Rob Waring is a British applied linguist based in Japan and the leading practitioner-research voice on graded readers and extensive reading. He spent his career at Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, where he is now Professor Emeritus, and continues as Visiting Professor at Thammasat University and Adjunct Professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City. He is a founding figure and Executive Board member of the Extensive Reading Foundation, the not-for-profit body that runs the Language Learner Literature Awards.
Waring's distinctive contribution is to keep extensive reading honest. Where research debates drift into ideal conditions and unworkable headword counts, he writes for teachers running real classrooms and real libraries. His website at robwaring.org hosts decades of practitioner-facing material on graded reader selection and ER programme design that few academics bother to make freely available.