What is Non-Fictional Texts

As practicing university teachers, we have noticed that students tend to focus exclusively on syllabus reading materials ignoring reading for pleasure outside the classroom. Rarely taught in ordinary university classes, extensive reading skills may play an important part in the foreign language teaching and learning process. Given these facts, we have decided to pilot an extensive reading program at academic level, the ultimate aim being to implement it in the future. Therefore, the purposes of the paper are to discover students' attitude towards extensive reading and to assess the results of the pilot as reflected in their opinions with a view to conceiving a large-scale future reading program. The study attempts to shed light on the issues triggered by the introduction of such a program into the curriculum of philological students, being mainly concerned with the practical side of the phenomenon and highlighting the interdependence between our findings and the latest theories in the field.