Stephen Krashen - Trends in Sustained Silent Reading - KOTESOL Conference
today I'm really going to talk about libraries libraries libraries libraries and please when you're going think about libraries do you have the handout okay good if not too bad no it's not raise your hand see if we can get the view okay are there handouts in the back and about handout good thanks Sophie all right Oh
at the top of the handout is my contribution to your economic condition saving money there's my website on the top WWSD crashing comm download things it's all for free and our journal I've mentioned this before the International Journal of foreign language teaching where you can find all kinds of free
short comprehensible articles the case for a library is based on three steps and I'm going to talk about each step number one more access to books means more reading most people in the United States don't believe this but we have very good evidence that it's true more access to books more reader number two
more reading means more literacy development not more exercises not more phonics more real reading reading for pleasure now if this is true we go to step three more access to books means more literacy development and where do we get books for many people in the world today it's the library someone said that the New York City Library was
the poor person's University right well let's move step one is it true that more access to books means more reading absolutely I wrote a book about this a few years ago called the power of reading my mother said that that was the best book that I because it was the one she really understood she said it was the
second-best book she had read about education not the first best my mother was perfect absolutely wonderful I owe so much to my mother and she read the read aloud handbook by Jim's release and she said to me Stephen why can't you write like this and I said I wish I could so better than my book read the
read aloud handbook by Jim's release it's very good it talks about me it talks about dr. Kim sick Joe talks about our work anyway it's a wonderful book anyway in that book and the power of reading I have a lot of research on there I have a whole chapter on access to books on how to get people to read
and here's what it says more books in the home means more pleasure reading more books in the classroom library means more pleasure reading more books in the school library means more pleasure reading more books in public library means more pleasure reading and I'm going to tell you about one of many many many studies that I talk about in
the book hula Moammar kept which is a study done in Canada they found that in school libraries if you increase the supply of books 20 percent this increases circulation by 10 percent a very direct relationship I think that's extremely encouraging if you increase the hours that the library is open this
is a great question ask it increases circulation 17% in high school only 3% in elementary school that makes sense elementary school children don't have the independence to go to the library and funny hours ok before school during school after school so this this makes sense well the reason people don't
really believe this is because they have the illusion that people don't like to read I'm going to expand on some comments I made yesterday I've written several papers on this about the fact that students children really do like to read in formal evidence is better than the statistics I have heard this story again and again
and the public doesn't know about it the teacher brings in a box of new books to the classroom the elementary school classroom the moment the box is delivered before they're open the children crowd around they want to see what the new books are they're eager to see them they love reading people still
like to read the chart you have here I'm getting very good at Excel you know these nice charts anyway this is my excel chart here from an article I'm still trying to get published and I mentioned it briefly yesterday this is a survey of how much people read our kids really reading today the title of my
article was stop scolding teenagers whose we're always anti teenager the kids these days you know I have no respect they don't read kids aren't reading these days look at this look at the column that says book reading this is one way of measuring it the number of minutes per day done by different surveys 1946 teenagers were reading
books 22 minutes a day today 1910 21 minutes a day that's not a serious decline that's identical look at the problem here magazines and newspapers yes that has gone down no question it's gone down for every age group for adults everybody but look at the next column websites 16 minutes a day and when you add website reading to
book reading students today teenagers today are reading about the same as they have ever read right and this is possibly an underestimate of everything they do okay so literacy is not a decline it is true the more access to books there is the more reading and probably as I mentioned in one of the seminars
yesterday maybe the internet is going to turn out to be a very good friend of literacy well is it true more reading leads to more literacy development oh yes in the keynote talk in the morning I talked to you about multivariate studies the multiple regressions that my colleagues have done and others have
done so I'll leave that alone that I'll just refer back to it this definitely shows reading is a consistent winner in all these studies let's look at another category of two more areas of research here one is the research on sustained silent reading SSR sustained silent reading most of you have heard about you
take about 5 10 15 20 minutes off of the school day the children the teenagers the students read the students read whatever they want to read so they can read choose-your-own-adventure they could read Twilight they can read Harry Potter most of them choose Steve crashing the power of reading you know they know and
they can read what they want to read and the teacher reads whatever the teacher wants to read isn't that wonderful we have to find out if this works I have calculated if you do 10 minutes a day of sustained silent reading with one of your classes once a day over a normal teaching career this amounts to three
months paid vacation are you with me teaching is hard let's give teachers a little bit of a break okay well I've looked at the research on sustained silent reading I've been spending a lot of my waking hours looking at sustained silent reading since the middle 1980s and oh my does it work what I'd like to do is show
you one study in detail then give you a survey of studies a study I think really deserves our praise and attention is the one in the middle of page 1 this is the Fiji Island study and the man in charge of this is one of my heroes in the profession Warwick Ellie who from New Zealand who has really been a pioneer
and it's important I tell you a little bit about Laura Kelly and his status in the field this is an important thing to note warrant work Emily is a retired professor senior scholar very well respected by everybody no matter what if you're in the profession of reading education alright you go to reading
conferences and you say Warwick Ellie and people say oh yeah he's okay Warwick Ellie has served the profession very well he's been the president of this the director of this etc etc so this is a well respected scholar in 1983 Warwick alley published a paper in the reading research quarterly the reading research
quarterly if you know the reading journals the reading research quarterly is the number one snob journal in the field of literacy education it's the flagship Journal of the International Reading Association and all the articles and the research right Regent gooda reading research quarterly nearly all of
them are along complicated and nearly completely incomprehensible so everyone thinks this must be the best journal in the field I think the only people who can read these papers are people who have met for several years and have monk-like powers of deep concentration oh my gosh I try to read it I really do and I
usually get through it but it's not easy okay you know when I need several cups of coffee to get through any of these papers that's where this came out this paper it was done I'll be it was done in the Fiji Islands in the Fiji with his with Elly and his colleague Frances mangu hi you might also know quite well
he spent a week with us in USC about 15 years ago is wonderful we learned a great deal from him anyway done in the Fiji Islands English is a foreign language the children were divided into three groups one group got the audio lingual method most of you remember this this is a combination of everything that's wrong
in language teaching combined into one method so repetition drills grammar correction all this heavy testing etc it's also still the most popular method in the world today the second group was sustained silent reading here the books boys and girls enjoy the third method was called shared reading in North
America we know this as big books the kids are read to from big books they follow the story and they do self selected reading this was done in the fourth and fifth grade children in the Fiji Islands start English at kindergarten 30 minutes a day so by the time they're in the fourth grade they can pretty well understand these books
they went out of their way to find very interesting books before I give you the results let me review what we've got here we've got Warwick le well-respected senior scholar we've got the reading research quarterly this is like the New England Journal of Medicine this is like nature the most you know well-respected
science journal in the world this is not the local newsletter of the Communist Party all right the this is mainstream well-respected stuff this is where it appeared and it's got data statistics and standardized tests everything the harshest critic would ever want in a study okay Ehle and mangu by presented the results in terms of
months gained on standardized tests we expect native speakers to gain ten months in a year let's see how these people did these children fourth graders audio lingual six and a half months gained now take a deep breath sustained silent reading fourth graders look at this fifteen months gained you should we should draw a
circle around that in red okay I didn't make this up this is from The Journal paper not even close big books 15 months gained fifth graders audio lingual of pathetic two and a half months game sustained silent reading a modest for respectable nine big books fifteen the second year of the project the nine disappeared was also fifteen
was equal rather two groups were equal and they were farther ahead of the audio legal group they were better in listening writing reading grammar etc in 1991 I think that should have settled it right there this study was was it in my opinion but in 1991 Laura Kelly published another paper another study I
called this one the Singapore study very similar gains it was published in the journal called language learning considered one of the top journals in the world in second language acquisition so this was very public places the results were nearly as impressive they were very strong from the Singapore study the interesting thing about the
Singapore paper was it le had a long section in a discussion of what some of the reactions were from the adults connected to the program from teachers parents administrators there were two major concerns concern number one the major concern everybody has good reason the children are reading but how will they do on the tests look
at the data they do find on the test they do better on the tests than children who do skill building they do better on the tests than children who do grammar exercises and test preparation they do better on grammar tests than students who study grammar now why did they do better I think it's because they
can't help it if you read a lot the conventions of language that write the grammar of the punctuation all that the spelling it's acquired its absorbed it becomes part of you it's deep stored deep in your central nervous system you have no choice but to write well let's say there 211 people in the room I just
made that up and let's say I asked you all to write something don't worry I won't but let's say I asked everybody to write you know two paragraphs and then we traded papers there would be 211 good papers there wouldn't be a bad one in the room I promise you you know why because you've read so much you have no
choice when you write everything comes out okay you have no choice it's automatic you cannot write poorly you don't even know how the only way you can write poorly is if you've just read a pile of student papers that shows the influence of greeting you go to someone's house there are books everywhere you would be amazed to see a
sample of their writing with serious mistakes it's extremely rare the other problem people have with this is they say things like the children the reading group seem to be having a good time well we can't have that we're now living in an age of tough love it has to be difficult no it isn't if you're looking
for pain and suffering you've come to the wrong place you know people in spirituality talk about the path of pleasure in the paths of pain and the path of pleasure in spirituality with meditation etc is very nice but it's slow and the path of pain oh my gosh it's very quick if you go to workshops and the leader asks people why did you
come why are you having a spiritual crisis and it's why do you want this education it's usually because of some tragedy something horrible has happened you woken up what is the meaning of life not so in literacy development in literacy development there is only the path of pleasure let me state this conservatively I am NOT saying
everything pleasant is good for you I'm not saying if it feels good it's good for you we said that in the 60s sometimes it was true sometimes it wasn't we had a lot of fun finding out but still what I'm saying is more conservative if it's good for you it should feel good in literacy development students and teachers will enjoy it if
it's painful something is seriously wrong well my triumph of Excel is the next chart here I wrote a paper in 2007 and I'm happy to say the paper is already very obsolete because new at has come and I need to update it this is a study of high school and university level only English as a foreign language
not in english-speaking countries not ESL but EFL and I thought this was a good laboratory because many many students in EFL the class is the only place they have to get English okay so this is a good place to look at it the first column here are the studies and in every study there was a comparison group
with traditional instruction and there was an experimental group where there was some sustained silent reading some free voluntary reading look down at the last two columns and you'll see the results of each study two kinds of tests close tests and reading comprehension tests the es means effect size and
here's today's statistics lesson if you don't know what this is if the effect size is positive if the number is positive it means the readers did better the readers are better in every single study in other words it worked in every single one an effect size of about point two is a low effect size 0.5 point six
is modest seven eight nine is pretty good now for those of you for both of you who remember statistics I'll tell you what this really means the rest of you can you know take some time off for the next ten seconds with this an effect size of 1.0 means the students in one group were one standard deviation better
than the students in the other group so the average stand the average effect size was anywhere from point four to 0.7 depending on how I did the calculation so this is pretty robust and pretty strong for short duration treatment well those that's canít give you a very quick look at the world wide studies
let's look at Korea and here is doctor so in the first row my my colleague here and these are Korean studies done with children and they're I'm very happy to say they're all short papers and easy to read that makes them harder to write but they're easy to read and these are all studies with children here in AFL and
again three studies three consistent results in one study the children and EFL class took time off read from the internet only 14 weeks that's a very short duration and it was a positive study they did better on reading tests second study they did reading of newspapers and the one I think is the most impressive about this is they did
more voluntary reading of the papers in their free time which is what we're really interested in the third study combined hearing stories storytelling read Aloud's with free voluntary reading and we see very very nice gains and more voluntary use of the library and these kinds of results are probably the most
important because we've done we're not just interested in the gains after you know ten weeks two months we're interested in lifetime does this lead to a reading habit well I like supplementing this with case histories I regard case histories as very important and scientifically valid because in most of the case histories the ones I'm going
to show you the threats to validity have been met they've been eliminated there is no other explanation except reading in these three cases we have people who are basically brought up in reasonably high poverty situations where there weren't a lot of books around but they managed to get a reading habit and they all became
highly literate and they give reading the credit the first one I find absolutely delicious Geoffrey Canada was the hero of a film that just came out in the United States about education called Waiting for Superman and he's the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone and has a very tough love attitude towards schooling data
sting hard work that's not the way he did it he published an autobiography about five years ago about growing up with violence all around there were two versions there was a prose version and a graphic novel version I of course read the graphic novel version and it's very very good he grew up in New York City
lots of poverty tough time how it was to survive about two-thirds through the book he says this I loved reading and my mother who read voraciously to allowed me to have novels after she finished them my strong reading background allowed me to have an easier time of it in most of my classes he all his best
friend was a reader they found books and always traded the Harlem Children's Zone schools their worst performance on tests is on reading that's where they having the most trouble I've written them I've tried hard to find out how are your libraries no response okay the second one is a similar case Liz Murray's an author of a
book that came out last year called breaking night grew up in very high poverty in New York and she said what she did is reading of course save the day for her her father had this very interesting habit or strategy in those days in New York City the local public libraries weren't connected by computer
that each one was independent so her dad would go to one local library take out all the books he could and never return them then he went to another local library got a library card took out all the books he could and never returned them so the house was filled with fugitive library books all over the city
of New York okay now what Liz did is she read her dad's books and what she did but she would only go to school two or three weeks before the end of the cinema in elementary school just enough to find out what the examinations would be here's her quote any formal education I received came from the few days I spent
in attendance in school mixed with knowledge I absorbed from random readings of my or daddy's ever-growing supply of unreturned library books as long as I still showed up steadily the last few weeks of classes to take the standardized test I kept squeaking by from grade to grade Wow again the same thing here and these
are one of many Richard writes another example Richard Wright is a wonderful author his best-known book is his autobiography called black boy which is about growing up in the segregated south he said he grew up in an environment where reading and writing was actually disapproved of his grandmother did not
approve of fiction when a boarder lived at the home a schoolteacher she read stories to Richard when grandma found out she asked her to leave he got a newspaper route only so he couldn't read the newspaper he finally got access to books lots of books by borrowing a library card from a white friend of his
and took books from the library pretending he was doing it for his friend but of course he was reading the books and he speculates about how he became a writer here's his quote I wanted to write and I did not even know the English language the literary language I bought English grammars and found them dull are there any questions
I felt I was getting a better sense of the language from novels than from grammars who are you going to believe people who haven't ever done it or a true master who really has done it and really knows how well this is part of the case I've made this first part of the case and that is more access to books me more reading and more reading
means second part is more literacy development let's look at the impact of libraries we have independent I've given you the indirect cases very good directives there has been an explosion of research on libraries in the United States and one person is the hero here his name is Keith Currie Lance your homework assignment is to go to
google and type in Keith Currie Lance another great hero and our friend I hereby pronounce Keith Lance to be our BFF best friend forever right Keith Lance worked for many years in Colorado in the state of Colorado and in the 1990s he was given this assignment is literacy a problem we should throw money at the answer yes but we have to
aim very carefully he found four elementary schools in Colorado the amount of money put in the school did not relate to the level of reading but if you consider the library in the equation then you see it he used a technique of multivariate technique called path analysis now look at books money put in the library then from the
library to the reading score very strong he found out it works when you control for money in the school when you control for computers in most cases even when you control for poverty and poverty overwhelms everything in these studies he also he's continuing his work and you can it's all one of the reasons again
another reason why he's such a hero is that all his work is available on the Internet you type in Keith Currie Lance you can download everything with his blessing and see what he's up to he also isolated the factors in many of his studies he found the number of books in the library was a factor the presence
of a certified library an independent factor his recent study in fact published last month showed that when you fire a librarians reading scores go down and that's what people are doing all the time number 3 hope for the librarian extra staffing these are the things that independently count Jeff McGill in my former student has
demonstrated this also at the national level states with better school libraries get better scores again even controlling for poverty on national tests our most recent study in this and this I am I think this is about as important as any study I've ever been involved with this was published just last year and this was done in virtual
collaboration of you through the electronics with my two former students seeing Lee from Taiwan and here's Jeff McQuillan again coming back to work with us we looked at performance on the perls examination now the pearls examination is an international test given to ten year olds in 40 countries you take the
test in your own language and they do all this statistical magic to make sure that the tests are more or less equivalent difficulty now when the pearls results come out and this is every three years or so the newspapers love it they always want to know which country won which country lost another person I
admire alfie kohn says the testing results should go in the sports section okay's they're always interested in winners and losers and all that and you know there's always these things did Germany beat France did Korea beat Japan you know this is always like this and when I look at the headlines in the media every single
country in the world except Finland declares they have a literacy crisis because you lost you got to come in first or it's no good Finland always wins all these things all the time so we didn't do that we ignored that instead we did a multivariate study and here's our multiple regression which you learned about yesterday to see which of
the factors was the strongest now this pretends that the factors are independent they don't influence each other again thanks to mathematical magic let's look at the factors involved in oh boy is this a big one ses poverty the this is when actually should have a the higher the level of poverty the lower the score and you look
here you see the beta is the highest of everything point 4 that was the strongest factor and you see this in all studies the next factor was the percentage of children in each country who do have access to a sustained silent reading program in school who are allowed to do from reading in school it was positive not as strong as poverty
but it had a modest effect and now the big one library the percentage of children in each country who have access to a library of 500 books or more positive nearly as strong as the effects of poverty look at the beta's point for three point three four what this suggests is that a good library can makeup mitigate balanced the effects of
poverty at least on reading this is big the next one was the amount of time spent in instruction in reading negative the more instruction the worse well before we get too excited about this it could be because kids who are lower in reading or given more instruction okay I suspect that it's real and I suspect
that if you did a graph you did a curve it would come out like this from no instruction to a little bit probably positive like in reading that's basic phonics the alphabet cetera after that diminishing returns now down below you see a number that says R squared equals 0.63 what this means is this if you go
to a country and you know the level of poverty you know what the percentage of children are getting sustained silent reading you know the effects of the library you know about libraries and you know how much instruction that's 63 percent of the information you need to predict their reading score for educational research this is X Files
this is science fiction you don't get r-squared this high now usually in educational research if we get r-squared of 0.15 our squared point one two if we can explain 20% we're very happy because there's so many confounding variables well we thought this was too good to be true we're probably doing something
wrong and then Doug after Minh we discovered Doug afternoon's dissertation this was done a few years before our study it was done only in California for high school students he found exactly what we did he found that poverty played a role he found that the effect of the library was just as strong as the effect of poverty
was the same in his study and school factors hardly mattered at all once you considered poverty and access to books his R squared was 0.57 since also since this came out we've discovered other international studies that look at access to books at home access to books at home balances the effects of poverty okay by
the way if you're looking if you'd like to see the date on this on my website as an article that summarizes all this research as you see it's called protecting students etc well my sermon at the end of all this for some reason we are still highly allergic to considering libraries and free reading we see signs of activity signs of hope
here and there that some people are paying attention but it's still not paid much attention to I'm gonna whine for a few minutes and you're gonna listen to it you'll be my therapy group for a few minutes I'll give you some instances of this that really are sad an article came out by fryer and Levitt now Levitt is
one of the authors of a book called Freakonomics and he's gotten a lot of variety he has a blog in the New York Times and all this I like for economics but I think he blew it with several areas and I wrote him said you got this wrong you got this wrong he said thank you very much and then ignored it for
the next edition in one of the articles though this is an independent thing that they used his background they decided to look at the difference between african-american and white children on tests given an entering kindergarten well first of all giving kindergarten children tests right away is wrong in my
opinion I mean let's start right there that's a pretty dumb thing to do these are kids who can hardly find the bathroom and tie their shoes we're giving them tests ah so okay so they gave them these tests on math and on literacy and they found that the the white kids were way up here and the african-american kids were down here
typical finding then they looked at poverty that closed two-thirds of the gap right there they then added access to books not only did that close the gap but the African American kids were slightly better it's not statistically significant the thing I find the most amazing is that these authors ignored that
result they said it in their papers a very long paper so here's the result oh yeah well I guess if you have books and you take care of poverty that closes the gap how about that then they can went on to their next topic and never referred to it again I think this is earth-shaking for many many many reasons
another thing that just happened about how this stuff gets buried all the time an article came out in a journal I really like called reading in a foreign language you should pay attention to reading in a foreign language it's free isn't that cool it's a good academic journal and it's free it's right there
in the internet so just type in reading in a foreign language and you'll find it anyway an article came out a very good article he'll occur long long long one of these papers that goes on for months and months and by the time you're at the end you forget what the paper was about in the beginning you're not the only
ones this happens to I complain about this buried in the article you got to look hard because I missed it he looks at the predictors of the ability to read and understand academic texts among Norwegian University students what were the factors reading ability in the first language and better you read the first
language the better you read the second which Jim Cummins has demonstrated again and again foundation of bilingual education taking extra English classes didn't matter the more you read the more you paid attention to English media small effect the winner ladies and gentlemen free voluntary reading by far
the highest correlation he also mentioned in passing that these Norwegian University students don't very much so that probably was what we call the weakened or attenuated correlations my disease even stronger only half in their lifetime had read 16 or more novels most of you read that many in the last two months I know only
18% had read fifty one or more novels in English so we have the evidence that this works again and again the American media is willing to consider anything except reading there have been articles in USA Today and the Washington Post about are you ready for this reading aloud to dogs they're serious they think
this is the breakthrough what you want is a friendly dog I guess a non friendly dog is a cat I don't know okay and these dogs have to be specially trained soon they'll have tests for them too and the only evidence they have that this works in one of the articles they said oh we know this works we know this
works it's wonderful one parent said it's terrific because when my little boy came home he started reading to the family dog okay I have nothing against reading to dogs so you want to do that it's that back to another article said no it's parents you got to read your parent okay this is the debate no
evidence for any of this stuff there's absolutely no evidence for any of it if you want to do it go ahead but don't claim in the front page of USA Today that this is a breakthrough that this is a wonderful thing and there's no mention to books other articles that have been in the media chess we want kids to play
chess you know the state of Idaho is instituting chess as a required subject for third graders because it might help reading a myth it's based on one study which all the games were by three kids you know done and you know 1968 or something like that study music music is going to help this has been a big deal
in the American president you look at the data really really hard there is a small tiny effect do you really have to look hard to find in several sub conditions it's barely there in passing buried in nearly in a footnote by the way the better readers were the ones who have more books in their home and that
was much stronger so we're willing to consider nearly everything we do this here in Korea it's happening all through Asia we're very eager to take the craziest things to help kids learn English we haven't considered the obvious for a fraction of what we are investing all through Asia in English villages just think how many books we
can make available to every child in the country thank you very much
