Literacy Campaigns: Access to Books is the First Step

Stephen Krashen
Literacy Network News, Spring, 2007, page 7 (Literacy Network of Greater Los Angeles)

The usual approach in literacy campaigns aimed at young people is to urge them to read more. Campaigns feature exhortations from famous people (usually athletes) telling young people that reading is good for you, official days or weeks set aside to honor reading, and prizes that readers can win by taking tests on what they read (one recent campaign features a free ticket to a major wrestling event as the grand prize).

This approach is not only unnecessary, it might be counterproductive.

Young people like to read

It is unnecessary to urge young people to read more and understand the importance of reading because, given the chance, they do in fact read quite a bit, and they certainly do understand the importance of reading. A number of studies confirm that given access to comprehensible and interesting reading material, children and adolescents take advantage of them. More access to reading results in more reading; this result applies to books in the home, classroom libraries, school libraries and public libraries (Krashen, 2004). In fact, sometimes a single, brief exposure to good reading material can result in a clear increase in enthusiasm for reading (Ramos and Krashen, 1998; Cho and Krashen, 2002).

Reluctant readers?

"Reluctant" readers are often those who have little access to books: Worthy and McKool (1996) studied 11 sixth graders who "hated to read." Nine of the 11 had little access to interesting reading material at home or in school, and none had visited the public library during the previous year. The two who had access to interesting reading were the only ones who read "with any degree of regularity" (p. 252). Ironically, even though all were described as "reluctant readers," all appeared to be quite enthusiastic about "light reading" (e.g. comics).

A poll conducted by READ California of young people ages 10 through 17 confirmed that older children and teenagers understand that reading is important: 99% felt that reading skill was "really important" (88%) or "kind of important" (11%) for success in the future (Fairbanks, Maaslin, Maullin and Associates, 1999). Fifty-eight percent of the respondents said they read four days a week or more, and 67% said they read 26 minutes per day or more, a result similar to that reported in other polls (Krashen, 2001).