Excerpted from Chapter Five of The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin, 2006, 6th edition). For a list of all topics covered here and in the print edition see Chapter Five question list.

Chapter 5: SSR—sustained silent reading,
reading aloud's silent partner—continued

What are the exact benefits of SSR?

The benefits vary by the individual, but in its simplest form SSR allows a person to read long enough and far enough so the act of reading becomes automatic. If one must stop to concentrate on each word—sounding it out and searching for meaning—then fluency is lost along with meaning. It is also fatiguing. Being able to do it automatically is the goal.⁹ To achieve this, the Commission on Reading (Becoming a Nation of Readers) recommended two hours a week of independent reading. Where do you find that time? The commission recommended less time be spent on skill sheets and workbooks.¹⁰

Because it is supposed to be informal and free of grades, SSR also provides students with a new perspective on reading—as a form of recreation. Judging from educated adults who come home each evening and think they can only relax by watching television, there is a critical need for such lessons in childhood.

Restricted to just basals, she'll be ill-prepared
for real reading.

n the secondary level, SSR may not cause an immediate or short term change in student skills (no “quick fix”), but it can result in positive changes in attitude toward the library, voluntary reading, assigned reading, and the importance of reading. This affects the amount students read and thus their facility with the process.¹¹

Younger readers, however, show significant improvement in both attitude and skills with SSR. “Poor readers,” points out Richard Allington,¹² a leading researcher and president of the International Reading Association, “when given ten minutes a day to read, initially will achieve five hundred words and quickly increase that amount in the same period as proficiency grows.”¹³

By third grade, SSR can be the student’s most important vocabulary builder, more so than with basal textbooks or even daily oral language. The Commission on Reading noted: “Basal readers and textbooks do not offer the same richness of vocabulary, sentence structure, or literary form as do trade books. . . . A diet consisting only of basal stories probably will not prepare children well to deal with real literature.”¹⁴ Indeed, about half of the 3,000 most commonly used words are not even included in K–6 basals.¹⁵ As shown in the chart below, printed material introduces three to six times more rare words than conversation does.

What would cause SSR to fail?

The McCrackens report that most instances where SSR fails are due to:

1. Teachers (or aides) who are supervising instead of reading
2. Classrooms that lack enough SSR reading materials

The McCrackens cite the teacher as a critical role model in SSR, reporting widespread imitation by students of the teacher’s reading habits.¹⁶ Students in one class noticed the teacher interrupting her reading to look up words in the dictionary and began doing the same. When a junior high teacher began to read the daily newspaper each day, the class began doing the same.

Here's an example of an entire nation that practiced SSR successfully for four decades and then ran into a snag. As a reading model, Japan has been unrivaled in the world. Its citizens consume enormous amounts of print, and lead the world in newspaper readership (64 percent of Japanese adults read a daily newspaper, compared to 23 percent in the U.S.¹⁷) Few outsiders, however, understand the reason behind the Japanese numbers: time. No, they get the same 24 hours everyone else gets, but they get them in different doses.

Hours and hours of mass transit time gave the Japanese lots of time for reading—then the "thumb
tribe" arrived.

Japan's highway tolls have long been among the highest in the world. A U.S. toll of $14 would be $47 in Japan, unless there's a bridge to cross and then it jumps to $97. The result is that almost everyone takes public transportation to work, commutes that often average an hour each way.¹⁸ This allows for 120 uninterrupted daily minutes of either reading or napping. All that time and all that reading put Japan at the top of book, magazine, and newspaper consumption—that is, until the mid 1990s.

That's when Japanese readership began to drop, and continues to drop.¹⁹ The cause was the arrival of what they call the "thumb tribe"—commuters with computer games, email, cell phones, and laptops. In short, distractions.

The more distractions confronting a nation, a family, or a class, the less reading accomplished. If you really want to get more reading done, then take control of your distractions: needless trips to the mall, land phones and cell phones, multiple televisions, DVD players, emails, computer games—each calling for immediate attention or multi-tasking. The "thumb tribe" is flourishing in America as well. (For more on the subject of distractions in reading achievement, see Distractions.)

What about summer-school reading programs?

Further proof of SSR’s benefits is found in the research on “summer setback.” Many parents, especially those whose children are having difficulty with school, see summertime as a school vacation and take it literally. “Everyone needs a vacation, for goodness sake. He needs to get away from school and relax. Next year will be a new start.” That attitude can be extremely detrimental, especially to a poor reader, as the chart below indicates (SOURCE: Center for Summer Learning, Johns Hopkins Institute).

There is an axiom in education that “you get dumber in the summer.” A two-year study of 3,000 students in Atlanta, Georgia, attempted to see if it was true. They found that everyone—top students and poor students—learns more slowly in the summer. Some, though, do worse than slow down; they actually go into reverse, as you can see in the chart on the right. ²⁰

Top students’ scores rise slightly between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next. Conversely, the bottom 25 percent (largely urban poor) lose most of what they gained the previous school year. Average students (middle 50 percent) make no gains during the summer but lose nothing either—except in the widening gap between themselves and the top students. Projected across the first four years of school, the "rich-poor" reading gap that was present at the start of kindergarten has actually widened.

Many factors cause the loss. The affluent child's summer includes: a family of readers who model that behavior and offer quiet spaces conducive to reading; a home that is print-rich with books, magazines, and newspapers; visits to the mall with stops at the book store or library; a family vacation or summer camp out of town in which new people, places, and experiences extend background knowledge and offer new vocabulary; and a high probability that educational or informational TV and radio will be seen and heard.

School's out but if reading is out also, he's in big trouble.

Conversely, the at-risk child's summer includes: a home without books, magazines or newspapers, and without adults who read avidly; no car by which to leave a dangerous neighborhood; no bookstores or a convenient library; a daily routine in which the child seldom meets new people, new experiences, or new vocabulary, thus no growth in background knowledge; and little likelihood that educational or informational TV or radio will be seen or heard.

The adage "If you don’t use it, you lose it," proves true for children who live these kinds of summers. Without printed material and without new experiences, the reading skills grow rusty and atrophy.

How to prevent the traditional summer reading gap? The research gives little support to traditional summer school, but a great deal to summer reading—reading to the child and reading by the child. Jimmy Kim's study of 1,600 sixth-graders in 18 schools showed that the reading of four to six books during the summer was enough to alleviate summer loss. He further noted that when schools required either a report/essay be written about a book read during the summer or that parents verify a student had read one summer book, this increased greatly the chances of it being read.²¹

   Most libraries have summer reading incentive programs, so make sure your child is enrolled and participates. And take your child on field trips—even if you just visit local places like a fire station, the museum, or the zoo, and talk and listen. One of the most original solutions I've heard is this one from Paul E. Barton, senior associate in the Policy Evaluation and Research Center at ETS, and someone who has researched and written extensively on the subject of poverty and schooling, from preschool to prisons.²² Barton knows full well the scarcity of books in the lives of poor children and it provoked him to tell USA Today that at-risk communities should be making bookmobiles or traveling libraries "as ubiquitous as the Good Humor man."²³

Regular family conversations will take care of the basic vocabulary, but when you read to the child you leap into the rare words that help most when it’s time for school and formal learning. Simultaneously, you’re familiarizing the child with books and print in a manner that brings him or her pleasure. Simply put, you're raising the sophistication of his or her vocabulary but doing it in a way that allows the child to associate reading with pleasure. SOURCE: Donald P. Hayes and Margaret G. Ahrens, “Vocabulary Simplification for Children: A Special Case for ‘Motherse,’” Journal of Child Language, vol. 15, 1988, pp. 395–410.

NEXT: What about 'reading incentive' programs like Accelerated Reader?

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