Research papers (academic journals)
Smartphones, tablets, and today's touch screen laptops are powerful tools capable of serving hundreds of specialized, complex operations and applications to anyone, seemingly anywhere in the world. For second language learners and those who teach them, these tools suddenly have the potential to recast the reading experience for 21st-century students. This study reports on the implementation of a 15 week (one semester) pilot test of Xreading? (www.xreading.com), an online Graded Reader (GR) library and learning management system (LMS) devoted specifically to the implementation and operation of extensive reading at a private university in Tokyo, Japan. This paper reports on student engagement with this platform exclusively for 15 weeks in regards to changes in reading speeds, volume of reading, and correlations between these numbers and TOEIC? IP test scores.
