Promoting Learner Autonomy Through Extensive Reading

Abstract

This study focused on 165 Japanese medical university students who engaged in extensive reading (ER) activities outside the classroom for two semesters. It aimed to see if ER could enhance their capacity to become more autonomous learners. This was because ER was designed as an activity to be done outside the classroom and primarily left to the learners, although the amount of reading was part of the grade in the reading class. The study also investigated the change in reading attitude and motivation to reading English through the ER activities. First, students' post-course reflective reports were examined quantitively with Co-occurrence Network Analysis (CNA), providing a graphic visualization of potential relationships between entities represented within written material by the KH Coder. Secondly, to see how the keywords extracted by CNA in their reports were presented, the contexts were examined carefully line by line. By doing so, prominent keywords such as 'fun' and 'not good at' related to ER were revealed. The result shows that perception of the activity with emotion could lead to improved motivation for reading English materials and a change in their attitudes to reading in English. In addition, some learners demonstrated increased autonomy when writing about their reading strategies and perceptions of the ER activities. These findings support the claim that ER is an effective way to promote learner autonomy and motivation for university students learning English.