Krashen – “Anything but Reading”

    In Stephen Krashen’s article Anything but Reading he gets right to his main point in the first sentence by stating, “I will begin with my conclusion.  Only one method of improving reading ability really works: engaging in a great deal of interesting (better yet, compelling) comprehensible reading.”  Krashen’s interesting and often comical article goes on to show that more reading instruction led to lower test scores.  He then illustrates educators using everything from chess to roller skating to try and improve students reading, but they aren’t promoting reading itself.  At the end of his article Krashen endorses “narrow reading” and students self-selecting their texts as ways to help students improve their reading.

            I think Krashen makes some very valid points in his article.  It is pretty obvious that for students to improve their reading abilities they should actually read more.  I like the idea of using “narrow reading” because I think I myself as a reader like to read the same familiar authors that are most comprehensible to me, so I would imagine this would also help novice readers.  I also think if teachers can find topics that are most interesting to students and assign them to read works on those topics they will be more motivated to read.  I also agree with Krashen in letting students self-select their own texts, but I think that the instructor would need to read the books first and then offer the students a selection to be able to access properly.  I think Krashens article is limited for post-secondary instructors because he looked at fourth graders while we are teaching college level readers.  I think this article would be more beneficial if he gave us practical examples of how we could implement sustained silent reading in our post-secondary reading classrooms.  I agree it is a good idea to have our students do more reading in class, but the question is how do we do that with institutional student learning outcomes and standardized tests requirements?  I think what we can do as teachers to facilitate our students in improving their reading ability is to not only give them a choice of what they read in class, but also provide them with topics that we think they will be interested in.  I also feel it is important to make sure the texts we require in our classes are at our students reading level.  I believe having discussions on readings in class where students can enter a conversation and hear different points of view, might encourage them to read more about topics they are interested in.  I would also like to incorporate book clubs into my post-secondary courses because I think the best way to engage students in reading is to have them talk about what they have read and explain what meaning they gleaned from it.  This will enable students to see other points of view and possibly catch elements of a reading they may have missed that their classmates got. As an avid reader myself I feel there is nothing better than having people to talk to about things I have read.