Exploring success factors in long-term extensive reading : a case study of a Japanese university student

What contributes to success in long-term extensive reading? To explore this question, this paper reports on a Japanese university student who read extensively in English for four years, with a total of 152 books and 842,019 words read. The majority of her reading was done in the first and fourth academic years with numerous ups and downs along the way, but she made a dramatic comeback in the fourth year by focusing on a single series. I suggest that she succeeded because (a) she made extensive reading part of her life and (b) she found her favorite series and engaged in "narrow reading" (Krashen, 2004).