14.-      DAVID R HILL TO RECEIVE FIRST MILNE INNOVATION AWARD

 

David R Hill to Receive First Milne Innovation Award

Honolulu, 1 November 2010

 

Prof. Richard R Day, Executive Director of the Extensive Reading Foundation, announced today that David R. Hill, Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh is the recipient of the first John A. Milne Innovation Award in the service of the Extensive Reading approach to language learning.

 

David R. Hill has been the director of the Edinburgh Project in Extensive Reading (EPER) since 1981. He had previously taught English in secondary schools in Uganda, the UK and Malaysia before joining the Institute for Applied Language Studies at Edinburgh University. EPER was the first attempt to set some order to the growing number of "Graded Readers", grouping them into appropriate reading levels, evaluating their quality, placing them into sets suitable for various language proficiency levels and providing teacher support materials for them.

 

The Award is named in honour of John Milne. As creator of the Heinemann Guided Readers series in the 1970s, Milne believed that the traditional grading of vocabulary and structure was not enough to make a book suitable for language learners. He therefore took a different approach, basing his series on good, clear writing, relevant content, careful explanation and control of information, and intuitive word and structure control. These innovations have been crucial in the development of language learner literature.

 

The award will be presented at the ERF Awards Ceremony during the IATEFL Conference in Brighton in April of 2011.

 

The Extensive Reading Foundation (http://erfoundation.org), founded in 2004, aims to promote Extensive Reading as a highly effective means of language learning.  To this end the Foundation offers awards to the best new graded reader titles, annually, maintains an annotated bibliography of research into Extensive Reading and conducts other activities to promote research and the implementation of Extensive Reading in the schools.  The Foundation will sponsor its first World Congress in September of 2011 in Kyoto, Japan.

 

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