This is a brief excerpt from Chapter One of
The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin, © 2006, 6th edition).

Chapter One: Why read aloud?

Creating Lifetime Readers: Are we there yet?

school’s objective should be to create lifetime readers—graduates who continue to read and educate themselves throughout their adult lives. But the reality is we create schooltime readers—graduates who know how to read well enough to graduate. And at that point the majority take a silent vow: If I never read another book, it’ll be too soon.

The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying adult reading habits for almost 25 years and their most recent report coincided perfectly with the NAEP assessment of pleasure reading among 13- and 17-year-olds. Adult reading of literature (fiction books, short stories, or poetry) was down 22 percent from its 1982 survey, and the decline was evidenced in every age, gender, ethnic, or educational category. By 2002, only 46.7 percent of 17,000 adults surveyed had read any fiction in the last year.¹ When that was expanded in a different survey to include newspapers or any kind of book or magazine, the figure rose to only 50 percent of adults.² In short, half of America is alliterate.

In comparing 2004 NAEP scores with those of 1971, there is no change for 17-year-olds and an insignificant change for the 13-year-olds.³ That's 30 years, with half of it devoted to national and state curriculum reform and higher standards, yet no improvement. Actually there was a change among the high school seniors in the last 20 years and it mirrored the change in adult reading habits. As I noted, the adult recreational reading dropped 22 percent in the last 20 years. Among 17-year-olds (where all the elementary instruction is supposed to take root and finally blossom), the percent who never read anything for fun increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. When you add on those who read only once a month or a few times a year, the figure expands to 48 percent, pretty close to what you find among adults.

This trend was first noticed as far back as 1983 and a national committee was created to explore the causes and solutions. It was called the Commission on Reading, organized by the National Academy of Education and the National Institute of Education and funded under the U.S. Department of Education. It consisted of nationally recognized experts in how children develop, how they learn language, and how they learn to read. Since nearly everything in the curriculum of school rested upon reading, the consensus was that reading was at the heart of either the problem or the solution. This commission was markedly different from the one created in 2000, the National Reading Panel, the one that created the reading curriculum under the No Child Left Behind Act (Reading First). More on that later.

The 1983 commission took two years to pour through more than 10,000 research projects done in the last quarter century to determine what works, what might work, and what doesn’t work.

In 1985, the commission issued its report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. Among its primary findings, two simple declarations rang loud and clear:

• “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”⁴
• The commission found conclusive evidence to support reading aloud not only in the home but also in the classroom: “It is a practice that should continue throughout the grades.”⁵

In its wording—“the single most important activity”—the experts were saying reading aloud was more important than worksheets, homework, assessments, book reports, and flashcards. One of the cheapest, simplest, and oldest tools of teaching was being promoted as a better teaching tool than anything else in the home or classroom. What exactly is so powerful about something so simple you don’t even need a high school diploma in order to do it and how exactly does a person get better at reading? It boils down to a simple, two-part formula:

• The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.
• The more you read, the more you know; and the more you know, the smarter you grow.⁶

How can something so simple as reading aloud to a child be so effective?

We start with the brain. As lumber is the primary support for building a house, words are the primary structure for learning. And there are really only two efficient ways to get words into a person's brain: either through the eye or through the ear. Since it'll be years before the eye is used for reading, the best source for ideas and brain building in a young child becomes the ear. What we send into that ear becomes the "sound" foundation for the rest of the child's "brain house." Those meaningful sounds in the ear now will help the child make sense of the words coming in through the eye later when learning to read.

We read to children for all the same reasons we talk with children: to reassure, to entertain, to bond; to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity, to inspire. But in reading aloud, we also:

• Condition the child’s brain to associate reading with pleasure
• Create background knowledge
• Build vocabulary
• Provide a reading role model

One factor hidden in the decline of students' recreational reading is that it coincides with a decline in the amount of time adults read to them. By middle school, almost no one is reading aloud to students. If each read-aloud is a commercial for the pleasures of reading, then a decline in advertising would naturally be reflected in a decline in students recreational reading.

There are two basic "reading facts of life” that are ignored in most education circles, yet without these two principles working in tandem, little else will work.

Reading Fact No. 1: Human beings are pleasure-centered.

Reading Fact No. 2: Reading is an accrued skill.

Let’s examine Fact No. 1: Human beings are pleasure-centered. Human beings will voluntarily do over and over that which brings them pleasure. That is, we go to the restaurants we like, order the foods we like, listen to the radio stations that play the music we like, and visit the in-laws we like. Conversely, we avoid the foods, music, and in-laws we dislike. Far from being a theory, this is a physiological fact. We approach what causes pleasure, and we withdraw from what causes unpleasure or pain.⁷

This fact applies to nearly everything we do willingly. Every time we read to a child, we’re sending a “pleasure” message to the child’s brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure. There are, however, “unpleasures” associated with reading and school. The learning experience can be tedious or boring, threatening, and without meaning—endless hours of worksheets, hours of intensive phonics instruction, and hours of unconnected-test questions. If a child seldom experiences the “pleasures” of reading and but increasingly meets its “unpleasures,” then the natural reaction will be withdrawal.

And that brings us to Reading Fact No. 2: Reading is an accrued skill. This means reading is like riding a bicycle, driving a car, or sewing: in order to get better at it you must do it. And the more you read, the better you get at it.

The last 30 years of reading research⁸ confirms this simple formula—regardless of sex, race, nationality, or socioeconomic background. Students who read the most, read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest. Conversely, those who don’t read much, cannot get better at it.

Why don’t students read more? Because of Reading Fact No. 1: the large number of “unpleasure” messages they received throughout their school years, coupled with the lack of “pleasure” messages in the home, nullify any attraction from the book. They avoid books and print the same way a cat avoids a hot stove burner. There is ample proof for all these hypotheses in my answer to the next question.

NEXT: Where does phonics fit into all this?

Chapter One — p. 1   p. 2   p. 3   Footnotes