ИСТИНА

Extensive reading has long been integrated into most English courses, and Moscow State University is no exception. It is typically performed as ‘home reading’: first the students familiarize themselves with a book (or an excerpt) of a specified length, allowed to progress through the text at their own pace, and then provide an oral summary in the classroom, followed by questions or a brief teacher-student discussion [2]. In this shape, home reading does not necessarily fit traditional definitions of extensive reading, e.g. ‘ease of understanding’ [1]. On the contrary, some courses (including the one the author has been teaching at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics for almost a decade) specifically require students to explore unabridged originals irrespective of their current proficiency, thus necessitating intense vocabulary work - to be checked in the classroom later. Thus, home reading becomes a suitable vehicle for developing both language systems (first and foremost vocabulary and, to some extent, grammar) and skills [5]. Nevertheless, the conventional approach to home reading may have several drawbacks. First, it is frequently delivered as an individual-turn task, with students taking turns to present their summaries to the teacher. Since each student is preoccupied solely with their own report, overall student talking time is low, as well as classroom engagement and interaction. Home reading essentially turns into an assessment type rather than a learning activity. Moreover, this is a task with insufficient ecological validity [4], as real-life discussions of fiction rarely involve retelling, favouring personal opinions or narrative analysis instead. Dialogues, too, almost invariably take precedence over monologues in authentic speech (unless the genre of a public presentation is selected, which demands a highly specific set of skills normally beyond the scope of a home reading class). Additionally, for lower-level students a book report often becomes an exercise in memorizing rather than speaking. These disadvantages could be mitigated by introducing additional home reading activities: more interactive, less structured, with a stronger communicative focus. The table below presents an outline of classroom activities that could potentially enrich the traditional home reading class. Each is supplied with an optional follow-up activity to bolster learning; each can be fine-tuned to the learners’ current level and is therefore suitable for student groups from Elementary to Advanced. The emphasis is placed on freer communicative activities, yet more controlled systems-oriented ones are also embedded in the interactive framework (e.g. the Word Clouds). In line with recent research that highlights the cognitive benefits of multimodal language learning [3], a number of activities involve visual support, frequently harnessing technology such as AI image or word cloud generators. Classroom interaction patterns vary throughout each activity: from individual to small-group to whole-class work, thus avoiding monotony and expanding the students’ communicative range, as well as the range of skills required to perform them. Small-group discussions are also beneficial to student autonomy, which extensive reading is supposed to develop by default. Unlike the more conventional ‘teacher-student’ paradigm, they allow the students to experiment with ways of getting their meaning across in a naturalistic communicative setting, while the teacher remains unobtrusive as an observer and sometimes a facilitator. These activities are not supposed to substitute the traditional book report - a well-established and efficient classroom technique. Yet when different methods are applied together, they are more likely to guide the students towards comprehensive language mastery, which is our ultimate goal as teachers.