Sessions /
Better than Book Whispering - Young Learners & ER #124

Book whispering is a method teachers employ to recommend books to students for the purpose of motivating them to engage in extensive reading (Miller, 2010). This method entails teachers recommending books to students based on questionnaire results about their preferences. Miller popularized this method in her best-selling book, the Book Whisperer, and claimed her sixth grade students in Texas read 40 novels a year because of it. While the idea of book whispering is popular in the ER community, there is no evidence of its effectiveness with EFL young learners. The presenter will show results of an action research project conducted in an eikaiwa school in Japan, which showed that autonomy in choosing books for ER was very important to them. Students overwhelmingly responded negatively to having the teacher directly recommend books, which lead the presenter to abandon the initial plan to implement book whispering in classes. It was found that an indirect recommendation method called Teacher Read Alouds, where the teacher read aloud the first book in a series or the first chapter of a novel in a series and then made the series available for students to borrow, was received very positively. Analysis of book borrowing data show that students often borrowed books in the series read aloud by the teacher.