will do not have reading habit and 
verse. Thus, it is necessary to solve all the 
problems at the same time. In fact, there are 
many ways to improve students’ vocabulary, 
reading fluency and reading habit separately. 
However, extensive reading is considered to 
be the best way as it can solve these problems 
at the same time. Richard and Schmidt (2002) 
report that extensive reading is tended to 
develop good reading habits, to build up 
knowledge of vocabulary and encourage a 
liking for reading [11]. 
3.1. Extensive reading can increase vocabulary 
In fact, not all of words are learnt by being 
taught, most of them were learnt when 
students meet them in the context. Usually 
this involved assimilating the meaning 
gradually, after frequent encounters. In the 
classroom, students do not get enough 
exposure for this natural assimilation to be 
possible. Therefore, solutions outside should 
be found. Wang [6] indicates that the most 
effective way of improving vocabulary is 
extensive reading. 
Regarding Extensive reading, Hafiz and 
Tudor [12] stated extensive reading is reading 
a large amount of second language material 
for pleasure without any task and exercise 
fulfillment. This approach facilitates students’ 
autonomy and provides them with the 
opportunity to meet words in their context of 
used, increases sight vocabulary, and could 
theoretically result in substantial vocabulary 
learning, which seems difficult to achieve 
Pham Thi Hoang Ngan et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 45 - 50 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 48 
with explicit teaching during the relatively 
short period of time that L2 learners spend in 
the language classroom [13]. Besides, 
extensive reading can also encourage students 
to gain new vocabulary through reading and 
thus their vocabulary recognition is built 
naturally. In the study by Lai (1993) (cited in 
[13]), the findings showed that there were 
three experimental groups which displayed 
better scores in vocabulary recognition 
compared to the control groups. Furthermore, 
there is no reason to doubt the finding that 
students incidentally gain small amounts of 
vocabulary knowledge from each meaning 
focused reading an appropriate text and with 
the characteristic of an Extensive reading 
approach such as students read as much as 
possible, that will help students remember their 
vocabulary for a long time. It is obvious that 
extensive reading can help students develop 
vocabulary. Educators and researchers have 
known that there is a strong correlation 
relationship between vocabulary development 
and reading comprehension. The more words 
students know in the reading texts, the better 
they comprehend the texts. Moreover, this also 
helps them improve their reading speed 
because they can guess the meanings of other 
new words quickly and do not waste of time 
looking words up in the dictionary. 
3.2. Extensive reading deals with fluency 
problem 
A number of researchers indicate that good 
reading ability is virtually impossible in the 
absence of reading fluency. Therefore, 
efficient ways of increasing reading fluency 
must be found to improve reading ability. 
According to Day and Bamford [14] 
Extensive reading promotes reading fluency. 
As students are asked to read a large amount 
of comprehensive materials, speed becomes 
important to facilitate the enjoyment and 
comprehension of materials. In studies on 
reading rate, extensive reading has been 
shown to increase students’ reading speed. 
Iwahori’s study [15] showed that students’ 
reading rates improved after a 7-week 
extensive reading treatment. The meaning 
reading rate from the pretest to the posttest 
improved from 84.18 to 112.82. Besides, 
decoding words automatically is needed for 
reading fluency. Words that students can 
recognize rapidly accurately and 
automatically have been called sight 
vocabulary. Sight vocabulary is essential for 
improving reading fluency. When students 
have a great deal of sight vocabulary, they 
can decode more words automatically. As a 
result, they can save their finite cognitive 
resources to comprehend a text. Also, sight 
vocabulary was proven to be increased by 
extensive reading above. That means 
extensive reading can improve students’ 
reading fluency.That means extensive reading 
can improve students’ reading fluency. With 
specific reference to reading fluency 
development, extensive reading has shown to 
be effective in increasing their reading speed 
and comprehension [16]. 
3.3. Extensive reading creates reading habit 
Lacking reading habit is one of students’ 
problems mentioned above. Students do not 
have interest in reading partly because their 
vocabulary and reading fluency is not good 
enough. After these problems are solved by 
extensive reading, students’ are more 
confident in reading. In other words, 
extensive reading indirectly improves 
students’ reading ability. Furthermore, to 
have reading habits students also need to have 
pleasure and motivation. 
Reading for pleasure requires a large selection 
of books that is available for students to choose 
and these books should be fit their level. 
Extensive reading can deal with this because 
some characteristics of an extensive reading 
approach from Day and Bamford [14] are: 
students can read as much as possible inside or 
outside classrooms; a variety of materials on a 
Pham Thi Hoang Ngan et al TNU Journal of Science and Technology 199(06): 45 - 50 
 Email: jst@tnu.edu.vn 49 
wide range of topic is available to encourage 
students to read for different reasons and in 
different ways; students select what they want 
to read and have freedom to stop if they are not 
interested in them; and the purposes of reading 
are usually related to pleasure. 
One of the key factors to make students have 
reading habits is good attitude and 
motivation. Day and Bamford [2] reported 
that positive effects of extensive reading are 
facilitating growth of student’s attitudes 
toward reading and increasing their 
motivation to read. Since extensive reading 
supplies materials that are interesting to the 
students, they will be far more likely to be 
stimulated motivation to read. In addition, the 
findings of previous research prove the effect 
of extensive reading on learners’ attitudes 
towards reading in the second language. 
Likewise, with motivation to read and good 
attitude to reading students will gradually 
have reading habit everyday. Perhaps this is 
because the more one reads, the easier reading 
becomes. 
4. Discussion 
On the whole, extensive reading with its 
characteristics has helped students overcome 
their difficulties in learning to read. The 
reason why extensive reading is considered to 
be better than the other methods on improving 
reading ability is that it can solve students’ 
difficulties at the same time. It is very likely 
that their reading abilities will increase in the 
long term if this reading is kept up and 
students are supplied with suitable materials 
and attention from their teachers. 
However, students at NDUN have faced a 
number of challenges in using Extensive 
reading including lack of time, shortage of 
appropriate reading materials. Furthermore, 
English is taught at the first year while the 
students have not adapted to new learning 
environment. They seem to be too busy to 
have time for reading something apart from 
their course books. Also, their levels of 
English are not the same so the teachers find 
it difficult to provide them the appropriate 
reading material. Moreover, the reading 
materials are not available in the library. 
Therefore, the teachers play crucial roles for 
the sucessess of the approach. They should 
introduce the Extensive Reading programme 
to their students, help students to choose 
appropriate books, encourge students to read 
as much as possible, and monitor students’ 
reading as well as reward them if they reach 
the target number of books. 
5. Conclusion 
In conclusion, this paper has pointed out that 
students’ lack of vocabulary, reading fluency 
and reading habit are three major problems 
that students are likely to encounter, which 
make them entangle in vicious circle of 
reading, then become bad readers. Although 
extensive reading is not without problems, it 
is considered to be able to deal with all these 
problems which help students improve their 
reading ability. However, extensive reading is 
still the missing ingredient in the EFL context 
of Vietnamese universities. Due to this 
situation, this paper was written with the hope 
that teachers and students in Vietnam will 
have right perception about the role of 
extensive reading and will apply it on 
improving students’ reading ability. 
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