I'm very pleased to report that my newest article on children's motivation to do extensive reading was just published in the Young Learners column of The Language Teacher, the bimonthly publication of the  Japan Association of Language Teaching (JALT). This is a very under-researched area, so it was a good chance to introduce the effective and easy-to-do Teacher Reading Aloud (TRA) method. Instead of directly recommending library books to students, it is much more effective for the teacher to read aloud from a series and then make the books available for students to check out, without making students feel any pressure to do so. Students value their autonomy and need to feel they have the freedom to choose what they want to read. I've been using this method at BIG BOW English Lab for a few years to help students feel intrinsically motivated to check out and read library books.

I published the academic research last year in Language Teaching for Young Learners, but hope this article will reach more teachers in Japan with extensive reading programs for children.