The impact of the implementation of fun extensive reading day towards students’ reading habit

Extensive reading nowadays is believed to be more effective in teaching ESL/EFL. With its characteristics such as reading for pleasure, reading a lot, easy and interesting reading, extensive reading has been an approach for teaching reading besides intensive reading. English Education Department of the Universitas Muria Kudus has put extensive reading as a subject in the curriculum. Some extensive reading programs are also established to introduce extensive reading. Yet, it seems that students’ awareness in reading does not apparently improve. Their reading habits have not been good enough. Responding to the phenomena, the writers created a voluntarily program and researched on this. This present research is a qualitative research aimed at figuring out the students’ perceptions toward Online Fun Extensive Reading Day (OFERD) program, and figuring out to what extend the program fosters the students’ reading habits. The instruments used were two sets of questionnaires and reading logs. Both of the questionnaires were administered in the end of the program, and the reading logs were maintained by the participants regularly. The participants were 13 sophomore students of English Education Department of University of Muria Kudus. The finding showed that the students’ perception toward the program was positive because it motivated them to read more and they would keep reading after the program. Another finding revealed that the program foster their reading habits in terms of length of reading time, number of books read, purpose of reading, and self-measurement. The recommendation for the department is establishing ER program which is institutionally and professionally managed by the department library, Self Access Room (SAR), or the university library in order to involve students massively