Shadowing Practice: The Power of Reading - Stephen Krashen - Learn English Speaking with Video
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hello and welcome to another episode of the CoE lecture series where we bring you lectures discussions
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and workshops on a variety of topics related to the broad
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fields of education today we bring you the first of two
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recent seminars presented by dr. Stephen Krashen emeritus professor of education
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at the University of Southern California his topic today the power of reading.
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Dr. Krashen's visit was co -sponsored by the Department of Language
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and Literacy Education
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and the LLEE graduate organization I have to do this first okay it says turn off
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when you go to the bathroom okay did you see
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that movie remember it was one of the police story movies where the guy kept Okay.
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Thank you, Kristen, for that wonderful introduction.
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I do have some comments on the introduction, though.
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I have to add some information.
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It's true about the black belt.
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That is true.
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But I got the black belt on the basis of the written examination.
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As for the weightlifting, that part is true.
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And that part is from my days in Venice Beach, California, and Gold's Gym where I worked out with Arnold.
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You want some Arnold stories?
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This is usually the only thing people remember from my talks when I mention this.
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Yeah, I worked out with Arnold in the old days in Venice Beach
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and in Gold's Gym and I gotta tell you a real story about Arnold.
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Nice guy.
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No question.
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Absolute prince.
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Arnold was legendary on the beach for being a nice guy and being a big help.
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You'd be working out by yourself, you know, doing your concentration girls, and Arnold would come over and say, can I make a suggestion, please?
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And he'd say, try it like this.
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You know, don't quite extend.
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Put your mind in your bicep.
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Always right.
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Everything he said turned out to be true.
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We would share things.
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You know what Arnold told me?
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He told me, and he was always right.
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He was already the world's number one bodybuilder,
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Mr. Universe, three times when he came as for governor oh my airplane pilot needed no experience necessary learn on the job
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and a colleague of mine have an article coming out about
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how Arnold really learned English did he go through immersion
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or was it bilingual ed which he opposes it was bilingual ed he had a good background in the first language
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let me reintroduce myself a little as well, too, because Kristen has emphasized my background in second language acquisition, foreign language, and bilingual education,
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which is where I come from with all this, but I feel like a country western singer crossing over in
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that today I'm going to be talking entirely about literacy in general.
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In fact, I'm going to be talking about the literacy crisis in America.
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Now, what makes me an expert on the literacy crisis?
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I am an
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expert and i want to give you my credentials i was there when the literacy crisis began
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the literacy crisis the literacy crisis began officially october 4th 1986
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on a thursday afternoon three o 'clock pacific coast time it began on the oprah winfrey show
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now what was i doing at home watching oprah winfrey At the time, I was a tenured full professor at a major research university.
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Are there any questions?
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What a job.
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It was great.
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Anyway, every time they tell you, we feel your pain, no, they don't.
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Anyway, Oprah had this show, and Oprah's very influential.
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She did this very compelling program about these six adult illiterates.
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These are guys who had gone to our schools in the United States
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and were native speakers of English and never learned to read and write at all.
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They got passed along every year, you know, social promotion, and they described in great detail all their strategies for getting through the day, making people think they were literate.
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You know, they go to a restaurant, wait to see what you're going to order, and they order the same thing, etc. The reason this is part of our national fabric is because of Oprah.
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Well, it was very compelling.
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I sent for the transcript, in fact.
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After that, there was a made -for -TV movie with Dennis Weaver about an adult illiterate, and then we had Stanley and Iris, Jane Fonda, a full Robert De Niro,
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a feature film about an adult illiterate.
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If you read the newspapers, you get the impression that our schools are turning out millions of students,
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millions of children, who can't read and write at all.
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Guess what?
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It's not true.
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Of course, they also say that teachers are to blame.
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That's not true either.
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In fact, if you look at the research, and I've looked at it, I just told you I'm a professional, okay?
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You look at the research, you see that literacy in America, I'll write this big enough so the first three rows can see,
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literacy in America has been on a steady increase for the last hundred years.
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In fact, it's very hard to find anyone in this country who's gone to our schools who's completely and totally illiterate.
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These people are very rare.
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In fact, they're so rare when you find them, they get on Oprah Winfrey.
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That's how rare they are.
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There is a problem, but it's not the problem that the media has been talking about.
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In fact, I'm so down on the media, I don't even believe the sports section anymore.
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I mean, that's how cynical I've gotten, okay?
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Anyway, are you sure that was the score?
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Okay.
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Anyway, you look at research on literacy, you see we are a very literate country.
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Literacy, as I've said, has been rising for the last hundred years.
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Total illiteracy is extremely rare.
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The problem, though, is that the demands for literacy have been increasing faster.
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That's the problem.
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Our teachers have been very successful at making people literate the problem is getting harder and harder.
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That's the problem.
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If you talk to automobile mechanics, for example, they'll tell you the reading and writing they have to do is much more demanding than it was 15, 20 years ago.
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Computer manuals, technical forms, legal things,
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etc. So the issue is not how do you get from no literacy to low levels of literacy.
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Everybody gets there.
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Let's call this basic literacy somewhere between second and fourth grade literacy literacy.
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Everybody gets there.
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They get there at different rates.
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Are you with me?
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Say yes.
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They get there at different rates because human beings do everything at different rates.
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The typical definition of low literacy is the lowest quartile, the lowest 25%.
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So newspaper article says 150 ,000 kids have sent to summer school because they're low literacy.
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Well, they're the lowest quartile.
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You could quadruple literacy scores and you would still have the lowest 25%.
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Am I the only one who understands this?
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We have a math problem in this country.
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While I'm on this, let me use you as my therapy group for a moment.
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This is very frustrating.
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We want all kids at grade level, right?
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You've heard that?
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Do you know what grade level is? it's the 50th percentile you see what's wrong?
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we want everyone above average no, it can't be done when I tell people about that they say,
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well, we'll try hard this is a math crisis anyway, we want to get this we've done
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we want to get to the higher levels the 6th grade
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level the 10th grade level the 12th grade level that's what we're really interested in if that's Lady Gaga Oh my God, the answer is no. I'm busy.
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Can't help her today.
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I know how to do it.
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I know how to get from lower levels to high levels.
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I know how to develop academic literacy.
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I know how to bring people to the highest levels of literacy.
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I know all about it because I'm an expert.
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And the answer, we all know, is one word.
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Reading.
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And there's one kind of reading that works better than any other, and it was the kind of reading you did last night before you fell asleep.
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How many of you read last night before you fell asleep?
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How many of you, like me, read last night even though you shouldn't have, it was too late?
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This is addiction.
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The kind of reading that really counts is the reading you and I do all the time that we do obsessively.
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We call it free voluntary reading.
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F -E -R.
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Reading because you want to.
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No book reports, no questions at the end of the chapter.
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You don't like the book, you put it down, you pick up another one.
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Free voluntary reading is the source, in my opinion, of our reading ability.
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It's the source of most of our vocabulary, all of our educated vocabulary just about comes from reading, in most cases.
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Our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions.
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Most of our ability to spell, to spell well, not perfectly, but to spell well.
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Well, all of this, our ability to write with a good writing style, much of our knowledge of the world comes from reading.
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Now I don't want to oversell this.
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I don't want to say if kids read a lot, they'll all go on to the university and get master's degrees.
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That may or may not happen.
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But if they start to read, they're going to have a chance.
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If they don't start to read, they're not going to have a chance.
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I want to take a few minutes...
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We have till, what, 7 .30?
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Is that right?
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I've ordered pizza for 6 o 'clock.
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Fast times at Ridgemont High, right?
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Anyway, I want to show you a little bit of the research, and I've got some charts here to back it up.
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The case for free voluntary reading, and I really want to go through this to some extent because this research, for many of you who are becoming teachers,
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is going to make your lives easier.
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This is a money -back guarantee.
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If this does not work for you, I will return the entire $50 honorarium and divide it equally among you.
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This research is going to make your professional life about 5 % easier.
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That's not bad.
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But let me give you the data behind it.
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No discussion of reading would be complete without talking about how it started in the United States
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and it started in a book with a book
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that came out around 1965
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which you can still get in paperback it's called Hooked on Books the author is a guy named Daniel Fader
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Daniel Fader worked with boys who were in reform schools reform
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school boys juvenile delinquents native speakers of English juvenile delinquents between ages 12
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and 15 one group got the Hooked on Books program each boy was given a paperback book this is yours.
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Do with it what you like.
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If you read it, fine.
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If you don't read it, fine.
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But you want a new one?
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Turn it in.
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You get a new one.
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No overdue finds, no book reports, no nothing.
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They had a pretty good idea what the boys' interests were.
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Now, this is back in the 60s.
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The favorite author?
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Ian Fleming, James Bond.
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The boys read the books.
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When you give kids interesting things to read, they will read them, no question.
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Some of the boys, in fact, averaged a book every other day for a whole year, all voluntary.
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He gave them tests at the end of two years.
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The readers improved in everything, attitude towards school, writing fluency,
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writing complexity, etc. The comparison group stayed the same or went down.
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Now, Fader was clever enough not to just rely on test scores.
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He looked at the boys' behavior in their daily lives.
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For example, he looked at their behavior during basketball games when they watched their school team play against other schools.
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During halftime, timeouts, free throws, some of the boys were looking at their books, which they had in their back pockets.
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We've known this since 1965.
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I have a couple of studies I want to share with you that are examples of what we call SSR.
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SSR means sustained silent reading.
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Some of us remember when it was called USSR.
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It's true.
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Uninterrupted sustained silent reading.
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Anyway, in sustained silent reading, you take a few minutes out of the school day and the students read.
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The students read whatever they want to read.
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10, 15 minutes or so.
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And the teacher gets to read whatever the teacher wants to read.
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Now we've got to find out if this works.
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I have calculated if you do 10 minutes a day,
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you're a teacher, you do 10 minutes a day of sustained silent reading with one class over a normal teaching career,
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this amounts to about three months paid vacation.
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Do I have your attention?
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Okay, teaching is tough enough.
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Anyway, in the typical study, one group does sustained silent reading, and the other group does skill building,
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the traditional program, and you know what that is all the things that our state governments, the federal governments, Pearson publishers, McGraw -Hill publishers want you to do more of.
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And as many of you know, to some extent, it's the same people.
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Anyway, you then give them tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and you see which makes the greater gains.
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The research in favor of sustained silent reading on this stuff, in my opinion, is overwhelming.
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I'll give you the bottom line.
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The worst thing that happens in these studies, the worst result is no difference.
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They make the same gains.
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Now, think about this.
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Which is easier on the children?
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Free reading or workbook exercises?
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You don't know?
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Let me try this again.
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Let me reverse it.
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Which is easier on the kids, workbooks and exercises or free reading?
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Free reading, thank you.
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Which is easier on the teacher?
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Free reading.
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So if there's no difference in test scores, which is better?
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Free reading, of course.
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I also find in looking at the studies that the studies that show no difference are nearly always short -term studies, some as short as.
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two months, 10 weeks.
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Now, I've seen sustained silent reading programs, and I now know what some of you know.
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The first couple of weeks, nobody's reading.
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They haven't found a book yet.
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When you give the program a chance to run, the readers are better.
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I found the cutoff to be about an academic year.
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You let her run an academic year longer, the readers are consistently better.
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Well, I want to show you a couple examples, and you'll see on the handout what happened to me the day I discovered Excel.
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Two studies.
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In fact, I'm going to reproduce some of this on the board.
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I just pulled out these two because I find them, first one I find, the most significant study.
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It was published in a journal called the Reading Research Quarterly.
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Now, those of you who know the reading journals
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know that the Reading Research Quarterly is the number one snob journal in reading.
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Most of the articles in this journal are long, dense, and nearly completely incomprehensible, which is why everyone thinks it must be the best journal in the field.
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The only people who can read these articles are monks who have meditated for years
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and can have these great powers of concentration.
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And that's where it came out.
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The author, which is great, the first author is Warwick Elley, who is our hero, and his colleague,
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Francis Mongubhai, another really interesting guy I've worked with.
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Warwick Ellie is a retired professor from New Zealand.
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It's important I tell you this.
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And he is well -respected by everybody in the field.
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He has done his work for the field.
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Let me tell you, he's been the editor of this, the director of this, the president of this.
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He's really put in a lot of time and effort.
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Everybody likes him.
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So he was one of the authors of this study.
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The study took place...
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By the way, I'm deliberately presenting to you research from very different areas so you can see the universality of these results.
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The study was done in the Fiji Islands.
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This is an EFL study.
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Children in the Fiji Islands begin English in kindergarten for 30 minutes a day.
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In Ellie and Mangubhai's study, and I'm going to reproduce on the board, which is already on your handout,
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the children were looked at by Ellie and Mangubhai between grades 4 and 6 and...
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I'm sorry, grades 5 and...
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Was it 5 and 6 or 4 and 5?
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4 and 5, thanks.
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They divide the kids into three groups.
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One group got the audio -lingual method,
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which, in my opinion, is a combination of everything that's wrong in language teaching combined into one method.
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You know, grammar drills, tests, force -speak, all this stuff.
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Second group got sustained silent reading.
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Here are the books boys and girls enjoy.
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That was the only treatment.
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I have to emphasize, the books were comprehensible.
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They'd had English since kindergarten.
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A third group got a program called Shared Book Experience, which we know of here as big books.
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Children are read to from very large books.
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The teacher discusses the stories with them, and they do free reading.
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I'm now going to put on the board what's already on your sheet, and that's the gains in reading comprehension on standardized tests after the first year.
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Now let me emphasize what we've got here.
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We've got Warwick Ellie, who's a very well -respected scholar.
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Standardized tests.
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The Reading Research Quarterly, the flagship journal of the field, the most conservative journal in the field.
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This was not published in the newsletter of the American Communist Party.
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How did it come out?
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We expect native speakers to gain ten months in a year.
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Let's see how these children did.
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Audiolingual, sixth grade, as you see on your sheet.
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Six and a half months gained.
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Sustained silent reading, and I regard this next number as one of the most significant in our field.
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Fifteen months gained.
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Not even close.
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Big books, 15 months' gain.
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Audio -lingual, 5th grade, a pathetic 2 1⁄2 months' gain.
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Sustained silent reading, a modest but respectable 9.
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Big books, 15.
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The readers were better.
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The second year of the project, this 9 disappeared.
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These groups were equal and were even farther ahead of the audio -lingual group.
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They were better in reading, better in writing, better in listening, better in grammar, better in everything tested.
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ELI replicated this result in Singapore.
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I refer to this as the Singapore study in another major journal, Language Learning.
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Very similar results, get this,
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the students who did reading did better on grammar tests than those who had grammar classes,
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which was basically test preparation.
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Very interesting.
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Now, why should this happen?
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I think it happened because the students couldn't help it.
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if you read a lot your knowledge of the conventions of writing your knowledge of vocabulary, grammar it's acquired,
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not learned it's subconsciously absorbed it's stored deep in your central
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nervous system it becomes part of you they had no choice
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but to write well let's say there are a hundred people here I just made
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that up and let's say I asked you to write something don't worry, I won't but let's say we each wrote a page and we traded it with our neighbors papers and evaluate it.
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A hundred people here, there would be a hundred respectable papers.
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There wouldn't be a bad one in the room, I promise you.
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We all make little mistakes here and there, tiny little punctuation, spelling, but all of it would be good, be very accurate, and it would be coherent.
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All your papers would be easy to read, easy to follow.
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You always write correctly, you have no choice.
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You cannot write poorly, you don't even know how.
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The only way you can write poorly is if you've just read a pile of student papers.
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Okay?
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Comes to reading.
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You go to someone's house, there are books everywhere, you would be amazed to see a sample of their writing with serious problems.
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It's extremely rare.
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The next big table is a study I published in a free journal.
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Check it out, folks.
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IJFLT .com.
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Free journal.
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International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching.
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I decided to look at all the studies I could find in EFL, English as a foreign language, in high school and college.
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I thought this would be a good laboratory because in these cases, many of these cases, students' major exposure to English is in these classes.
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And the first column, the study column, are the papers, the studies themselves.
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And these are from various countries, Yemen, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore,
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etc. The last two columns are the results of two kinds of tests.
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We call it a closed test, where you delete every fifth word or sixth word, and the student puts the word in, which turns out to be a test that correlates very highly with other tests.
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So it's a good general test.
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It's a lousy pedagogical technique, but it's a good test.
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The last column is reading comprehension the numbers you see there are called effect sizes.
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I'll tell you what those are.
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If the effect size is positive, the ones who had sustained silent reading did better.
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In every case, the numbers are positive.
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In all these studies, the students who had sustained silent reading did better than the comparison groups.
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No exceptions.
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That's pretty remarkable.
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The size of the effect is what counts here.
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Effect size of around 0 .2, 0 .3 is considered low.
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Effect size of 0 .4, 0 .5, modest.
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0 .7, 0 .8, you're really getting there.
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For both of you who remember your statistics class,
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effect size of 1 .0 means the experimental group was one standard deviation better than the comparison group.
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Okay, everyone else, come back.
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The average effect size between 0 .4 and 0 .7, depending on how I calculate it.
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In other words, this stuff really works.
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Sustained silent reading works everywhere we've tried it.
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I want to supplement this with case histories, which I find to be very, very convincing.
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People say, oh, just case histories.
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But if you do enough of them, you see patterns.
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And I find these quite interesting.
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The first one is politically loaded.
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Jeffrey Canada is the hero of a movie called Waiting for Superman.
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He is the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone of schools,
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which emphasizes hard data, tough love, etc. He wrote an autobiography,
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which is all about growing up in New York in tough areas and living with violence all around.
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There are two versions that are published.
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There's a regular version and a graphic novel version.
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I, of course, read the graphic novel version.
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And about two -thirds through, here's what he says.
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I loved reading and my mother, who read voraciously too, allowed me to have her novels after she finished them.
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My strong reading background allowed me to have an easier time of it in most of my classes.
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He also had a friend, his best friend was a reader, they found books, shared them.
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Children who grew up with poverty who have access to books are the ones who make it.
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Those who don't, don't make it.
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This is the conclusion I'm coming to.
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Another case, Liz Murray, who wrote a book called Breaking Night, similar case, grew up in New York under extreme poverty.
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Here's what she did.
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She said in her novel, in her autobiography, she said she only showed up in elementary school the last
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couple of weeks before the examinations just to find out what was going to be on the test.
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Her father had this interesting habit.
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But in those days, the public libraries in New York were not connected by computer.
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They were all independent.
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So her dad had this practice of going to a local public library in New York area, getting a library card, taking out all the books he could and never returned them.
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Then he'd go to another library, take out all the books he could and never returned them.
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So she had this huge house of fugitive library books all over.
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Here's what she says.
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Any formal education I received came from the few days I spent in attendance,
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mixed with knowledge I absorbed from random readings of my or daddy's ever -growing supply of unreturned library books.
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And 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.
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Now, people who think that comic books are bad for you might consider or lead you to lives of crime, which is what people claim.
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Consider the case of Nobel Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu, who said this was his route to English.
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One of the things I'm most grateful to my father for is that contrary to educational principles, he allowed me to read comics.
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I think that's how I developed my love for English and for reading.
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Some of you have read Richard Wright's autobiography, a wonderful writer called Black Boy, about growing up in the segregated South.
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He says he grew up in a family where reading and writing was actually discouraged.
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His grandmother did not approve of fiction.
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She'd be right at home on the Common Core Curriculum Committee.
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She thought these are stories, you shouldn't be doing this, you'd stay with the real world.
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A boarder lived in the home, a school teacher, she read stories to Richard, told him stories.
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Grandma found out and asked her to leave.
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He took a newspaper route only so he could read the newspaper.
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He finally got access to books by borrowing a library card from a white friend of his
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and was able to take books out of a public library pretending they were for someone else.
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Here's how he describes his writing development.
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I wanted to write, and I did not even know the English language.
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I bought English grammars and found them dull.
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I felt I was getting a better sense of the language from novels than from grammars.
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Wow.
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Well, let's say this is true.
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Let's pretend I've made the case that free voluntary reading is the way this happens.
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If this is true, how do we get kids to read?
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Should we give them pizza?
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Remember Book It Pizza Hut?
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Alfie Cohn discusses this in his book Punished by Rewards, and he quotes a friend of his who says, if you give kids pizza for reading,
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all you're going to get is a lot of fat kids who don't like to read.
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I'll explain why that's true in a moment.
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Then there are all kinds of newspaper articles about children, principal has to sit naked on the school roof for two weeks
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or eat worms or dye his hair green or whatever because kids read 4 ,000 books or whatever.
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Newspapers love this stuff.
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I don't see the motivation there.
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Anyway, that's the idea that we have to record, we have to reward kids for reading
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and the most popular way of doing this is to use a commercial program called Accelerated Reader.
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Now, again, for both of you who haven't heard of this, Accelerated Reader is in one -third of all the schools in the United States.
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It's a reading management program.
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It works like this.
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The child types the name of the book into the computer.
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The quiz pops up.
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Low -level questions.
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So there's no ambiguity about the answer.
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And usually questions that are not too important to the theme of the book was Hermione left -handed or right -handed.
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I just made that up.
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Exaggeration.
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You get points for how many you get right.
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You need to get at least 6 out of 10 right to get credit.
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At the end of the year, you can turn in your points for a baseball jacket or whatever reward you want.
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This has become the reading curriculum in a lot of schools.
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I was asked by a journal, the Journal of Children's Literature, to do a survey of accelerated reader research, and I happily accepted.
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It was a lot of fun.
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I looked at every single paper ever done on Accelerated Reader.
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Only a few were in professional journals.
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Most of them were a couple of dissertations, but most of them were from the Accelerated Reader company, Renaissance Learning, from their website as advertising their product.
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I accepted those at face value just to see how it would come out.
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In order for me to give you my results, let me review for you what Accelerated Reader does.
434
It has four components.
435
Number one, when you order the program, you have to order books.
436
Lots of them, or it doesn't work.
437
Number two, time to read.
438
Renaissance Learning recommends 60 minutes a day.
439
Wow, Sustained Silent Reading is like 10 minutes.
440
This is a lot of time.
441
Number three, the tests, the quizzes.
442
And number four, prizes.
443
Now, based on what I've said so far, of these four elements, which are the ones we know really work?
444
Books and time, one and two.
445
Terrific.
446
So if you want to be a scientist, what you want to do is compare books and time to books,
447
time, tests, and prizes to see whether the tests and the prizes add anything.
448
So far, so good?
449
They've never done that.
450
Instead, they compare it to doing nothing.
451
You see what the problem is?
452
Let me put it to you this way.
453
I've just invented this new anti -anxiety medication.
454
I'm going to make a lot of money on it.
455
It's called Calm.
456
And it has two elements.
457
Sugar and Zoloft.
458
Prozac and I've given this to a lot of people and they all feel much better.
459
Can I say I've got a new product here?
460
No. We already know that Zoloft works and all that sugar is not really good for you.
461
Same idea.
462
We already know that this works.
463
The issue is whether the tests and prizes are adding anything.
464
So my conservative opinion on the accelerated reader research is that we don't know.
465
And my conservative advice when people ask me
466
if you've got a couple thousand dollars in your book budget don't buy accelerated reader, we have no evidence although I suspect it doesn't work
467
but we really have no evidence use the money to buy books for the library the classroom libraries,
468
the school libraries this we know absolutely works now this is my conservative conclusion
469
let me give you my conjecture
470
I learned the word conjecture from my son who's now sitting on the floor in the back, Danny
471
in the math department here and Danny has pointed out to me
472
Danny has pointed out to me that in mathematics if you have a hypothesis that you're not really sure of, that's really borderline, you can call it a conjecture.
473
Then you can say, well, it was only a conjecture.
474
So I have a conjecture on this.
475
Actually, it's Alfie Kohn's conjecture.
476
I'll tell you about Alfie Kohn.
477
He's a really interesting guy.
478
AlfieKohn .org.
479
Check out his website and his interesting books.
480
In his book, Punished by Rewards, here is his conjecture.
481
And this is based on, actually it's pretty well established, based on studies in psychology and education.
482
He says that if you give someone a reward for doing something that's already pleasant,
483
what you're telling them is that it's not pleasant.
484
And that no one would do it without a bribe.
485
He tells the story of this old man who lives in a house.
486
Kids come and play outside, they make a lot of noise, and he wants them to go away.
487
So he goes outside and says, tell you what, come back tomorrow and play and make a lot of noise.
488
I'll give you a dollar.
489
Great.
490
So they do it.
491
Next day he says, okay, 75 cents.
492
All right.
493
Next day, 50 cents.
494
Fine.
495
When it gets down to 10 cents, the kids say, we're not going to do this for a dime. And they never return.
496
We might be extinguishing behavior when we give people rewards.
497
There have been no long -term studies of accelerated reader.
498
We don't know what happens in the long run, whether children will stop reading because they're not getting the reward anymore.
499
So if we're not going to use bribes, we're not going to use pizza, what are we going to do?
500
We'll have a radical suggestion.
501
Probably the best motivator of reading that we know of is reading itself.
502
students who are involved in sustained silent reading programs when you look at how they're doing at the end of the year,
503
they're doing more reading on their own than students who are not in the program
504
and another area of research is presented to us inspired by the work of Jim Trelese
505
those of you who don't know how many of you have heard of Jim Trelese?
506
he's the author of a book called The Read Aloud Handbook.
507
Okay?
508
Danny, did I ever tell you what my mom said about The Read Aloud Handbook?
509
She read it, my mother, Danny's grandma, and she, it's a beautiful book, it's amazing.
510
And my perfect mother said...
511
Stephen, why can't you write like this?
512
And I said, I wish I could, okay?
513
It's absolutely wonderful.
514
Anyway, in the read -aloud handbook, which is, I think, put read -alouds on the map in North America, overwhelming bestseller, beautifully written.
515
He does great presentations, et cetera.
516
He introduced, two editions ago, a concept called the Home Run Book, which he got from Clifton Fadiman,
517
who said one's first book, one's first kiss, one's first home run are always the best.
518
My first home run was the best.
519
It was also my last.
520
But you know, I'm not a complete nerd.
521
I go to the gym, work out and all that.
522
I don't mind getting in a ball game.
523
I was in a game last spring.
524
I was pitching.
525
I had a no -hitter going for six innings.
526
then the bell rang and the big kids came out oh well
527
we decided to check out this idea of the home run book
528
which says that one positive reading experience can make you into a reader correct we did it with 4th graders,
529
5th graders, 8th graders we asked kids was there one experience
530
that got you into reading over half of the subject said yes and they told us what the book was Garfield,
531
I found something better than television.
532
Captain Underpants changed my life.
533
My gosh, you want subversive literature, check out Captain Underpants, etc. So reading itself, the big one though, in addition,
534
read alouds, literature, all gets kids into reading, the big one is making sure there is access to books.
535
This is the major thing.
536
We must make sure books are there.
537
And we've done a very poor job in doing this.
538
The problem is, is that children, and I'm going to emphasize this tomorrow a bit more, children of poverty have practically no access to books.
539
They have fewer books in the home, they have fewer books in their school libraries, in their classroom libraries, and they live in neighborhoods with fewer bookstores.
540
In fact, when you look at wealthy children versus poor children, and the ratio of books per child is the differences in the thousands to one.
541
Wealthy children, children of high income families, one researcher said, are deluged with books.
542
Children in poverty have a hard time finding books anywhere.
543
I want to share with you one of the studies we've done on this.
544
I'll talk about this more tomorrow, which I think might be the most important of all the studies I've ever looked at, I've ever participated in.
545
What you have on your sheet, it says Multiple Regression Analysis, and I'm going to give you the English language translation of that.
546
This is a study I've done with two of my former students.
547
They were students of mine in the 90s, and we're still hanging together doing studies.
548
Exciting.
549
This was based on the Pearl's examination.
550
The Pearl's examination is given to kids in 40 different countries, 10 -year -olds, and when the results are announced,
551
the newspapers get very excited because they want to know who won.
552
Germany wants to know if they did better than France.
553
Korea wants to know if they did better than Japan.
554
And every country declares a literacy crisis except Finland because Finland always comes out on top.
555
We ignored all that.
556
By the way, Alfie Kohn recommends that the test scores be put in the sports section.
557
Anyway, we ignored all that.
558
Instead, we looked at the factors and the PEARLS manuals just gave us all the raw data we needed.
559
All we needed to do was put it in the computer.
560
We did analysis to see which factors were the most important, which predicted reading scores the best.
561
We did several analyses.
562
We did one very complex analysis where we put in everything
563
that we could find and then tried to boil it down into simpler factors.
564
And then another one, which I like better, statisticians call it planned comparisons.
565
You pick out the factors in advance that you want to test
566
and you ignore everything else all the analysis came out the same.
567
So I'm going to give you the simple one.
568
First, we looked at poverty.
569
Poverty was a very strong factor and, of course, negative.
570
The higher the level of poverty, the lower the scores.
571
Number two, we looked at sustained silent reading.
572
What percentage of children in each country had a chance to do free reading in school?
573
The more they could do sustained silent reading, positive factor, but quite modest.
574
Fairly low, but it was there bordering on statistical significance.
575
The third factor we looked at was school libraries.
576
Presence of a school library of at least 500 books.
577
By the way, multiple regression is a very nice technique.
578
It allows you to pretend, through doing mathematical magic, that each of these factors is independent.
579
They don't influence each other.
580
Anyway, this is the big one, folks.
581
The presence of a school library was a strong factor and positive, nearly as strong as the effect of poverty.
582
I'm pausing for effect.
583
What this suggests is that supplying books in a school library can balance,
584
mitigate, offset the effects of poverty on reading comprehension scores, providing the access that was missing.
585
This is big stuff.
586
We then looked at the number of hours of actual reading instruction the effect was modest and negative
587
the more reading instruction the worse now I don't want to
588
jump to conclusions although I'd love to in this case it could be the case that children who had
589
poor reading had to have more instruction my suspicion is
590
if you graph it out and this is a conjecture that
591
if you looked at it would probably look like this from
592
no instruction to a little you probably see gains A little basic alphabetics and all that is helpful.
593
After that, diminishing returns.
594
On the chart, you see something there called R squared.
595
It says R squared equals 0 .63.
596
What this means is that if you know the poverty level of the country, you know if they're doing sustained silent reading,
597
you know about school libraries and you know about instruction,
598
this is 63 % of the data you need to predict their reading scores.
599
Wow.
600
This is science fiction.
601
This is really high.
602
Because in education, you get R -squared to .2, you think you're doing very well.
603
You can explain 20 % of what's going on.
604
Here we're getting nearly two -thirds.
605
We thought we had done something wrong.
606
It was too good to be true.
607
But other studies have found the same thing.
608
So in conclusion, I have a little closing number before we do questions.
609
But let me come to conclusion.
610
Reading works.
611
How about that?
612
Free voluntary reading.
613
We've discovered Remember that reading is good for you, and if we want to encourage reading, by far the big necessary factor,
614
access to books, libraries, libraries, libraries, libraries.
615
Let me conclude, I've given you information that I think is of use to you right now,
616
used to us as teachers and dealing with our children, et cetera.
617
Let's fight for libraries.
618
Anyways, let me give you some new research looking around that will probably be of use to you, taking a good look at you guys,
619
in about 40, 50 years.
620
Our latest research from the scientific laboratories of the University of Southern California.
621
I've been very, very interested in aging and the brain.
622
I got interested in it because there is some dementia in my family on my dad's side and I think,
623
you know, I want to prevent this and also I've had some very horrible experiences I must share with you
624
and I'm still in recovery
625
one of them happened in Philadelphia when I was visiting my son and family when they were in Philadelphia now in Philadelphia, you land in the airport
626
and you have to take this train The train takes you into the train station in the city.
627
I got on the train, and the sign says, $11, fair.
628
My gosh, that's a lot of money.
629
Senior citizens, $1.
630
Great.
631
Must show ID and Medicare card.
632
I had my Medicare card.
633
I was ready.
634
The conductor comes through, this punk kid, and I have my dollar ready, and I have my Medicare car ready.
635
I give him the dollar.
636
I'm about to show him my card.
637
He looks at me and says, oh, that's okay.
638
They should be told, no matter how old the person looks, always check ID.
639
Okay, Sonny, here you are.
640
Well, there's a balance on this, actually.
641
I have to tell you what also happened to balance this.
642
And this is also why Adam Sandler is my favorite Hollywood personality.
643
Good old Adam Sandler.
644
He can do no wrong after this and I tell everyone I can about it because he deserves all the credit.
645
Maimonides says the highest form of charity is when the person doesn't know.
646
This is pretty close.
647
I was in the Malibu gym.
648
The only people in the gym were me, My daughter and my granddaughter,
649
the adorable Sydney Amelia, who was like seven months old.
650
My daughter was pumping iron, and my job was to take care of the baby.
651
Okay.
652
Adam Sandler walked in.
653
He came up to me and said, the absolute best thing you can say to someone my age, he said, oh, is this your child?
654
Yes!
655
I said, no, it's my granddaughter.
656
And he gives me the equivalent of the masculine hug, you know, the little punch.
657
And he says, good -looking grandpa.
658
He can do no wrong, as far as I'm concerned.
659
This is a real man.
660
Nobody else was around to see it.
661
Anyway, so I got interested in the research.
662
And the research, I did a paper on this, which is now being translated into Chinese.
663
Is that cool or what?
664
It's being translated into Hong Kong.
665
Anyway, three factors can keep the brain young and prevent dementia from prematurely occurring.
666
Actually, I'm not too worried about dementia.
667
I follow the wisdom of Bill Cosby, who said, don't worry about senility.
668
When it comes, you won't know it.
669
It's made me feel better.
670
Anyway, factor number one, bilingualism.
671
Isn't that neat?
672
people who are bilingual have better executive
673
control
674
this means not getting distracted what was I doing people who switch all the time back
675
and forth in language you know how it is, you get up in the morning you go down and get the newspaper, you go outside and you see something on the lawn, you take care of that, put it away you see something else, you put that away
676
and you forget why you went out there in the first place we all do
677
that and we do more of it as we get older but bilingualism slows that down isn't that nice number two,
678
reading Reading, free, voluntary reading.
679
People my age who read a lot have the same verbal memory as people in their thirties who read less. And number three, coffee.
680
Is that cool or what?
681
Now when I'm going to tell you what the research says, this takes discipline and dedication
682
but i know you can do it three cups of freshly
683
brewed coffee a day all the studies converge on this people
684
in independent laboratories will delay senility significantly this is great news
685
in fact there's one study where they extrapolate i know there's one study where they extrapolated from mice
686
and the conjecture i love that word thanks it's wonderful the conjecture is this might reverse Alzheimer's, because it did in these mice,
687
the equivalent of five cups a day.
688
Now, what I find interesting...
689
Oh, by the way, a former student of mine, Kyungsook Cho, said, why don't you tell Starbucks about this?
690
Okay, because I figure, you know, Starbucks has these little words of wisdom on their cups, okay, so maybe they'll include this,
691
and they'll include reading and bilingualism.
692
Yes, we can get in a few points.
693
So I sent...
694
I wrote a note to Starbucks.
695
I found the address on their website, the email address, and I wrote, and I said, I have this paper, are you interested in it?
696
They wrote back, and they said, I'm sorry, we are not interested in new economic ventures at this time.
697
Corporate dementia, all right?
698
So I wrote them back, and I said, no, no, there's no money.
699
I just, do you want the paper?
700
You can use it.
701
It's public domain.
702
So that was it for Starbucks.
703
What is interesting about this is that you You can do all three of these things at the same time.
704
Sit down, have a nice cup of coffee, read a book in another language.
705
The Fountain of Youth.
706
My request is if any of you are interested in doing research on this, I would like to serve as a subject so I can get free latte.
707
Okay, may I have wild applause and then we'll do questions.
708
Thank you.
709
Thank you, thank you.
710
Alright.
711
Aw, shucks.
712
Oh, I do have a constraint on questions.
713
The first one has to be friendly.
714
After that, you can ask whatever you like.
715
I said that once at a university, three hands went down.
716
and let me introduce to you my son Danny, say hello, the real Dr. Krashen is here,
717
thank you professor here at UGA and the father of my grandchildren yes okay preguntas
718
yes this is just anecdotal but after talking to students to some fellows because they would say,
719
I'm wondering if Jeff is going to be reading, changing, because I'll ask you a student, how much do you read, and that's all the time.
720
But are we thinking text?
721
Is it reading your snippets more than concentrated?
722
Yes.
723
Is the definition of reading changing?
724
I can give you a clear answer.
725
Yes and no. The idea, what we've had through the years is complaints that kids aren't reading these days.
726
By the way, the complaints go back to 1840, that kids don't know anything, et cetera.
727
If you look at my website, which is listed on there, keen free stuff, operators are standing.
728
Anyway, I have an article called Stop Blaming Teenagers, Stop Scolding Teenagers, and I look to see how much teenagers are reading these days compared to 20 years ago,
729
etc., including reading on the computer.
730
First of all, in terms of book reading, they're actually reading more than in 1946.
731
It's about the same, it's very close, it's a little more.
732
The only category that's declined is newspaper reading and magazine reading.
733
And newspaper reading has gone down for everyone because of the Internet.
734
Far fewer people read newspapers today.
735
When you add the Internet reading, and that's blogs and things like this, kids are reading today just about the same as they always have.
736
Then I did a closer look.
737
This is Pew Foundation data.
738
They have it all there.
739
It's easy to look at.
740
About how kids use the Internet
741
and it turns out that using the internet for entertainment which is YouTube and games
742
versus using the internet for social interaction social interaction is much more frequent they use the internet for reading
743
and writing to each other
744
when you factor that in you get a lot of action now people tend to deprecate
745
that to me the jury's out I don't know if it's beneficial I suspect that it is
746
because we know when kids write back and forth Fourth, writing makes you smarter, helps you think, et cetera.
747
Something might be going on here, and it's meaningful and important to them, relevant to their lives.
748
We had a friend of the family who had a website for teenagers, it was Debbie Boxall, and she told me that this was for kids,
749
12, 13, 14 years old girls, nearly everything they posted, this was years ago, had to do with their social interaction with other girls.
750
Susie came to school and she wasn't talking to me today.
751
I wonder what's going on in deep discussions about this stuff.
752
Put it this way.
753
Let's say we discovered through history a group of kids in
754
16th century France who had the habit of writing notes to each other based on their personal lives.
755
We think, oh, what an exciting literate group that must be.
756
And today we give this no respect.
757
Right, so I think kids are reading as much as ever, even though they're reading different things, and I'm very hesitant to condemn computer reading and writing.
758
It might very well be beneficial.
759
It has not really been seriously studied.
760
Good question.
761
Good questions are those I'm prepared to answer. So, yes?
762
Oh, internet slang.
763
Actually, internet slang, since you're my BFF, I can tell you.
764
Internet slang, the only thing that's really been looked at seriously has been text messaging.
765
That's been around a little longer.
766
And the studies, people said, oh gosh, kids aren't going to be able to read and write, they're going to misspell everything and all this stuff.
767
And it turns out, number one, when you look at it, it's conventionalized.
768
You can't just make up your own.
769
You can't just decide this is my abbreviation, you look kind of silly.
770
So you've got to know when to use LOL and all that stuff, because it could mean all these different things.
771
Also, it has no negative effect on writing accuracy.
772
None.
773
And this has been a very popular research topic.
774
I think it's kind of the same attitude people had toward teenage slang in general.
775
They assume it's going to make things worse.
776
So far, it hasn't been shown to be the case.
777
I think it improves communication.
778
There might be something good going on.
779
I don't know.
780
I suspect there is.
781
Oh, by the way, email, comment on email, my hypothesis.
782
Email should be nearly perfect, but not quite.
783
If it's too perfect, it looks insincere.
784
So we have these conventions, right?
785
Yeah, question here.
786
I had a comment or a question about the comment you made earlier in the talk about reading
787
Yes, yes.
788
The reason this has not been widely investigated is that it's very hard to test it speech, because you've got to record it, and it takes a lot of time,
789
and it's easy to test writing.
790
It's right there, and we have computer programs that will help you with it, et cetera.
791
So there have been very few studies, and one of my former students, King Sook Cho, keeps bringing this up every six months.
792
We've got to know, because she did a study of, this is her dissertation study, of women who read Sweet Valley High novels.
793
This is before Twilight, and found a very positive impact, okay?
794
I think Elizabeth should have jumped Jessica a long time ago, okay?
795
That's my opinion, all right?
796
Anyway, they read these teen novels, and everything got better and better and better, and she claims their reactions, their comments, their speech got more fluent,
797
and their friends said their speech got more fluent, but I don't know any study that's used speech as a dependent variable.
798
Let's look to see.
799
So that'll be your research.
800
And please let us know what happens.
801
My suspicion is it's going to have an impact, and it's going to be positive.
802
Of course, you'd have to do some listening as well.
803
So if you take everything else equal, you add reading, it's going to help.
804
That's a prediction.
805
Okay, thanks very much.
806
The COE Lecture Series is a production of the UGA College of Education, the University of Georgia, copyright 2012.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Power of Reading - Stephen Krashen”. This video has 806 sentences and 8852 words to shadow. The speech runs for 56:10. The speaker talks at a natural 158 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| literacy noun | /ˈlɪtəɹəsi/ | The ability to read and write. |
| sustain verb | /səˈsteɪn/ | To maintain, or keep in existence. |
| conjecture noun | /kənˈd͡ʒɛkt͡ʃə/ | A statement or an idea which is unproven, but is thought to be true; a guess. |
| accelerate verb | /ɪkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪt/ | To cause to move faster; to quicken the motion of; to add to the speed of. |
| voluntary adjective | /ˈvɑ.lənˌt(ɛ)ɹi/ | Done, given, or acting of one's own free will. |
| aloud adverb | /əˈlaʊd/ | With a loud voice, or great noise; loudly; audibly. |
| literate adjective | /ˈlɪtəɹət/ | Able to read and write; having literacy. |
| sling noun | /ˈslɪŋ/ | An instrument for throwing stones or other missiles, consisting of a short strap with two strings fastened to its ends, or with a string fastened to one end… |
| bilingual adjective | /baɪˈlɪŋ.ɡwəl/ | Having the ability to speak two languages fluently. |
| comprehension noun | /ˌkɑmpɹɪˈhɛnʃn̩/ | A thorough understanding. |
| dementia noun | /dɪˈmɛnʃə/ | A progressive decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the brain beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Areas particularly affected… |
| vocabulary noun | /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/ | A usually alphabetized and explained collection of words e.g. of a particular field, or prepared for a specific purpose, often for learning. |
| modest adjective | /ˈmɑdəst/ | Not bragging or boasting about oneself or one's achievements; unpretentious, humble. |
| teenager noun | /ˈtiːnˌeɪ̯d͡ʒə/ | A person between thirteen and nineteen years old (inclusive). |
| bilingualism noun | The condition of being bilingual; the ability to speak two languages. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. | |
| come over verb | To affect in a sudden, unprecedented or surprising manner; to overwhelm a person's ordinarily contrary impulse. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Anyway, are you sure that was the score?
- Am I the only one who understands this?
- Can I say I've got a new product here?
- Stephen, why can't you write like this?
- That's my opinion, all right?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if kids read a lot, they'll all · if you looked at it would probably |
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been talking · has been rising · have been increasing |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has emphasized · I've looked · has been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | can't be done · was given · was called |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 167 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, don't, I've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: comprehension /ˌkɑmpɹɪˈhɛnʃn̩/, dementia /dɪˈmɛnʃə/, gosh /ɡɑːʃ/, regression /ɹiːˈɡɹɛʃ.ən/, suspicion /səˈspɪʃ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: literacy /ˈlɪtəɹəsi/, accelerate /ɪkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪt/, voluntary /ˈvɑ.lənˌt(ɛ)ɹi/, vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, illiterate /ɪˈlɪtəɹət/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like literacy, sustain, conjecture.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.