Fostering a Love of Reading

This week’s article summary is Increasing Student Reading Time Improves Comprehension.

As most of us know, there is a strong correlation between the amount of time we read and our working vocabulary. 

This article shows how dramatically different a high school senior’s exposure to vocabulary can be when increasing reading time during her/his school years by as little as 15 minutes per day.

As elementary school teachers, we understand the importance and power of reading, yet this article was sobering to me in that most children in America today average a scant 15 minutes of reading per day (including reading they do at school).

As the article attests, this has long-term implications on breadth of vocabulary, reading comprehension ability, and one’s overall knowledge base—even in a high-tech world, a solid knowledge base is advantageous for subsequent learning.

While the article provides a lot of facts and statistics (for example, high school senior reading levels woefully prepare kids for the mammoth jump to college-level textbooks) an additional key to me is the importance of teachers fostering the joy of reading in children, young adults, and high schoolers.

Although I didn’t become an avid reader until college, I was fortunate in that my parents read to me when I was young, my two schools (one public and one private) gave me plenty of latitude in reading what I liked (sports books, magazines, mysteries), and I became a humanities teacher. 

I always felt as a middle school humanities teacher that perhaps my most important goal was to excite my students about reading. I had a younger colleague who team taught 8th grade English with me. He spent many class periods ignoring our planned curriculum, preferring to stand in front of our students and vividly recount the characters, plots, and themes of books he was reading for pure pleasure. At first, I was annoyed at him; he was taking so much time away from our real curriculum and many of the books he talked about had adult themes that clearly weren’t appropriate for 8th graders. 

Yet over time, I saw how engrossed and enamored our students were by him: not solely about the books but by his unbridled enthusiasm for reading. He was--as last week’s article summary discussed--a ‘truly charismatic adult’ and was a role model for our 8th graders about how exciting and rewarding pleasure reading could be. 

We ultimately managed to find the time to read and discuss our assigned books, yet our students much more enjoyed our open discussion time to share about the books they were now reading independently at home. Also, like last week’s article summary, our students were appropriately empowered in browsing in book stores and choosing their own books.

I’m sure those students—who are now in their 40s—can trace their love of reading to him and still remember him fondly!

Joe

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The majority of students spend fewer than 15 minutes per day reading, and increasing their daily reading time to 30 minutes can improve comprehension and boost student achievement, according to a new study.

The annual What Kids Are Reading report (abut 10 million kids and over 30,000 schools) examines students' overall reading, nonfiction reading and reading across the curriculum, and it analyses the data to identify reading habits that can support student achievement.

54% of students read for less than 15 minutes per day, and between kindergarten and grade 12 those students will be exposed to approximately 1.5 million words.

On the other end of the spectrum, 18% of students read for more than 30 minutes per day, and consequently are exposed to approximately 13.7 million words throughout their K–12 schooling.

That difference of more than 12 million words can affect student achievement. However, when students increase the number of minutes they read per day, their comprehension also improves.

While high-performing students read a lot, students who struggle initially but then begin to dedicate significant time to reading with high understanding can experience accelerated growth during the school year, and thus start to narrow achievement gaps.

The report also found that by the time students finish high school, they typically read books with at a middle school reading level, yet first year college textbooks have an average reading level well beyond a high school reading level, presenting a significant jump in difficulty when students move on to higher education.

The report recommends gently encouraging students to read at more difficult levels, while providing instructional supports to help them improve their reading comprehension at higher reading levels.

Other key findings from the report:

• Girls read an average of 3.7 million words between kindergarten and grade 12
• Boys read just over 3 million words  (23% less than girls)
• Nonfiction materials represent less than one third of kids' overall reading, despite recommendations that elementary and middle school students read about 50% nonfiction, increasing to 70% by the end of high school
• Only 19% of grade 12 students read books that surpass a grade 9 reading level.