Letter published in Education Week
October 20, 2004, as More on How to
Produce Lifelong Reading Habits
In his letter to
the editor, Hugh Calkins asks what reading method is most likely to produce
lifelong readers ("Why Is There No Answer to This Reading Question?"
Letters, Sept. 29, 2004).
A number of
studies describe how dedicated readers developed their interests in reading,
but a valid study needs to include a comparison with nonreaders as well.
I know of two
studies that provide hints to an answer. Vincent Greaney reported that 6th
grade boys in a sustained-silent-reading program did more leisure reading at
the end of the program than boys in a comparison program. Six years later, he
contacted the boys again: Those who had been in the reading group were still
reading more.
Olga Emery and
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi compared 15 men of working-class backgrounds who became
college professors with 15 men of very similar backgrounds who became
blue-collar workers. We do not know if the two groups had different reading
programs in school, but there were profound differences in their lives outside
of school. The future professors lived in a much more print-rich environment
and, likely as a result of this, did far more reading when they were young.
These studies
suggest that the crucial activity is reading itself, with access to plenty of
books. But they are only scraps. Mr. Calkins has asked the right question, and
it deserves a better answer. I hope other scholars know of additional studies,
and I hope we turn our attention to more investigation of what it takes to
produce a lifelong reader.
Stephen Krashen
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, Calif.
Thank you for posting the article. As a father, an educator, and a lover of reading, this is a question I think about regularly but to which I have no answers.
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