Inspired, as ever, by our #KELTchat colleagues, we’ve decided to shamelessly steal try out their “slowburn” idea for our next Twitter chat.

This means instead of the usual 1-hour format, we are spreading out over a whole 12 hours, starting at 10am and ‘officially’ closing at 10pm Sydney time.

The idea is that more of us will be able to access the chat instead of always missing it due to class/train/timezone clashes. It will also be less chaotic more relaxed than a 1-hour chat where the tweets are flying and nobody really knows what’s going on till the summary comes out (much as we love that type of chat too!) People can dip in and dip out, comment, ask and respond, whenever suits them over the 12-hour period, and hopefully we’ll still get the same great range of ideas, resources and food for thought.

So, our first slow burn will take place on Thursday 3rd April 2014, 10am-10pm, on the topic of EXTENSIVE READING.

The chat won’t be moderated as such, so participants can feel free to start whatever conversation they would like on this topic, and follow the threads that are most of interest to them. Some ideas may be:

• What is the value of extensive reading?
• Is extensive reading something the teacher can/should address IN class? If so, how?
• What obstacles are there to teachers setting up an ER program & how can they be overcome?
• Are ‘graded readers’ effective? What material has been particularly successful in helping learners ‘catch’ reading in English?
• What’s different about reading in the digital century? Is this considered by ER programs?

Do feel free to ask your own questions and share your own experiences on this topic. See you on Thursday!

Useful pre-reading/links

Extensivereading.net – full of great resources/articles

Top 10 principles for teaching extensive reading by Richard Day & Julian Bamford http://www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2002/day/day.html

Extensive reading: Why it is good for our students…and for us by Alan Maley https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/extensive-reading-why-it-good-our-students…-us

PS:  Don’t worry, we will continue to mix it up and have 1-hour chats and guest chats as well as slowburns. Some other ideas for organisation of chats have also been floated including:

–       #AusELT members choosing a topic that they are especially interested in, and taking over the set up and management of that particular chat

–       voting and scheduling all chats, of all types, at the start of the year

–       all of the above 🙂

Do you have some ideas for how chats could be run/organised? Let us know in the comments.

This post by @sophiakhan4