Day and Bamford's Top Ten Principles for Extensive Reading

The canonical statement of what an extensive reading programme requires to function. Day and Bamford published the ten principles in Reading in a Foreign Language in 2002, distilling and revising the framework from their 1998 Cambridge volume. The principles have since served as the field's reference checklist: ER programmes, graded-reader libraries, and teacher-training materials are routinely evaluated against them.

The ten principles

1. The reading material is easy. Texts should fall well within the learner's current ability, with no more than one or two unknown words per page. Difficulty defeats the volume on which extensive reading depends.
2. A variety of reading material on a wide range of topics is available. Genre and topic breadth lets learners exercise choice and meet the language across different registers.
3. Learners choose what they want to read. Self-selection is constitutive of the approach, not optional. The teacher curates the library; learners pick from it.
4. Learners read as much as possible. Volume is the active ingredient. Day and Bamford recommend a book a week as a working benchmark.
5. The purpose of reading is usually related to pleasure, information, and general understanding. Total comprehension is not the goal; main-idea comprehension and engagement are.
6. Reading is its own reward. The reading itself is the activity, not preparation for a comprehension test or a downstream task.
7. Reading speed is usually faster rather than slower. Texts at the right level are read at near-normal silent-reading pace, supporting fluency development.
8. Reading is individual and silent. ER is not a group activity in class, though shared discussion of choices and reactions is welcome around it.
9. Teachers orient and guide their students. The teacher introduces the programme, helps with selection, monitors progress, and intervenes when learners stall, but does not micro-manage what is read.
10. The teacher is a role model of a reader. Teachers read alongside learners, share their own reading, and demonstrate a reader's life. Without this, the programme tends to drift toward assigned reading.

Materials-design implications

Each principle has a counterpart at the design and procurement level. Principle 1 sets a coverage threshold close to 98% known vocabulary, anchoring graded-reader band selection. Principle 2 dictates library breadth: any single-genre or single-topic collection violates the framework. Principle 3 implies discoverability: cover art, blurbs, level markings, and topic categorisation must support browsing and self-selection. Principle 4 implies quantity: a viable library carries multiple titles per learner per term. Principles 5 and 6 push back against post-reading comprehension batteries, suggesting that book reports, reading logs, and quizzes should be light or absent. Principle 7 rules out word-by-word reading aids that slow learners down. Principle 9 requires teacher training: most teachers are not natural ER coaches and need preparation. Principle 10 makes teacher reading, not learner reading, the dependency to address first when an ER programme fails.

Standing in the field

The framework's authority rests on three things: it predates and survives the major empirical reviews, it has been adopted as the working definition by the Extensive Reading Foundation, and it converts smoothly into programme-design checklists. Subsequent work has questioned details (whether learner-choice principle 3 can be relaxed in classroom-mandated ER, how strictly principle 1 should bind in skill-strand programmes), but the ten principles remain the agreed reference point, and most variants are framed as adjustments to them rather than replacements.

References

• Day, R. R. & Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.
• Day, R. R. & Bamford, J. (2002). Top ten principles for teaching extensive reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 14(2), 136–141. https://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/