ER-Central.com

Another new and potentially useful site:

Extensive Reading Central is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing an Extensive Reading and Extensive Listening approach to foreign and second language learning. It was started by Dr. Rob Waring of Note Dame Seishin University, Okayama, Japan and Dr. Charles Browne of Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan as a free service to the EFL community.

This site will consolidate a number of existing sites, including Rob Waring's pages robwaring.org/er/ and Tom Robb's site extensivereading.net. The ER foundation, though, will remain a separate site.

Writes Rob,

Our hope is that it will act as the go-to place for ER/EL. Please take a look. It has information for teachers, Authors and publishers. There are how-to's, 90 videos about ER, links, downloads, and lots more - take a look. There's a student page where we'll add some student stuff in the future. We also want to allow the publishers to make announcements about their products, ask for help with say piloting materials and so on. They are part of our community too. 

We'll be adding a discussion section, advice center and so on in the coming weeks. We also hope to have pages in different languages. All in time. 

ER-Central will open an Amazon Affiliate bookstore soon. Note that the site has cost a lot of money to build and any earnings from this will pay for the development costs and go towards  paying the annual bandwidth costs of ($650 per year). We expect to make a huge loss each year. However, if it does turn a profit, it will be used to buy books for disadvantaged schools. We hope we! don't have to resort to advertising. 

So how can you help?

1. If you have any handouts, presentations, worksheets, webpages etc you wish to add to the site, please let use the upload form on the top page to send stuff to me and I'll link it in.
2. Spread the word on Facebook, Twitter or however you like   
3. Help translate some pages
4. Find dead links and send new ones
5. Make comments on pages
6. Leave announcements about ER events etc.
7. Buy books from the store (available in a week or so)
8. Leave suggestions for features you want - we'll try to add them
9. The site is in Wordpress (which both Charlie and I are still learning). If anyone can help design the site help us to add images and various widgets, let me know and I'll add you as an administrator.