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"Home Run Research" offers short columns that present new, anginal research in a digestible, easy-to-understand way, research that has implications for librarians and others interested in literacy development.
The question of how to encourage students to read more is still under investigation. We know that simply supplying access to books has a positive effect on students' reading habits, but is not always sufficient.'
In addition, there is evidence that read alouds encourage reading, and that teachers modeling reading encourages reading/ What about simply telling students to read? Does direct encouragement work? I present here dramatic evidence that, in one case, it did work, but urge caution about its use.
Tanesha: A Reluctant Reader
Tanesha is a native speaker of English, a sixth grader who read at the fourth-grade level at the time of this study. She was one of two hundred students participating in a special summer program I organized that allowed children to read for pleasure for two hours per day. Children could read whatever diey selected, and accountability was minimal: Students only had to fill out a simple form for each book they read with the name and title of the book.
Children in this program had previously had little access to books, but during the summer had access to a large quantity of paperback books, including the Goosebumps, Sweet Valley Kids, and Animorphs series, as well as such magazines as WWF (World Wrestling Federation), Teen, Seventeen, and Sports Illustrated for Kids-about twenty-five items per child.
I became interested in Tanesha's progress because of a particular incident that happened during the conferencing time. One Friday when Tanesha was in the library, I pulled her folder and conference log and asked her to read to me. She read one page from the Goosebumps book she was reading. She read it without difficulty and with a high level of accuracy. I asked her a few questions, and it was obvious that she had understood what she had read. When she finished reading the next page, I asked her what she was...