PIE SIG Podcast
This podcast explores the benefits of using performance related approaches and activities in the classroom and the lives of the people who use them.
PIE SIG Podcast
PIE SIG Podcast+ Episode 1: Dr. Thomas Robb Discusses his Role at the 2026 STEAM Conference
PIE SIG Podcast+ is a sister podcast to the PIE SIG podcast, but focuses on current activities on the PIE scene, like upcoming conferences, recently published PIE articles, and student performances.
In this episode, Darren interviews Dr. Thomas Robb, Professor Emeritus at Kyoto Sangyo University and Extensive Reading Foundation Chairperson about the 2026 STEAM Conference in Naha, Okinawa.
2026 STEAM Conference in OKINAWA!
Conference: Full STEAM Ahead!
Date: February 20 (Fri.) ~ 22 (Sun.) 2026
Venue: Okinawa Prefectural Gender Equality Center [Tiruru] in Naha, Okinawa (not far from the Okinawa International Airport)
Topic: STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics)
Theme: A STEAMY Conference: Adding Arts to STEM Curricula
Motto: Full STEAM Ahead!
Plenary Speaker: Tom Robb, Professor Emeritus Kyoto Sangyo University, Editor-in-Chief, TESL-EJ.org Chair, The Extensive Reading Foundation (https://erfoundation.org)
We plan to invite SIGs that have a connection with STEAM topics, 22 JALT Associate Members/Publishers, and all of the international language organizations JALT is affiliated with.
The Call for Papers can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKkO91gIfrJRBZAZyb9s21hHE5Me8XwCB2Qd0Xk_TqhTwiVw/viewform
Please register by Sunday, February 8, 2026 JST.
Find more information on the STEAM conference here:
https://jaltpiesig.org/pie-sigs-okinawa-steam-conference/
Dr Thomas Robb's scholarship can be found here:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=leg2vUsAAAAJ&hl=en
The Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF) Website:
https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/
The JALT Extensive Reading SIG Website:
Computer Assisted Language Learning (JALT) Website:
https://jalt.org/group/computer-assisted-language-learning/
Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please like and leave a review. To learn more about the Performance in Education SIG, check out our website:
Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please like and leave a review. To learn more about the Performance in Education SIG, check out our website:
Have questions or want to get involved? Reach out to us at pie.sig.podcast@gmail.com.
To access other high-quality JALT podcasts, go to JALT CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) Podcasts on Soundcloud!
https://soundcloud.com/jalt-call
For tips on how to cite these episodes using APA 7th edition, use the link below:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uLVARUdviigboSQXkJXfgNm0zNkMsal6brBvwpmTKWM/edit?usp=sharing
Welcome to PIE SIG Podcast Plus, your spot for what's happening right now in performance in education. We talk with teachers, authors, students and folks behind our events Casual conversations that keep you in the loop. Stay connected to the ideas PIE how we teach and learn on PIE Sig Podcast Plus. Hey everyone, welcome to the very first PIE of PIE Sig Podcast Plus. I'm Darren. Thank you so much for joining us. Now, this podcast is a bit different from our usual deep dive PIE. We're focusing on what's happening right now and what's coming up. Think shorter, casual chats, maybe, with conference presenters, authors talking about their latest work, and students and teachers talking about performance-based education, for example. So it's a podcast that's really in the moment.
Darren:Kicking things off, we're zooming in on the STEAM conference in Okinawa, happening February 21st and 22nd, put on by PIE. Now, if you're not familiar with STEAM, basically it's STEM science, technology, engineering and math, with the addition of A, and A stands for arts. So what's the purpose? Well, this makes it more inclusive for students who aren't purely analytical and gives STEM folks a chance to explore their creative side and to develop those soft skills that are becoming very center stage in the workplace. These include creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, empathy, communication and collaboration, just to name a few. Now it's these skills that are going to give our students the edge in an increasingly volatile job market. Now, if the location of the conference were not enough to make you want to go, you've got the steam, and with steam, I think you're going to feel more confident about your teaching and what you need to do in the classroom to prepare students for the future.
Darren:If that still weren't enough, the plenary speaker might get you there. Today we're talking to someone with decades of experience in the field of language, and yet he's always looking ahead, bringing fresh ideas, a global perspective and a passion for innovation to everything he does. He's been deeply involved in computer-assisted language learning and extensive reading for decades, giving presentations all over the world and just recently returned from one in Vietnam. In fact, with a wealth of research and publications under his belt, he offers unique perspectives on both where we've been and where we're going A truly rare and valuable perspective for educators of all ages. So welcome to the very first PIE of the PIE SIG Podcast Plus. I'm Darren Kinsman, and today we're talking about the STEAM Conference in Naha, okinawa, scheduled for February 21st and 22nd 2026. And our very first guest is Professor Thomas Robb, chair of the Extensive Reading Foundation and Editor-in-Chief of TESOL EJ, and Dr Robb will be making not one but two presentations at the conference that teachers will not want to miss. So, professor, welcome to the podcast.
Dr Robb:Thank you, you can just call me Tom.
Darren:Just, tom is okay, sure, all right. So I've heard you've been quite busy, so what have you been up to recently?
Dr Robb:Well, I'm retired, but as it turns out, that just makes me busier. I do two basic things. One is the Extensive Reading Foundation, and we just had our biannual conference in Sapporo. This time. It hasn't been in Japan for eight years or so.
Dr Robb:But anyway we had 440 participants, 200 of whom came from Korea, mongolia and China. Wow, and it went very well. Everyone seems to have been impressed by the quality of the presentations and the organization, which makes me quite happy. I could add that I wasn't that happy with the organization myself from behind the scenes, but anyway, we fooled them all.
Darren:Well, I've often noticed that when you're behind the scenes, you see all the things that are going wrong, but the people out there don't notice it.
Dr Robb:Yeah, it seems to be true.
Darren:So can you share how you first became involved with English teaching and how you became the second president of JALT?
Dr Robb:Yes, I always wanted to come back to Japan because I was here as a kid in the third, fourth and fifth grades, because my father was in the military and we were stationed in.
Dr Robb:Yokohama, and in order to do that, I decided that linguistics would be a good major for my university. There wasn't anything called ESL at that time. This was 1966, I think, oh, before I was born. So anyway, I took linguistics and you had to take a non-European language and at that point in time the closest I could get was Chinese. So I studied Chinese for three years.
Dr Robb:Then actually, I went into the Peace Corps to dodge the draft and then after that I came to Japan just when Bpaku 1970 exposition was starting, because I thought that people, there would be a demand for English teachers at that point of time, and I was right. I got a job pretty quickly working for a company called Panasonic. Fortunately, in Panasonic, the head of the English well, not the Panasonic head, but there was one individual who was in charge of the English program and he actually asked me if I wanted to teach at his university, and that was the start of my academic career. Eventually I ended up at Kyoto Sangyo University and retired 36 years later, which was about five or six years ago. 36 years later, which was about five or six years ago, and unfortunately, at that point in time I let the head of the editor of Tesla, ej know that I had retired and she said, oh, tom, would you mind taking over the journal? And foolishly I said yes, well, she had been doing it for 20 some years.
Dr Robb:Maggie Sokolik at Berkeley, so you know it was my turn and it's been very, very busy. We get one or two submissions every day on that. I have to read them first, but I have 16 co-editors around the world and then they take care of the selecting the referees and the back and forths, and then it comes back to me when it's time to make a decision of reject or accept, and then yeah. So Wow, that's a lot of reading, there are a lot of people PIE, but then I have to do all the formatting for the actual printed version of it as well, once it is accepted.
Darren:Right. So how would you sum up your general approach to teaching if you had to explain it in a couple of sentences?
Dr Robb:I've never been one to correct my students. I've always wanted them to speak, write or whatever school it was, as much as possible. I do believe, though, in say, correction when it comes to compositions comes to compositions. To some point. I wrote a paper back in 1986, rob Ross and Short read with an experiment on what sort of feedback helped the students, and found out it didn't matter what sort of correction you gave them, they all improved the most, which to me meant that what is important is actually the amount of practice they're getting rather than the way you are correcting them. So you know, that's basically it. I've always used technology a lot in my teaching because I've always taught the English what is it called computer literacy course at my university. We have a number of sections of that, and even with that, I very quickly found partners for the students overseas so they could chat online and that was before any of these services came about, which made it a lot easier for you to do that. The students seem to have appreciated that.
Darren:So you seem to have been heavily involved in computer-assisted language learning and extensive reading for some time, so could you briefly explain what they are for teachers who don't know, maybe who are new to the field?
Dr Robb:Well, extensive reading, of course, you would assume, means reading a lot, and that's true.
Dr Robb:The problem is how do you get students to read a lot and how effective is it? The best way is to use graded readers, but unfortunately, except in a rich country like Japan, it's hard to obtain graded readers. Japan it's hard to obtain graded readers, so that really hasn't worked too well internationally only in the places where they can obtain the readers. So we're now looking at other ways to get the students material, like having readers created in country on themes that the students know. And we have some groups now in various countries Indonesia, vietnam and Thailand who are working on local creation of graded readers. And there's been a lot of research that definitely shows that extensive reading isn't just for improving one's reading comprehension or fluency, but it also has knocked down effects on their. But it also has knocked down effects on their writing, their listening well, all the skills, in fact, at my school, the TOEFL listening score is the one that correlates the most highly with the amount of words that the students have read.
Darren:Can you explain what a graded reader is and how it fits into extensive reading?
Dr Robb:Yeah, graded readers are put out now by a lot of publishers. They've been around for a while, but what it is is the vocabulary in particular is limited to a certain range of words. There's the 200 head words, the 500 head words, and so all the vocabulary basically, except for a few other words maybe which they need for the story, are included in there. So they say that you need to know 95, or better, 98%, of the words in the book you're reading in order to really be able to read it fluently without needing a dictionary, and enjoy the book rather than studying the book. And so Oxford, penguin, pearson, cambridge and many other publishers have series of graded readers at between five and eight different levels, so the students can find something at their level to read and then continue to read at that level until they feel they're ready to go up to the next.
Darren:Now I've heard from teachers who use online graded readers that sometimes the students will do everything they can to avoid reading and they basically find a way around it and make it look like they've read the book, and I was wondering why you think that might be happening.
Dr Robb:Well, some students just don't like to read. They have other things in their life that are more important to them, priorities such as their part-time job, other courses that are in their major rather than English, social activities and so forth. So you're always going to have a certain percentage of them. You just have to accept that and try to get as many students as possible to do the reading. But it's never going to be 100% and even then many of them are doing it unwillingly and they say, well, I don't like it, but I know it's good for me, so they do it. And there's quite a few like that. So at my school we require them to read 500,000 words minimum in the first two years, first four semesters, and most of them do it because we check If you can see how long it's taken them to read the book, and so you can't just go flip, flip, flip because that's detected and you fail the book. So there are strategies for you know from the teacher's end to be careful to watch out for that.
Dr Robb:And I, even before X-Reading, had my M-Reader program, which was also for that. And I, even before X-Reading, had my M-Reader program, which was also for that. But at that point in time. It was just a short quiz that they had to pass at the 60% level, with very easy questions that were on not the deep understanding of the book but rather the superficial things that if they read the book they should still remember. And that worked quite well. And they enjoyed collecting the covers of the books on their own personal page and that sometimes was more of a motivator than the actual reading. But anyway it worked for a lot of people, right.
Darren:So so that was your way of combining your two interests. Then extensive reading and call well, that's true.
Dr Robb:Yeah, that did combine both of them. I was also the chair of the t-cell call interest section for two years, a long time ago.
Darren:What is it about call and ER that drew you to them.
Dr Robb:I was in ER because I felt that reading was important for the students. But when I got to Kyoto, sanyo, they didn't have any graded readers and I ordered a lot of paperbacks from Hong Kong because they're really cheap, from Scholastic, and had them read those even though they weren't graded readers, and they had to write a short summary. But I found that the summary took more of their time than the reading, which was supposed to be a reading class, and so we finally settled on the quiz instead of the summary in order for them to prove that they had read the book.
Darren:Right. So you wrote an article in 2024, and you talked about. It seemed to me that ER just doesn't function just by setting it up. You have to have some kind of support mechanisms and there has to be some kind of teacher control over the class in order for it to work. So what exactly were you thinking of? Like what are these supports?
Dr Robb:Well, actually the supports have to come two ways Bottom up, meaning the teacher, but not only the teacher, but the other teachers as well, because if everyone is teaching the same course, it really isn't ideal for one person to be using extensive reading and none of the others.
Dr Robb:It works best when everyone is doing it. That means that you can have a budget for the readers, you can have a place to store them and, whatever If it's a single teacher, they have to haul them to class with a basket. And then the top-down is also important. In other words, the administration of a school, and hopefully even the Ministry of Education of the whole country, needs to understand and appreciate extensive reading and then encourage the schools, or maybe legislate the adoption of extensive reading. For example, in Indonesia they have a rule that all the students have to read for 15 minutes a day, and that doesn't mean English, though it could be Indonesian, because they have a literacy problem because no one really speaks in. Well, hardly anyone speaks Indonesian at home. They all have different languages which are not related very often, so, or it could even be the Koran that they're reading, but anyway, that's one way to get students to read is to actually have a requirement for it.
Darren:So what is it that drew you to the STEAM conference?
Dr Robb:This is something that I have a lot I could say about, and so I was very glad to be able to participate.
Darren:Do you think that the A that's inserted into STEM, making it STEAM, is a valuable thing in terms of the future of the workforce? Because we don't know what's going to happen with AI. It just seems to be replacing jobs, and if we get to a point where the jobs are being replaced faster than people can train for them, you know, what skills do you think are going to be most valuable for us to teach our students?
Dr Robb:The thing is that, for extensive reading, it's important for everyone to be able to read fluently, regardless of what their intended major is. Unfortunately, though, those that are in science and technology very often only want to read books that are related to science and technology the nonfiction books as opposed to the fiction books, which are the bulk of the readers used in extensive reading. There are a number of series, though, that are Cambridge has a series, and can't remember who else has one, but there are a couple of series that are only books that are on geography, science, technology and related nonfiction areas, but they aren't quite as interesting, and very often it's harder to test if students have read them or not, because there's usually a lot more prior knowledge that they have before they read the books, but at least they're in their field and they're PIE up suitable vocabulary.
Darren:Right. I think the PIE relation to STEAM is that without the A, PIE wouldn't have any relation to it, because it's basically analytic. Right, stem is analytic, but when you insert the arts in there, you're talking about skills like soft skills, creativity, critical thinking and things like that, maybe that a lot of analytical thinkers don't have and probably they'll need more of in the future. I'm not sure what your PIE is on that. Are these soft skills really important or not? So much do you think?
Dr Robb:No, I think they are important. In fact, if you look at the literature and say the contributions that we were receiving, tessal EJ there's been a tick in the number of submissions talking about higher order teaching skills and lower order teaching skills and pointing out that most of the textbooks that are currently available mainly focus on the lower order skills, without going into the higher order skills, which are what the students need for their future lives. So it's an PIE to a large extent in text in general, and I'm not just talking about English language texts, but other texts that are relevant to science and technology.
Darren:Okay, so you mentioned that before when we were talking before the interview that you were using AI Is your PIE. Do you think it's a net benefit or we just don't know yet?
Dr Robb:in terms of education, no-transcript the ways that I've been using it. It's definitely a benefit for the teacher at least, and hopefully for the student as well. I have a long list of different ways that I've used AI that I could mention quickly if you like. One is, of course, text correction, which that's good for both the teacher and the students, grammarly and so forth, which works wonders. But still there's a question of if Grammarly is correcting the mistakes, how much are they learning from their errors? And I've suggested that actually to the PIE membership that that might be a fruitful area for research. Text simplification you have something you want your students to read but there are too many difficult words in it or the grammar is too difficult. So you can ask AI to make it simpler, bring it down to the CEFR level B2, for example, and it usually does a decent job Summarizing a text. You throw in a text and say can you give me a 500-word summary of this? One interesting thing I did recently for the Sense of Reading World Congress which we just had, is I had to write something about one of the speakers and I asked the chat GTP, what can you tell me about so and so? And it took 46 seconds and it said you know, searching this, searching that and so forth, and it came with a very nice set of information on the person and a summary which I could basically use verbatim. And so that's something which I didn't know that ChatGTP could do, because originally it was only taught about the world two years prior to the current date. But it seems that now it has access to more information Text creation, for example, how students can create a text as a group, or teachers can create a text that they want, or getting information from internet sources, like the example I just gave you for the speaker, or making.
Dr Robb:You have a text but there are too many difficult words in it. One approach is to ask ChatGP to simplify it. Another approach is to ask it to extract all the words that appear to be too difficult, and it extracts the words and then you can add the Japanese translations to it or whatever language, and that's been very useful for me. I did that with French and Arabic translations when I was teaching a writing course in Lebanon. Well, that was two years ago now. Creating illustrations PIE and other ones can actually create illustrations to go with whatever it is that you or the students are making. And the next one, which I haven't actually gotten around to yet, but I think it might be possible is converting a story into dialogue text for acting out, and so, anyway, that's my short list of things that I'd like to talk about concerning the use of AI.
Darren:You just made me realize that you know, even a dry textbook on some STEM field could also be made into an interesting dialogue.
Dr Robb:You want to try that why?
Darren:not. Let's give it a try. After the podcast, I think it might be interesting. Say, here's this dry text and you could make it into, I don't know, like a drama Interesting, and you'd have them talk about the concepts.
Dr Robb:Okay, well, let's both try that and see what works out. I have lots of texts I could use as the input. Cool.
Darren:All right, so you're giving two talks during the conference, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. What do you think they can get from it?
Dr Robb:Well concerning AI, I hope that some of the ideas I present are ones that they can use For the talk on extensive reading. I would basically show what sort of materials there are and the levels of them, and ask the audience that is present what do they think about how these might be useful for their own?
Darren:students. Do you think there's any benefit of having a kind of performance element, so for example, giving a book report in front of the class or doing a skit or a play based on the story?
Dr Robb:I personally am not too keen on one person performing in front of a whole class. If they're doing something involving acting with multiple students, that's fine, but basically it's rather time consuming for one person at a time to talk in front of the group. In fact, I have a program I wrote called Peer Eval, and Peer Eval allows all the students to listen to a student who is speaking, preferably in groups, so you don't have that one person in front of the whole class frontally, and while he's speaking they can evaluate it on a Likert scale that the teacher has made, and then they submit it and then the student gets the feedback. They can also put in verbal feedback and the teacher can get the evaluation of the person, include things like how well prepared the person was, and so that makes it much more valuable as an activity, I believe.
Darren:All right, thank you very much. We look forward to your presentations in Okinawa. Have you been to Okinawa before?
Dr Robb:Oh, two or three times for conferences, of course, no one time with my parents. Okay, he was stationed in Okinawa during the war.
Darren:So, tom, thank you very much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure and it's been great talking to you. See you in February.
Dr Robb:It's been fun. Thank you very much. I enjoy it and I'm certainly looking forward to the conference in Okinawa. Take care, thank you.
Darren:That's all for today. Thank you very much for joining PIE Sig Podcast Plus. See you next time and stay connected.