Why Read Aloud?

-JIM TRELEASE-

One day back in the 1980s I visited the kindergarten room I had attended years earlier as a child at Connecticut Farms Elementary School, in Union, New Jersey. Gazing up at me were the faces of about fifteen children, each of them seated expectantly on their story rug. “How many of you want to learn to read this year?” I asked. Without a second’s hesitation, every hand shot into the air, many accompanied by boasts like “I already know how!”

Their excitement matched what every kindergarten teacher has told me:
Every child begins school wanting to learn to read. In other words, we’ve got 100 percent enthusiasm and desire when they start school—the first chapter in their life.

In subsequent years, when the National Reading Report Card surveyed students, they found very different attitudes and behavior as the students aged:

• Among fourth-graders, only 54 percent read something for pleasure every day.
• Among eighth-graders, only 30 percent read for pleasure daily. 
• By twelfth grade, only 19 percent read anything for pleasure daily. 
• The Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2010 longitudinal study of children 8 to 18 years of age found 53 percent read no books in a given day, 65 percent read no magazines, and 77 percent no newspapers. 
• In a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in 2010, young adults between ages 15 and 19 (the largest concentration of high school and college students) reported spending only 12 minutes a day reading versus 2.23 hours watching television.

Think about it: We have 100 percent interest in kindergarten but lose three-quarters of our potential lifetime readers by the time they’re eighteen. Any business that kept losing that much of its customer base would be out of business. Admittedly there is a natural falloff during adolescence and early adulthood—these are the busiest social and emotional times of human life. But what if the early interest never returns? If schooling’s objective is to create lifetime readers who continue to read and educate themselves after they graduate and then they fail to do so, that’s a major indictment of the process.

 
Let’s see how the childhood figures are reflected in adulthood these days. The National Endowment for the Arts surveyed adult reading habits for twenty-five years, and its most recent report coincided perfectly with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of pleasure reading among thirteen-and seventeen-year-olds. The number of adults who read literature was down 22 percent from its 1982 survey, in every age, gender, ethnic, and educational category. By 2002, only 46.7 percent had read any fiction in the previous year. When expanded in a different survey to include newspapers or any kind of book or magazine, the figure rose to only 50 percent of adults. In short, half of America is aliterate. 

 

As I showed in the Introduction, reading scores improved by only one point for seventeen-year-olds and five points for thirteen-year-olds between 1971 and 2008. That’s thirty-seven years—half of it devoted to national and state curriculum reform. Couple those figures with mobile-multimedia usage soaring to more than seven and a half hours a day for students ages eight to eighteen, and one can see a perfect storm on the horizon, threatening to hinder reading even further.