The power of reading, the power of libraries and the "summer slide"
Letter published in Language Magazine, May, 2017
Stephen Krashen
http://tinyurl.com/ll3d36s
Language
Magazine readers might be interested in a case study that confirms
Andrew Johnson's recommendations for dealing with the summer slide in
reading
("Tales of summer," April, 2017). In a published journal paper, we (Shu-Yuan Lin, Fay Shin, and S. Krashen)
described the case of "Sophia," a high school student whose
reading test scores dropped during three consecutive academic years, but
increased during the summer. In fact, Sophia's fall reading scores were
higher than they were the previous spring. What
did Sophia do during the summer that caused this improvement? She did
not attend special classes, did not get instruction in reading
strategies, did not
work through vocabulary lists, and did not write book reports. All she
did was read for pleasure. According
to her mother, Sophia read an average of about 50 books per summer,
largely from the local public library. Early favorites were the Nancy
Drew and Sweet
Valley High series, followed by the Christy Miller series and other
books by Francine Pascal, the author of the Sweet Valley series. (Sophia
informed us that she was “addicted” to the Christy Miller books; it
took her only a week to read the entire series
“because I just couldn’t put them down.”)
Sophia’s
mother told us that during the school year Sophia was so busy with
school work that she had hardly any free time to read. Her mother, in
fact, joked
that it might be a good idea to keep her daughter at home during the
school year in order to increase her scores on standardized tests of
reading.
Lin, S-Y, Shin, F., & Krashen, S.
2007. Sophia’s choice: Summer reading. Knowledge Quest 35(4). Available for free download at
www.sdkrashen.com,
under "free voluntary reading."