Reading has been given a boost at Zayed University’s Academic Bridge Program(ABP) by an initiative which has seen current learners of English having read 52 million words and counting. It is proving a hit with young Emirati students on both campuses of Zayed University in what the President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has declared as the Year of Reading. “Zayed University students have to take out one of several thousand graded English reading books from the university library’s collection. Then upon finishing it they have to go online to the M-Reader program and undertake a short test of 10 questions and if they pass then they accumulate the total number of words from that book in their ‘account’,” Duncan Pollock, Instructor at the Academic Bridge Program, said.
“Seeing how many words they have read and the competitive element of trying to beat their class-mates has proved a huge motivator. Teachers then select targets such as 80,000 words a month to encourage more extensive reading from the students,” Pollock added. The home page of the M-Reader website shows, for example, that in the last 30 days at level 2 the world leader is a male student from Zayed university Dubai and at level 4 a female student from Abu Dhabi ZU at the top of the leaderboard with 53,659 words read. There are also leaders for the past 3 months, 6 months and 2 years with the highest recorded international student having clocked up a grand total of 3,279, 345 words. Wayne Jones, Director of ABP, said: “We have introduced a robust extensive reading component into our program as a way to motivate students to read in a second language. We want our students to experience the pleasure of reading and increase their motivation to read and engagement with texts from the outset of their university careers.”
Kate Tindle, a Faculty Member at ABP, also helped set up the initiative at Dubai campus. “I have spoken to many of our students who have said before they started reading the specially graded books that they hated reading and now they love it. Another student said she enjoyed the stories so much she actually reads them aloud to her family at home,” Tindle said. It is now much more common to see students around campus with a graded reader or two stuffed into their hand bags, reading them avidly in between classes. Many faculty allocate regular time in class for reading to encourage the students to become lifelong readers.“Having their own account and seeing the number of words they have read quickly add up motivates our students to keep reading. The huge volume of English, at just the right level for them as learners of a second language is an enormous help with not only their reading skills, but also grammar, vocabulary and critical thinking. The more they read the more English they absorb,” Tindle added.
Another crucial element of the program’s success is the fact that it is now an integral and assessed part of the English curriculum throughout the student’s time on the foundations course. The instructors can control the level of books read and the program itself can detect whether the students have actually read the books and provide detailed feedback to the teachers.The M-reader program was originally founded by Tom Robb at the Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan and is free to educational institutions. His light-bulb moment was to realize that each story needed its own test in order to not only assess the student but to prove that the book had indeed been read. Making the tests accessible from any mobile device including smart phones as well as the students’ i-pads was also a perfect marriage of digital with paper technology. “In the USA there is an ‘Accelerated Reader program’ for mainstream elementary school students but there was nothing similar for second language learners. So we initially created a Moodle for teachers and students to track their reading. Then we added the idea of incorporating the book cover images into the student’s account and a progress bar,” Robb said.
Robb also pointed out that there are now more than 80,000 students in over 35 countries using the M-Reader web browser-based program.The M-reader website is hosted by the Extensive Reading Foundation and is supported by all the major publishers such as Cambridge University Press and Macmillan Education.“Surprisingly, most of our millennial students still say they prefer the feel of a real paper book. However, they also appreciate being able to take the test online and see not only a total number of words read so far but also an image, or thumb print photo, of all the books they have read so far,” Tindle said.Graded readers are fairly short, simplified versions of mainstream works of fiction and non-fiction. They are carefully graded with words and grammar suitable for different levels of English as a second language learners which means they are more enjoyable to read.
“Theprogram’s success is simply down to the intrinsic pleasure of reading. Primarily it promotes reading for pleasure as well as the secondary goal of long term acquisition of the English language and reading fluency. Whereas before students might read one or two of these books a term now they are reading dozens,” Barnaby Priest, Assistant Director at ABP, said.
The Library at Zayed Universityhas also been integral to the project and has invested heavily in extensive reading with several thousand new books sorted into a plethora of genres such as Horrors, Thrillers and Biographies. They have also created a special area for the students to read in silence and comfort. Andrew Mcgladdery, Education Technology Coordinator in the ABP, has also worked with M-reader’s creators to make the program accessible to a number of students with special needs such as visual impairment. Books can be converted into brail in the university’s Assistive Technology Resource Centre.
Other institutions within the UAE are also on board with M-Reader including the Higher Colleges of Technology.President his Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan announced the reading initiative to drive through the goal of creating a knowledge-based economy and creating a new generation of readers. “That is certainly a major goal on the campuses of Zayed University and M-Reader has proved itself a vital part of achieving this noble goal. To paraphrase Frank Serafini, “There is no such thing as a student who hates to read. There are only students who have not found the right book”,” Pollock added.
About Zayed University
Zayed University is today the premier national university in the United Arab Emirates and a regional leader in educational innovation and change. It has created and implemented a skills-rich, outcome-based general education program that systemically develops student skills, knowledge, and values associated with liberal learning and provided a solid foundation for pursuit of disciplinary majors and future careers. Zayed University welcomes national and international students, and provides them with a high quality education, offered by seasoned teaching scholars to prepare them to shape the future of the United Arab Emirates.
Zayed University offers Undergraduate and Graduate degrees in the following Colleges: College of Arts & Creative Enterprises (recognized as substantially equivalent by NASAD), College of Business (Accredited by AACSB), College of Communication & Media Sciences (Accredited by ACEJMC), College of Education (Accredited by NCATE), College of Sustainability Sciences & Humanities, and College of Technological Innovation (Accredited by ABET). For more information, visit www.zu.ac.ae