Discussion

Trelease's hypothesis receives very strong support here - one positive experience can make a difference. This result appears to hold for children from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds. This is very good news. Reluctant readers may simply be waiting for their home run book. Our finding that readers mentioned a wide variety of books underscores the importance of providing many different titles in school and classroom libraries and introducing children to a wide range of literature in language arts.

Our finding that 84% of the students like to read is in agreement with Von Sprecken et. al., who reported that 96% of their fourth graders liked to read. Both of these results are contrary to common wisdom: Literacy campaigns feel children must be encouraged and urged to read, and feel that incentives are necessary. Common wisdom also holds that building up skills must precede reading for pleasure; indeed, the major cause of infrequent voluntary reading, it has been suggested, is the inability to decode individual words "automatically" and fluently. But very few of our nonreaders claimed that difficulty in reading was responsible for their lack of interest. From their responses, it appears that they simply didn't have interesting things to read.

Our findings lead to an interesting question: The students at the school we investigated perform quite poorly on standardized tests. In the 1999 SAT9, the sixth grade mean was the 25th percentile for all students, the 30th excluding limited English proficient children. While these scores are better than other schools at their SES level, they are low. If the children are so positive about reading, why should their scores be so low? In our view, they are not reading enough, and they are not reading enough because they have little access to books. It has been demonstrated that children from low SES backgrounds have very little access to books at home, in the community (public library) and in schools (school and classroom libraries) (for a thorough review of this evidence, see McQuillan, 1998). It is also quite likely that few of these children have a comfortable, quiet place to read, factors also known to influence the amount of reading children do (Krashen, 1993).

These children are willing to read and appear to be enthusiastic about reading. We suggest that they would read more, and hence read better, if more reading material were available to them. The minority who do not like to read are simply waiting for the right pitch to hit their home run. They don't need encouragement, they don't need incentives. They need books.

Fadiman, C. 1947. Party of One: The Selected Writings of Clifton Fadiman. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company.

Krashen, S. 1993. The Power of Reading. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

McQuillan, J. 1998. The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions. Portsmouth: Heinemann Publishing Company.

Von Sprecken, D., Kim, J. and Krashen, S. 2000. The home run book: Can one positive reading experience create a reader? California School Library Journal 23 (2): 8-9.

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