Raising Kids Who Read Read online

  What’s a “Good Reader”?

  The discussion to this point implies that people who are good readers are people who know a lot. A lot of what? What kind of knowledge makes you a good reader? That depends on what you want to read. Authors omit information based on their guess as to what their audience already knows. A writer for the Journal of the Lepidopterist’s Society will omit a whole lot of information about butterflies, figuring that her audience already knows it.

  Most parents want their children to be solid general readers. They aren’t worried about their kids reading professional journals for butterfly collectors, but they expect their kids to be able to read the New York Times, National Geographic, or other materials written for the thoughtful layperson. A writer for the New York Times will not assume deep knowledge about postage stamps, or African geography, or Elizabethan playwrights—but she will assume some knowledge about each. To be a good general reader, your child needs knowledge of the world that’s a million miles wide and an inch deep—wide enough to recognize the titles The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, for example, but not that the former may have inspired the latter. Enough to know that rare stamps can be very valuable, but not the going price of the rare Inverted Jenny stamp of 1918.

  If being a “good reader” actually means “knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff,” then reading tests don’t work quite the way most people think they do. Reading tests purport to measure a student’s ability to read, and “ability to read” sounds like a general skill. Once I know your ability to read, I ought to be able (roughly) to predict your comprehension of any text I hand you. But I’ve just said that reading comprehension depends heavily on how much you happen to know about the topic of the text, because that determines your ability to make up for the information the writer felt free to omit. Perhaps, then, reading comprehension tests are really knowledge tests in disguise.

  There is reason to think that’s true. In one study, researchers measured the reading ability of eleventh graders with a standard reading test and also administered tests of what they called “cultural literacy”—students’ knowledge of mainstream culture. There were tests of the names of artists, entertainers, military leaders, musicians, philosophers, and scientists, as well as separate tests of factual knowledge of science, history, and literature. The researchers found robust correlations between scores on the reading test and scores on the various cultural literacy tests—correlations between 0.55 and 0.90.a

  So Where Do You Get Broad Knowledge?

  If knowledge is so important to reading, where do you get it? Many sources, of course: conversations, television, movies, the Internet. But research has shown that people with broad general knowledge—the type of knowledge that makes good general readers—gained most of that knowledge by reading. (This work was conducted before access to the Internet was widespread, but in Chapter 9, I discuss other research indicating that kids aren’t likely to gain much knowledge from most of their online activities.)

  Here’s how researchers tested this hypothesis. First, they needed a measure of how much people had read when they were growing up. They could have asked, “Were you a reader as a kid?” but that’s a pretty subjective judgment. Researchers figured that readers would be more likely to recognize the names of well-known authors, books, and magazines, so they gave people a list of author names and titles; some were real, and some they had made up to sound plausible. (Exhibit 1.1 shows a sample of magazine titles.) Subjects were asked to identify the real ones.

  Exhibit 1.1. Recognition Test of Magazine Titles

  Can you pick out the genuine magazine titles from the false ones? Answers are at the end of the chapter.

  Architecture Today Madame

  Better Homes and Gardens New Republic

  Car and Driver Scientific American

  Digital Sound Technology Digest

  Home and Yard Town and Country

  Their prediction was that people who did well on this test must have done a lot of reading, and so scores on the test would be positively correlated with knowing a lot of stuff. To get a measure of “knowing a lot of stuff,” they used a battery of tests measuring common knowledge of science, history, the arts, and so on.

  The results did show a substantial correlation; people who recognized a lot of author and magazine names had very broad cultural knowledge. But of course that relationship could be due to something else—it’s correlation, not causation. The most obvious candidate would be intelligence. Maybe smart people like to read as kids and smart people know a lot. So the researchers used another battery of measures to get at intelligence—metrics like high school grade point average and performance on a standard intelligence test. And indeed, intelligence was related to how much college students knew. Related, but not the whole story. Reading volume was still a big contributor. In other words, smart people (high IQ, good grades) who never read much as kids didn’t have a lot of general knowledge as adults. And not-so-smart people (low IQ, poor grades) who read a lot as kids did have a lot of general knowledge.

  So we’ve come full circle. We began by examining how sentences are connected to build larger meanings and quickly came to the idea that the reader must bring knowledge to this process to make up for the information that the writer omitted. We noted that sometimes the reader who lacks this knowledge can use the rest of the text and some reasoning power to make up for this missing knowledge; that’s what happened when I learned that sails can be made of Kevlar. Finally, we saw that this process is not only possible, but seems to be very important to reading, because adults with broad background knowledge (which helps them to be good readers) got that background knowledge by reading. You need knowledge to read, and reading gives you knowledge.

  So now we have our second clue about how to help children become good readers. They need a broad foundation of knowledge of words and the world.

  Motivation

  A boy might be motivated to read Looking for Alaska to impress a girl or because it was assigned in school. It seems self-evident that these are not the sort of motivators we’re after because they’re temporary. We want our kids to read because they have a positive attitude toward reading, because they find the activity itself rewarding. Unfortunately, although kids like reading (both at home and at school) in the early grades, their opinions become more and more negative as they get older. By high school, the average kid is at best indifferent to reading. What can be done to change that?

  Attitudes toward Reading

  Before thinking about how to change reading mind-sets, we need to know what type of attitude we’re dealing with. Some attitudes are the product of a logical analysis, at least, as logical as we can make them. I recently bought a dishwasher, and my attitudes toward dishwasher brands (I like Kenmore, I don’t like Whirlpool, and I think Bosch is overrated) are a product of research on repair records, efficiency, and so on. My opinions are pretty cold and pretty rational.

  We like to think that most of our attitudes are rational, that our opinions are the product of fact gathering and logical analysis. But we have attitudes about things where analysis is impossible, or at least much less likely. Why do you prefer Coke to Pepsi, or Old Spice to Brut? No one says, “I’ve looked into the matter, and research shows that Old Spice makes a man more attractive to women and tends to make other men submissive.” You use Old Spice because you like the way it smells, and, perhaps equally important, you like the way it makes you feel. These are emotional attitudes. Emotions also play heavily in attitudes to things that are intertwined with our values—issues like abortion or capital punishment. You could bring logical analysis to bear on such issues, and people like to think that they do. But the logical arguments are mostly post hoc and marshaled to justify the emotionally driven opinion.

  It’s a good bet—although there’s limited research on this question—that a child’s reading attitude is mostly emotional. It’s not a reasoned judgment of its value to her future career prospects. It’s based on wheth
er reading seems rewarding, excites her, interests her. So where do emotional attitudes come from?

  The Origins of Emotional Attitudes

  Here’s Oprah Winfrey on reading: “Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.” One source—probably the primary source—of positive reading attitudes is positive reading experiences. This phenomenon is no more complicated than understanding why someone has a positive attitude toward eggplant: you taste it and like it. Oprah tasted the mental journeys reading affords and loved them (figure 1.5).

  Figure 1.5. Twentieth-century writer Richard Wright. In his autobiography, Wright describes his first encounter with a fictional story. A young woman—a teacher who boarded at Wright’s grandmother’s house—learned that he was unfamiliar with children’s stories and so told him a pirate’s tale. He was bewitched: “My sense of life deepened, and the feel of things was different, somehow. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me.”

  Source: Carl Van Vechten photograph, retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004663766/

  We can elaborate a bit on this obvious relationship. Kids who like to read also tend to be strong readers as measured by standard reading tests. Again, this is not terribly surprising: we usually like what we’re good at, and vice versa. This situation yields a positive feedback loop (figure 1.6).

  Figure 1.6. Reading virtuous cycle.

  Source: © Daniel Willingham.

  If you’re a good reader, you’re more likely to enjoy a story because reading it doesn’t seem like work. That enjoyment means that you have a better attitude toward reading; that is, you believe that reading is a pleasurable, valuable thing to do. A better attitude means you read more often, and more reading makes you even better at reading: your decoding gets better and better, and all that reading you’re doing adds to your background knowledge. We would also predict the inverse to be true: if reading is difficult, you won’t enjoy it; you’ll have a negative attitude toward the activity, and you’ll avoid it when possible, meaning that you’ll fall still further behind your peers. This cycle has been called “the Matthew effect” from the biblical verse, “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” (Matthew, 25:29). More succinctly, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

  Reading Self-Concept

  As you probably know, Twitter is a website that allows users to broadcast very short messages. Users are also invited to compose a brief profile—a self-description that anyone can view. The profile is limited to 160 characters, so users must be concise; to give you a sense of the need for brevity, the sentence you’re now reading is forty-nine characters too long. If you don’t have a Twitter account, consider for a moment how you might describe yourself in 160 characters. For economy, many people write a series of self-descriptive phrases (figure 1.7). Twitter profiles are not a bad way of thinking about our self-concept. It’s a cluster of generalizations about how we tend to act (introvert, activist) and roles we fill (professor, father).

  Figure 1.7. Twitter bios as statements of self-concept. When we’re forced to be concise, our self-descriptions often refer to roles we play and personality descriptions. See if you can match the Twitter biography (left) with the writer (right).

  Source: Twitter profile text obtained from Twitter.com, September 8, 2014.

  Here we’re interested in one narrow aspect of the self: how you see yourself when it comes to reading. Your reading self-concept is probably related to your attitude toward reading, but the two are not synonymous. You might think that reading is useful (and so your attitude is positive) and also see yourself as quite competent as a reader. But you don’t see it as an important part of who you are. For that reason, I think that reading self-concept is more important than reading attitudes. The purpose of this book is not to help you raise a child who has a positive attitude toward reading but never reads.

  If “reader” is part of your self-concept, it will occur to you as a viable activity more often. “What will I do on that two-hour train trip? I could bring my iPod. Oh, I should bring a book too.” And of course, the more you read, the more “reader” becomes cemented as part of your self-concept. What I do and what I think of myself reinforce one another (figure 1.8). Conversely, children who do not have “reader” as part of their self-concept are not likely to think of it as an option. They may be neutral or even mildly positive in their attitudes toward reading but do not see it as “one of the things I do.” Analogously, I don’t make a conscious decision not to attend renaissance fairs. It’s not that I don’t like them. It never even occurs to me to think about whether I might enjoy going (figure 1.8).

  Figure 1.8. Reading virtuous cycle with self-concept added. Reading self-concept is both built by and a contributor to positive reading attitudes and the act of reading.

  Source: © Daniel Willingham.

  Why does one four-year-old have a developing sense of herself as a reader and another not? It seems obvious that I would think of myself as a reader if I read a lot. That’s true, and it’s especially true if I perceive that I read more than other people do; it’s something that separates me from my peers. Very young children don’t engage in such extensive comparisons; that’s for older kids. Still, you want your child to read at an early age (even if “reading” means looking at pictures) in order to build a reading self-concept.

  Looking over this section on reading motivation, it may seem that we’ve made little progress. I identified two important factors: positive reading attitudes and a sense of oneself as a reader. But the genesis of each is predicated on your child’s doing some reading, and that’s the problem we’re trying to solve. If your child were doing a lot of reading, we wouldn’t be concerned about his attitude or self-concept. That conundrum harkens back to our discussion of reading comprehension in which I said that the way to improve reading comprehension is to improve the child’s background knowledge, and the way to improve background knowledge is to read. So the secret to raising kids who read is to have reading kids?

  In part, yes. And maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that reading is the best way to support good decoding, comprehension, and motivation. Still, we need a way out of that revolving door, and in the chapters that follow I’ll suggest two tactics. First, we examine ways other than reading that support decoding, comprehension, and motivation. Second, we look at ways to get your child reading even if his attitudes are not that positive and his reading self-concept is weak. The hope is that kick-starting reading will generate a positive feedback cycle.

  Let’s get started.

  Answers to exhibit 1.1: The actual titles are: Better Homes and Gardens, Car and Driver, New Republic, Scientific American, and Town and Country.

  Notes

  “a phenomenon also observed in languages other than English”: Treiman and Kessler (2003); Treiman, Kessler, and Pollo (2006); Treiman, Levin, and Kessler (2012).

  “light rhymers”: Vaughn (1902).

  “Many words that break pronunciation rules are very common.”: Ziegler, Stone, and Jacobs (1997).

  “just not sure where words begin and end”: Holden and MacGinitie (1972).

  “Children who have trouble learning to read often have difficulty hearing individual speech sounds.”: Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, and Hulme (2012).

  “children who more or less teach themselves to read turn out to hear them easily”: Backman (1983).

  “you see it across languages”: Anthony and Francis (2005); Hu and Catts (1998).

  “Kintsch offered this example”: Kintsch (2012).

  “Too much of it makes reading slow and difficult.”: Foertsch and Gernsbacher (1994).

  “readers need to know about 98 percent of the words”: Carver (1994); Schmitt, Jiang, and Grabe (2011).

  “The researchers found robust correlations between s
cores on the reading test and scores on the various cultural literacy tests.”: Cunningham and Stanovich (1991, 1997); Stanovich and Cunningham (1993); Stanovich, Cunningham, and West (1995); see also Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988).

  “their opinions become more and more negative as they get older”: Eccles, Wigfield, Harold, Blumenfeld, and Url (1993); Jacobs, Lanza, Osgood, Eccles, and Wigfield (2002); Kush and Watkins (1996); McKenna, Conradi, and Meyer (2012); McKenna, Kear, and Ellsworth (1995).

  “we have attitudes about things where analysis is impossible”: For a review of the three types of attitudes, see Aronson, Wilson, and Akert (2012).

  “the logical arguments are mostly post hoc and marshaled to justify the emotional opinion”: For a review of this literature, see Haidt (2012).

  “This situation yields a positive feedback loop.”: Mol and Bus (2011).

  “your decoding gets better and better, and all that reading you’re doing adds to your background knowledge”: The best evidence for this assertion comes from studies that employ structural equation models (e.g., Clark & DeZoysa, 2011). For data that examine the relationship across countries, see Lee (2014).

  “The Matthew effect”: Stanovich (1986).

  “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”: Morgan and Fuchs (2007).

  “if ‘reader’ is part of your self-concept”: For more on reading self-identity, see Hall (2012).

  “What I do and what I think of myself reinforce one another”: Retelsdorf, Köller, and Möller (2014).