SPONSOR and exhibitor

Greta Gorsuch

Recording (29min): https://youtu.be/PkRgZ-Wl0OQ 

Reading L2 texts comprises a significant means of input and language experience for learners. Learners can use reading to obtain information from a variety of written sources and to interact as full interlocutors with other users of the language. Yet many with limited experience reading L2 texts read slowly and laboriously, likely because of poor word recognition skills. For these and for other reasons, the development of reading fluency has taken a position of growing importance in L2 reading research, and has emerged as a significant pedagogical and program issue. One method thought to increase reading fluency is repeated reading (RR) in which learners repeatedly read a 500-word text with an audio model in order to automatize lower level comprehension processes, and thus free learners’ attentional resources to invoke higher order comprehension processes. RR has been shown to increase L2 learners’ reading fluency and comprehension in studies in Japan and Vietnam (with English), and in the U.S. (with Japanese). Points of discussion are: 1. What reading fluency is; 2. What its role in reading comprehension is; 3. How to work with reading fluency in classrooms with adult learners; 4. How to find materials suitable for reading fluency development, and 5. How to implement reading fluency methodologies into language education programs.

Greta Gorsuch is a professor of applied linguistics at Texas Tech University. She has lived and taught in Japan, the Philippines, the United States, and Vietnam, and has been teaching ESL/EFL for 32 years. Her research interests are in second language education, course evaluation, materials design, testing, reading and speaking fluency. Her articles on these topics have been published in TESOL Quarterly, English for Specific Purposes, System, Language Teaching Research, TESL-EJ, Reading in a Foreign Language, Asian EFL Journal, Journal of Faculty Development, Foreign Language Annals, Reading Matrix, Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, Journal of Creative Practices in Language Learning and Teaching, and Educational Policy Analysis Archives. She is also author and editor of Tests that Second Language Teachers Make and Use (Cambridge Scholars Publishers), and co-author of Second Language Course Evaluation, and Second Language Testing for Student Evaluation and Classroom Research (Information Age Publishing). She has written original fiction for adult literacy learners and ESL learners, including Post Office on the Tokaido (Gemma Open Door); and The Bee Creek Blues, Lights at Chickasaw Point, and The Storm (The “American Chapters” series, Wayzgoose Press).

Link to the exhibition booth: https://virtualexpo.info/exhibition/Virtual-Round-Table_7yddxpdawn/Wayzgoose-Press_n1gboovhk8