Reading stations: A transitional activity to extensive reading

ncounter and 
Recall forgotten 
vocabulary, 3, 
24.19
Encounter and 
Recall forgotten 
vocabulary, 4, 
35.48
Encounter and 
Recall forgotten 
vocabulary, 5, 
32.26
Identify and Understand new vocabulary
Reuse new vocabulary
Guess new vocabulary in context
The results of the study also show that there were still opinions that Reading Station did not have 
much impact on the ability to improve the vocabulary of learners on certain aspects such as reusing new 
vocabulary. However, the percentage of these comments was relatively low, most of which were below 
10%. 
4.3.2. Improving reading techniques 
The study’s results reveal that the majority of students highly evaluate Reading Station in improving 
their Skimming skill rather than Scanning, at 27.42% compared to 8.79% respectively. 
In addition, many argue that Reading Station helped them improve their reading speed considerably 
thanks to the ability to select familiar topics or topics of high interest. This result is consistent with the 
comments made in the focused-group discussion. 
Figure 3. Reading Station’s impacts on improving reading techniques (n=62) 
4.3.3. Improving writing skill 
Reading Station also seemed to have a positive impact on student’s writing skills, as revealed by the 
result of group discussions and questionnaire. In particular, most of the comments were at level 4 and level 
5 (the level of impact). The results are shown in Figure 4. 
Reading speed, 2, 
6.45
Reading speed, 3, 
24.19
Reading speed, 4, 
45.16
Reading speed, 5, 
24.19
Skimming 
technique, 1, 0.00
Skimming 
technique, 2, 4.84
Skimming 
technique, 3, 
25.81
Skimming 
technique, 4, 
41.94
Skimming 
technique, 5, 
27.42
Scanning 
technique, 1, 3.23
Scanning 
technique, 2, 
24.19
Scanning 
t chnique, 3, 
24.19
Scanning 
technique, 4, 
39.60
Scanning 
technique, 5, 8.79
Reading speed Skimming technique Scanning technique
 Figure 4. Reading Station’s impacts on improving writing skill (n=62) 
Among the impacts evaluated, writing reflective diaries, reusing some vocabulary and sentence 
patterns from the collected readings, and adopting ideas from the readings’ authors were the major opinions 
mentioned not only in the focused-group discussions but were also relatively high rated in the questionnaire, 
averaging 65% of responses from level 4 (agree) and above (totally agree). However, only 48% students 
think that Reading Station helps them acquire the writer’s style of writing, and up to 15% disagree with this 
statement. 
5. Discussion and suggestions 
From the results of the study, it can be seen that Reading Station has pushed students to read more 
and enjoy reading. This result is consistent with Krashen's (1993) study where the author believed that free 
voluntary reading (FVR) is the key to developing reading, language abilities, vocabulary, spelling, and 
writing skills. Also, the fascinating headlines of the articles are the ones that impressed students, offering 
them quick glance through the main content of the article before going in to read more, thereby increasing 
the interest in reading. Increasing motivation is also the ultimate goal when incorporating Reading Station 
in the reading class. 
Students’ attitude towards Reading Station activity is in line with several findings by research to date. 
As Reading Station is essentially an ER activity, students’ attitude towards it reflects their responses 
towards ER. Generally, ER attracts students by its novelty, which makes it stand out from regular 
comprehension activities with end-of-passage questions. Students’ motivation was also mainly boosted 
from the fact that they could choose a suitable topic and difficulty level to meet their interest and 
proficiency, which is essentially similar to the reasons why ER is favored in other studies. 
However, an advantage of Reading Station over other ER applications in previous studies is that the 
moderate length of online articles and the up-to-date topics were regularly mentioned as the reasons why 
students like this activity. This can be explained by the fact that while previous studies mainly focused on 
using graded readers, the information students read was mainly fiction, so little update news was present in 
this kind of reading material. Meanwhile, online articles helped students stay informed of current events 
within a moderate number of words, thus boost their motivation to read and explore further. 
Write better thanks 
to writing reflective 
diaries, 1, 1.61
Write better thanks 
to writing reflective 
diaries, 2, 3.23
Write better thanks 
to writing reflective 
diaries, 3, 27.42
W
Write better thanks 
to writing reflective 
diaries, 5, 22.58
Write better thanks 
to reusing vocab 
and sentence 
structures, 1, 0.00
Write better thanks 
to reusing vocab 
and sentence 
structures, 2, 8.06
Write better thanks 
to reusing vocab 
and sentence 
structures, 3, 20.97
Write better thanks 
to reusing vocab 
and sentence 
structures, 4, 41.94
Write better thanks 
to reusing vocab 
and sentence 
structures, 5, 29.03
Write better thanks 
to acquiring the 
auth r's style, 1, 
3.23
Write better thanks 
to acquiring the 
author's style, 2, 
14.52
Write better thanks 
to acquiring the 
author's style, 3, 
33.87
Write better thanks 
to acquiring the 
author's style, 4, 
27.42
Write be ter thanks 
to acquiring the 
author's style, 5, 
20.97
Write bett r thanks 
to gainning ideas 
from reading, 2, 
6.45
Write b tter thanks 
to gainning ideas 
from reading, 3, 
19.35
Write be ter thanks 
to gainning ideas 
from r adi g, 4, 
37.10
Write better thanks 
to gainning ideas 
from reading, 5, 
33.87
Write better thanks to writing reflective diaries
Write better thanks to reusing vocab and sentence structures
Write better thanks to acquiring the author's style
Write better thanks to gainning ideas from reading
With regards to improving vocabulary, the present study found out that students claimed they saw 
clear improvement in various aspects of vocabulary development. Studies by Pigada and Schmitt (2006) 
and Nation and Ming-Tzu (1999) also suggest that the ER really helps learners understand the meaning and 
grammatical aspects of the word, thereby raising the awareness to use better vocabulary in Writing. Another 
study by Yamashita (2008) also found that students after being exposed to ER could use vocabulary and 
structure that often appear in the reading materials. In the present study, these findings were confirmed as 
nearly 70% of students think that the ER helps to expand the receptive and productive vocabulary. 
Meanwhile, nearly 13% of respondents still claimed that Reading Station did not have much impact 
on learners’ ability to use the acquired vocabulary in productive skills, and this can be explained by Huckin 
and Coady (1999)'s study. They argued that the benefits of improving vocabulary by ER were not so 
significant because learning vocabulary by this way was not intentional, so learners can hardly remember 
new words for a long time. This will prevent students from reusing the vocabulary found in the readings, 
because by the time they write, the learner will no longer remember to use unintentionally learned words. 
Regarding the development of reading techniques, the practice of Reading Station was claimed to 
improve Skimming more than Scanning. This can be explained by the fact that the main purpose of ER is 
to read for joy and general understanding, without focusing on locating specific information for a 
comprehension-detail question. This result corresponds to Sun's (2003) study when he only explored the 
Skimming for Gist process in detail in a similar activity called Extensive Reading Online (ERO) and barely 
mentioned the Scanning technique. According to Sun (2003), students entered the reading phases by 
skimming the titles and subtitles, the topic sentences of each section to try to understand the main content 
of the article. These steps were also employed by students in the present study when all students approached 
an article by reading its catchy title first. 
Finally, for the improvement of writing skills, the results are consistent with those of Macalister 
(2010), Soliman (2012) who suggested that students write better by applying some words and sentence 
structures gained from reading. Reading these up-to-date articles also helps them learn better ideas for later 
writing activities. 
From the results and discussions above, the incorporation of ER using online English articles to 
current IR-based English reading classes is well suited to the practical context and solidifies the theoretical 
framework of ER and its benefits. Extensive reading in general and similar activities to Reading Station 
should complement traditional reading strategies in classroom instruction to stimulate students' interest in 
reading English and promote positive values of both methods. This is also a case study with initial positive 
results of how ER can be easily introduced in traditional IR classrooms at low cost, solving several problems 
and conflicts of integrating ER into the rigid reading curriculum. 
Despite employing a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodology, a few limitations of the 
present study are worth pointing out. One limitation is that this study involves only initial evaluation of the 
transitional activity Reading Station, thus, is still on a small scale. Another is that it also sought to explore 
only students’ motivations and feedback without empirical evidence of their sub-skill improvement. Also, the 
study only looked at English-majored students and thus, could be of little implication to general English 
learners. Further research may investigate in-depth the impact of such introductory ER activity to students 
and/or compare the impacts of this transitional activity to complete ER program on a specific skill or part of 
knowledge. Reading Station activity can be further upgraded to an online version where information is stored 
over time, creating a bank of graded articles that can be used for later years. 
6. Conclusion 
Reading Station activity in two Reading 4 classes at Hue University concluded with a positive outcome 
with regards to students’ motivation in reading extensively, and the perceived impacts on improving 
vocabulary, reading techniques, and writing skill. This activity proved to be a cost-efficient introduction to 
ER when certain restrictions that prevent the application of ER in reading classes were present. By abiding by 
the ten core principles of ER, teachers would be able to devise many other similar activities to Reading Station 
in the present study that suit the available teaching and learning conditions – an activity that balance students’ 
needs and wants. 
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TRẠM ĐỌC - MỘT HOẠT ĐỘNG CHUYỂN TIẾP 
TRONG ĐỌC MỞ RỘNG TIẾNG ANH 
Tóm tắt: Đọc mở rộng (ĐMR) là phương pháp cho phép sinh viên đọc nhiều chủ đề khác nhau một 
cách dễ dàng vì niềm vui và hiểu biết chung. Để từng bước đưa ĐMR vào chương trình học đọc chính 
khóa, một hoạt động mang tính thử nghiệm và chuyển tiếp có tên Reading Station (RS) đã được tiến 
hành trong 2 lớp đọc 4 tại khoa tiếng Anh, Đại học Ngoại ngữ, Đạo học Huế. Ở đó sinh viên được yêu 
cầu mang các bài báo tiếng Anh đến lớp để chia sẻ và cùng đọc. Các kết quả thu thập được từ bảng hỏi 
và thảo luận nhóm người học cho thấy, sinh viên rất thích hoạt động này và đã chỉ ra những tác động 
tích cực của RS đến kiến thức và kỹ năng của họ. Kết quả này cho thấy tiềm năng ứng dụng các hoạt 
động tương tự trong dạy đọc tiếng Anh hiện nay. 
Từ khóa: Đọc mở rộng, trạm đọc, hoạt động chuyển tiếp