How to Read the Compendium Start anywhere and read in any direction. Let your interests be your guide. The compendium is organized around six sections: • Readers: We profile early, adolescent, and boy readers—plus emerging bilinguals, students from diverse backgrounds, and striving readers. • Reading: High-volume readers build an expansive capacity to comprehend what they read. They develop robust vocabularies, deep knowledge of the world, and a proficient, fluid reading style. • Equity: Avid readers are highly engaged and motivated. With stamina, self-efficacy, and a can-do spirit, they understand the joy and power of reading. • Texts: At school and in their homes, all children must have access to abundant texts of all kinds (print and e-books, short texts, magazines, and more). Children also need to develop a sense of genre, text structure, and reading purpose. • Teaching: Students need daily time at school and at home to read and become enthusiastic readers. They also need instructional support such as the interactive read- aloud (reading aloud plus conversation about the book), guided reading, book clubs, and the benefit of writing about reading. • Family Literacy: Families with a rich reading culture—access to books and lots of talk about books—are more likely to raise successful readers. The compendium does not in any way represent a definitive treatment—the field of reading is vast, varied, and vital. When we investigate reading, we explore cognition, linguistics, psychological influences, and social-cultural traditions. Instead, the compendium is meant to provide a brief introduction to the benefits of independent reading, or free voluntary reading (Krashen 2011), and suggest some of the pivotal research behind these benefits. It’s a place for you to begin your own exploration. As our title suggests, we include both research and expert opinion so the references reflect a range of formats—traditional research reports, as well as newspaper and professional journal articles. Additionally, when appropriate, we link to the Scholastic anthology: Open a World of Possible: Real Stories About the Joy and Power of Reading, a collection of essays authored by some of the leading literacy experts in the country (Bridges, 2014). Depending on the depth of your interest, you may want to use the references we cite as the starting point for a deeper investigation. Note that some of the links are live, enabling you to read the original research online or download a print copy.
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HOW TO READ THE COMPENDIUM
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