Reading materials

The main resource is of course the collection of graded-readers. At an affordable price -- about 500 yen per book -- the word-based levels of the various graded-reader series are an ideal stepping-stone towards real books, plus they provide a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction genres and topics. Some series also come with comprehension activities, either in the back of each title or from the publisher's internet site (note of warning: the quality of these activities is uneven, sometimes obliging students to recall minute or trivial details instead of asking general questions about characters and incidents). In addition, thousands of titles have already been tried-and-tested by numerous ER programmes throughout the world.

Graded-readers serve two functions in TEREP:

• as Class Readers, on which everyone works together. This is the best way for teachers to initially encourage and influence library reading
• as Library Readers, which students themselves select for individual reading both in- and out of class

Supplemental materials are also available:

• reading cards. Particularly useful for low-level students, the two sets of cards available -- Starter Cards and Reading Cards (from EPER) -- are copyright-free and familiarize low-level students with the roughly 300 words most common to graded-readers
• cassette recordings. These either come with the books or are recorded by teachers themselves
• CD-ROM versions of some graded-readers. These are teacher-created and are available in the school's computer lab

Incidentally, the school itself bears the cost of materials but, to enable the collection to grow, in future students may be charged a small yearly book fee.

A view of the reading materials