Rob Waring
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.
Career
- Professor Emeritus, Notre Dame Seishin University, Okayama, Japan
- Executive Board member, Extensive Reading Foundation
- Visiting Professor, Thammasat University; Adjunct Professor, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City
- Author, series editor, and consultant for major commercial graded reader programmes
Published Work
- Series editor of the Footprint Reading Library and Page Turners Reading Library (Cengage)
- Author and series editor of the Foundations Reading Library
- Teaching Extensive Reading in Another Language (with I. S. P. Nation, Routledge, 2020)
- "Exploration of the core and variable dimensions of extensive reading research and pedagogy" (with S. McLean), Reading in a Foreign Language 27, 2015
Influence
- Co-architect of the modern graded reader system through his series-editor work for Cengage
- The 2020 Nation-Waring volume is the current definitive practical reference for ER programmes
- Through the ERF and his open practitioner resources, sustains the institutional infrastructure that makes ER a teachable methodology rather than a slogan