More to Know: Proficient Readers Read a Lot When it comes to the role of books and reading in increasing reading achievement, the facts are indisputable. Extensive and intensive reading—also known as avid, high-volume reading—supports not only high scores on reading achievement tests, but also a fulfilling and productive life. “For the majority of young people, enthusiastic and habitual reading is the single most predictive personal habit for the ability to achieve desirable life outcomes” (Bayless, 2010). Effective and enthusiastic reading does, as Dick Robinson maintains, “create a better life.” Avid, voluminous reading (Atwell and Merkel, 2016) is the most reliable path to the development of proficient readers; indeed, there’s no other way to become a proficient reader. No matter what we’re trying to get proficient at—ping-pong, programming, or paddle boarding, we have to practice for many, many hours. No surprise, then, that students who read voluntarily and extensively both at school and at home become proficient readers. Indeed, research demonstrates a strong correlation between high reading achievement and hours logged inside a book. Effective reading programs include time for independent reading of a wide variety of reading materials, including abundant trade books across genres (Harvey and Ward, 2017; Scharer et al., 2018). How important are time and engagement with books? The difference they make is nothing short of miraculous—engaged readers spend 500 percent more time reading than do their peers who aren’t yet hooked on books—and all those extra hours inside books they love gives them a leg up in everything that leads to a happy, productive life: deep conceptual understanding of a wide range of topics, expanded vocabulary, strategic reading ability, critical literacy skills, and engagement with the world that’s more likely to make them dynamic citizens drawn into full civic participation. As Mary Leonhart, author of 99 Ways to Get Kids to Love Reading (1997), notes: The sophisticated skills demanded by high-level academic or professional work— the ability to understand multiple plots or complex issues, a sensitivity to tone, the expertise to know immediately what is crucial to a text and what can be skimmed— can be acquired only through years of avid reading.” Elfrieda Hiebert and D. Ray Reutzel (2010) note that the opportunity to read (OTR) is associated with literacy performance: Foorman et al. (2006) used hierarchical linear modeling to examine the relationship between various instructional practices and the impact on reading achievement for 1,285 first-graders. Time allocated to reading was the only variable that significantly explained gains on any of the post-test measures, including word reading, decoding, and passage comprehension. Other time factors, such as time spent on word, alphabetic instruction, and phonemic awareness instruction, did not independently contribute to growth in reading achievement.
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CHAPTER 2: READING
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