One of the most interesting plenaries I attended at the Braz-Tesol Conference last week in Fortaleza, Brazil was Rob Waring's The missing piece of the puzzle. Rob talked about vocabulary acquisition, the need of getting to know words in a deeper way and advocated for a wider use of graded readers and extensive reading in ELT.

Rob mentioned the need to know the nuances and shades of words, their derivations, collocations & colligations, usage and discourse domains.

How many of you have been using graded readers and literature regularly with your language learners? Are graded readers part of your course programme? Do you agree that extensive reading can improve learners' vocabulary?

Looking forward to some replies.

Cheers - Chris