Let Them Have Books: A Formula for Universal Reading Proficiency

Let Them

Have Books

A Formula for Universal Reading Proficiency

Gaby Chapman

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Let Them Have Books

A Formula for Universal Reading Proficiency

Copyright © 2010 by Gaby Chapman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-5777-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-5778-7 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 10/29/2010

For my mother, who gave me books

Readers are born free and they ought to remain free.

~Vladimir Nabokov

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part One:

Why Kids Should Read

Chapter One

Kids Who Read Get a Great Deal from Books

Chapter Two

Kids Who Read Do Well in School

Chapter Three

Kids Who Read Become Adults Who Read

Part Two

Why Kids Don’t Read

Chapter Four

Some Kids Do Not Get the Early Literacy Experience They Need

Chapter Five

For Some Kids, Learning to Read Is a Struggle

Chapter Six

In School, Many Kids Learn to Hate to Read

Part Three

What Kids Need to Become Avid Readers

Chapter Seven

Kids Need a Full Preliteracy Experience

Chapter Eight

Dyslexic Kids Need Early Recognition and Targeted Instruction

Chapter Nine

Kids Need Schools that Foster a Reading Culture

Appendix A: Books and Authors Mentioned

Appendix B: Further Resources Mentioned

Bibliography

End Notes

Acknowledgments

First, I must thank all my students, who taught me more than I could possibly have taught them. In particular, I am grateful for the students who so willingly gave me permission to use some of their words in this book. Second, I am immeasurably grateful for the readers of early versions of this book—Rob Kaplan, who read the first version and gave me a good kick into a better direction; Joan Kir, who read a later version and helped greatly with my organization; and Mike Chapman, who read version after version after version. I also owe thanks to Mary Cole, Charles Bayless, Jessica Wheeler, and Violet Witchel and Georgia Witchel for their valued contributions.

Preface

I have always loved to read. Since the days I sat in class with a novel propped up inside my textbook, my education has come primarily from reading books that I have chosen for myself. This background inspired my teaching when I taught sixth through twelfth grade at a charter school for seven years. Since I was given the freedom to teach English as I chose, I gave my students the time and the encouragement they needed to read the books they wanted to read. I was stunned by the results in terms of both high test scores and student enthusiasm.

While I was teaching reading, I was also watching my two new grandchildren develop from listeners to decoders to avid readers. I became convinced that all children could become highly skilled, lifelong readers if they were well prepared to learn to read and were encouraged to do abundant, independent reading in school. I decided to write this book because I felt that this worthwhile goal could be realized with a fresh look at what children truly need to become readers.

During these years, I shared the national anxiety over the decline in American students’ reading skills in international comparisons. Fewer than half of the nation’s children were reading at a proficient level.[1] In 2002, the Department of Education launched a multi-billion-dollar initiative with the ambitious goal of universal reading proficiency by the year 2014.[2] It was all to no avail; in November 2009, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that reading skills had not improved at all.[3]

Encouraging abundant reading had not been a part of this initiative.

In 2010, the Department of Education announced it was abandoning the unrealistic goal of universal reading proficiency.[4] Instead, it would push for the broader goal of college and career readiness. If students don’t do much reading, then, yes, universal reading proficiency is and always will be an unrealistic goal. If they don’t start reading more, broader college and career readiness will likely prove to be unrealistic as well.

Reading is the most important skill children can learn, not only for their school years but for a lifetime of benefits. Young children are naturally drawn to books. They understand the wealth that books contain. They want to read. As soon as they learn to read, they are capable of reading in enormous quantity. When they read with abandon, schoolwork becomes easier for them. But with each passing year of school, more children lose their interest in reading, and their level of reading proficiency declines. By twelfth grade, fewer than 25 percent of them like to read, and reading test scores hit bottom.[5] Only a third of those who go to college have sufficient reading skills to handle college work, and 40 percent of those who enter the work force lack the literacy skills that employers seek.

This is not what anybody wants, and it is not inevitable. In the pages that follow, I invite educators, parents, philanthropists, and civic leaders to replace an ineffective reading education with one that will deliver reading proficiency to every child.

Part One:

Why Kids Should Read

Chapter One

Kids Who Read Get a Great Deal from Books

An eight-year-old sits in a chair with her knees drawn up, nearing the end of The Sisters Grim, Book 2. She lifts her eyes from the page for a moment to gaze out her aunt’s living room window. She is not looking out the window because she hears the joyful cries of the other children playing in the pool. Those eyes that gaze out the window are thinking eyes. With just a few pages left in her book, she has reached the resolution of the plot, and she is resolving in her own mind the sense of it.

Olivia was swimming earlier, playing a diving game, competing to see who could retrieve the most plastic rings that had been dropped along the bottom of the pool. At various moments, amid the shrieks and the splashing and the glorious summer sun, the memory of where she last left the story drifted into her conscious mind. The distinct characters with their burdens, their motivations, and their interactions weighed in and felt familiar. At some point, the excitement of the game ebbed just enough, and the desire to know what was going to happen next drew her back inside to finish her book.

Olivia will finish this book with a taste for more. When she goes home, her mother will have The Sisters Grim, Book 3 waiting for her. Olivia chooses the books she reads either from the library or from selections her mother makes available to her. She has already learned how to get the feel of a book by looking at the cover, reading the beginning, thumbing through the pages, and subconsciously matching up her own distinct intellectual quest with what she sees.

All summer, Olivia will immerse herself in reading. At the age when the hunger to know everything is at its freshest and most vibrant, she will find real treasure in the pages of books. At the age when reading a book at any time of the day, anywhere, and for any length of time triggers absolutely no guilt, Olivia will breeze through tens of thousands of pages, all the while increasing her understanding of the world and of herself and gaining facility with language. A passion for reading found here in the guiltless days of youth will never leave and will return in many forms and for many reasons throughout this child’s life journey.

Reading is fun for Olivia, as it is for many children and adults. Part of the fun comes from the pleasure of experiencing and gratifying an innate yearning to find out what is going to happen next. A good story ratchets up the yearning and then delivers the pleasure of resolution. Another part comes from the fulfillment of another strong and innate yearning: the desire to know more about our world.

Reading hasn’t always been fun for Olivia. At the beginning of the first grade, she asked me when I thought most kids learned to read. With tears in her eyes, she told me she didn’t think she would be able to learn. Before she went to school, Olivia had loved books. There was no activity she would not drop, given the opportunity to have a book read to her. Amazed for many years at their young daughter’s natural intelligence, Olivia’s parents expected she would have no trouble learning to read, and Olivia eagerly anticipated going to school, where she knew she would learn to read. Initially confident in her own intelligence, she soon began to sense there was something she did not have, something that was keeping her from being able to learn. She came home one day late in the school year and told her surprised mother that she and two boys in her class were being pulled out of class to get extra help in reading.

After getting vague answers to their questions from the school, Olivia’s parents took the matter into their own hands and immediately had Olivia privately tested. When the tests revealed a high intelligence paired with a weakness in several, but not all, of the indicators of a neurobiological reading difficulty, they made appointments for remediation. By the time she entered second grade, Olivia was finishing up visual exercises and a series of computer games designed to strengthen her processing speed (ability to rapidly integrate and memorize symbols and words) and associative memory (ability to store and retrieve newly learned information in the process of thinking).

The trauma of Olivia’s first year with reading lingered into her second year. She read short grade-level books easily, but they did not inspire her. She did gain confidence in her own ability to read, and