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When I first arrived at Guan Ai, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of books in the library. In addition to the hundreds of books for students, there is also a significant collection of books on education and teaching methods. This year, I’ll be reading and reviewing these books and others to hopefully spark discussions on education. This week’s book is The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research by Stephen D. Krashen. The librarian at Trinity School donated this book to Guan Ai when students and faculty visited last year.

Throughout the book, Krashen makes the argument that free voluntary reading (FVR) is the most effective tool for increasing literacy. Krashen describes it as follows:

“For school-age children, FVR means no book reports, no questions at the end of the chapter, and no looking up every vocabulary word. FVR means putting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead. It’s the kind of reading most highly literate people do all the time.”

In this edition, Krashen does not present any new research on the benefits of reading, but rather provides a broad overview of what the existing research concludes. As the title suggests, reading is powerful and Krashen cites countless studies to make his point that developing systems that encourage FVR in schools will result in marked improvements in literacy. Krashen does not claim FVR is the complete answer to problems of literacy, but suggests it is the missing ingredient in many language arts programs, both first and foreign language courses. He argues FVR will improve reading comprehension, grammar usage, writing style, vocabulary and spelling.

How does Krashen propose encouraging FVR? He places his faith in libraries (public, school and classroom), arguing that lack of access to books of interest is the major reason children do not do independent reading. Even if children are doing “light” reading (comic books, teen romance novels, magazines or Goosebumps books), the data suggests literacy will improve and children will eventually select more difficult literature. Thus it is the library’s responsibility to find books of interest for students and the administration’s responsibility to set up programs in the school where children can select books on their own and have the time to read them.

Overall, I appreciate this book. A lot of the information seems intuitive to me, but it’s nice to have it all in one place and backed up with data. While I was teaching 7th grade English in Texas last year, we were working on grammar rules and many of my students were struggling. I told them that I thought a lot of their problems had to do with the fact that they do not read books for pleasure so they rarely saw correct grammar modeled. This book backs up the basic argument I was making to my students.

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