The Great Summer Reading Debate

Cross-posted from my blog on our faculty Ning. 

Christmas in July?  How about Summer Reading in November?  Why not!  I was given the assignment the last week of October – put together the Middle School Summer Reading Program for next year.  Sound reasonable?  I am, after all, the Middle School Language Arts Teacher.  I coordinated summer reading for the Middle School for the last six summers and I have the advantage of collaborating with a terrific team.  Last year, I proposed a school-wide (K-8) commitment to a spiraling summer reading agenda, initiating a discussion forum on our Ning with my blog post, “Does Summer Reading Matter?”  Ah, and, there’s the rub . . .

Here is an excerpt  . . .

Summer Reading Grades 6-8

Does Summer Reading Matter?

Yes!  Researchers call it the  “summer slide” or “summer effect” on student achievement: “The long summer vacation breaks the rhythm of instruction, leads to forgetting, and requires a significant amount of review when students return to school…” (Cooper 2003, 2). Studies have consistently reported that students who do not participate in summer enrichment and learning activities can, during the break, lose roughly 22 percent of the knowledge and skills they gained during the previous school year. The findings have further shown that children who read during their summer vacation retain more of what they have learned and are better prepared for their first day back to school.

1. Maintaining Performance: Reading just six books during the summer has the potential to keep a struggling reader from regressing.

2. Improving Performance: Summer reading can help improve literacy levels, giving children the opportunity to return to school in September with further advanced reading skills.

3. Learning Confidence: It makes sense that a child with good reading skills will have higher confidence to continue with reading activities, both at school and at home.

What Are the Objectives of Summer Reading?

1. To aid children in becoming  lifelong readers.
2. To provide the opportunity to expand and enrich each child’s reading repertoire.
3. To develop the habit of reading.
4. To challenge students to explore ideas outside their usual experiences.
5. To foster a love for reading.

MJGDS Middle School Summer Reading Program

All MJGDS Middle School students are expected to participate in a summer enrichment reading program comprised of required reading material and reading response activities with Jewish studies, social studies, and language arts components.

Photo credits: J. Enokson (Wylio)     Karin Dalziel (Wylio)

CHAI Reading:  To develop the habit of reading, and in keeping with Krashen’s injunction that “reading about things that matter to us is the cause of literature language development,” middle school students engage in individualized, independent reading throughout the school year.  The *objective is to read and review two (2) books per month, chai (18) for the year.  Books are of the students’ own choosing within a specified wide range of genres, writing styles, and reading levels.  Book reviews with CHAI-lights (reading response projects) are posted to student blogfolios.

*The goal to read Chai (18) books per school year, in addition to class novel studies and literature textbook selections, is optimum.  Time restraints, calendar changes, and the intensity of correlative activities are extenuating factors. Students are expected to read a minimum of 12 books, while encouraged to reach CHAI.

What Does the Research Say about the Benefits of Summer Reading?

In The Power of Reading, Stephen Krashen reviews research on reading going back over 100 years. He reports that in “study after study the research is consistent on one thing: when students are engaged in free voluntary reading…the benefits are profound.” He concludes that such students will “acquire a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical constructions, develop a good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect) spellers.” In addition, “…their reading comprehension will improve, and they will find difficult, academic-style texts more comprehensible. Their writing style will improve, and they will be better able to write prose in a style that is acceptable to schools, business, and the scientific community.” Perhaps most importantly, these benefits accrue to students no matter what reading material they select. The significant variable is their development of the habit of reading – that it becomes a natural rather than an alien activity for students to pick up and read a book, a magazine, a journal, etc. If this habit develops, there is a far greater likelihood that students will associate reading with pleasure rather than academic obligation.

Experts further attest that reading helps develop a child’s cognitive development, improves social abilities and academic performance, and aids in emotional development.

Academic Benefits of Reading

The MJGDS teaching staff for the upper grades has always maintained an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to academics.  Researchers and professional educators alike concur that well-developed reading skills are requisite for excelling in all other subjects. Year-round exposure to a variety of genres (fiction, nonfiction, folklore, poetry, drama) promotes reading comprehension and fluency, higher level thinking and lifelong learning.

Cognitive Benefits of Reading

A key cognitive benefit of reading literature is the development of reasoning skills.  According to a paper published in The Reading Teacher, characters in Newbery Medal-winning books . . . [confront] cognitive and/or moral dilemmas . . . [so they] must actively move from lower-level to higher-level reasoning over the course of the book. This process models the development of [a reader’s] reasoning skills in a natural and engaging way.

Social Benefits of Reading

Reading literature also aids in social development.  Characters in high-quality books often represent diverse backgrounds, including varying economic means, different races and ethnicities, and unique regions of the country or the world. Exposure to diversity can aid in the development of emotional sensitivity, such as empathy for others and tolerance for differences, thus moving beyond adolescent egocentrism. This change in focus benefits interactions with peers, teachers and parents.

Emotional Benefits of Reading

Quality literature naturally elicits a variety of strong emotions (e.g. rage, euphoria, heartache, fear, love, loss).  Reading offers opportunities to grapple with and process these emotions in a safe setting, without feeling overwhelmed, resulting in a coping mechanism to deal with future real-world situations.

In Conclusion…

The Mott Educational Foundation summarizes the [National] Department of Education’s focus on the development and launch of high quality summer programs that take advantage of time outside of school to help children learn, grow, and develop.

1. People who say they read more read better (Krashen 2004), therefore the primary purpose of the program is to encourage students to read more.
2. The program offers students choice because choice is an important element in reading engagement (Schraw et al. 1998).
3. Student projects accommodate multiple intelligences (Gardner 1993) and thinking styles (Sternberg 1997) as well as options for written work.
4. Because ” … results suggest that schools can encourage children to read more by also requiring them to complete a short writing activity based on their summer reading activities … .” and that “students who fulfilled teacher requirements by writing about their summer book … are predicted to read more books than their classmates who did not complete these activities,” (Kim 2004b, 185) reading responses include writing activities.
5. Reading response projects reflect activities students enjoy in their leisure time are grounded in reading response described as the aesthetic stance in transactional theory (Rosenblatt 1978).

Who knew that such a post would generate such impassioned responses?

“How many books are required for summer reading?”

“I agree that students should read during the summer but I think it should be about reading for pleasure.”

“I think summer reading should be voluntary and for pleasure.  As an adult, if I am made to read something it takes all of the pleasure out of the book.”

“I agree about reading should be for pleasure…in K it’s probably a little different…we really need to “encourage” the kids to read or many of them will actually forget how to read over the summer!!  You’re right, Deb…there should be accountability even in the younger grades. Included in our packet will be a reading log (similar to what we do monthly during the school year) so that the parents can write the names and authors of all the books the children read.”

“Personally, I feel that summer is a time for ALL to relax and regroup without a lot of homework.”

“My kids are required to read some fun and some boring stories from their textbooks. Let the summer be the time when they choose the books themselves and read at their own pace.”

“As an adult I love to read.  As a child I didn’t.  I don’t hide this fact from my students. I use myself as a model to instill the fact that a non-reader can easily become a reader AND enjoy it.  Summer reading is homework when we include an assignment.  As a child this is what caused me to dislike reading.  I hated having to ‘report back’ what I had read.”

“I think your statement in your comment below, ‘I have seen reluctant readers become avid readers, and I have seen one-genre-only readers come to love and demand variety in their reading’ is key. Avid readers will always read, but how do we motivate the reluctant reader, the child who really should read (more)? And, yes, summer reading should be all about exploring one’s interests.”

What do you think?  

Sources:

Anderson, R., P. Wilson, and L. Fielding. 1988. Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside of school. Reading Research Quarterly 23: 285-303.

Constantino, R., et al. 1997. Free voluntary reading as a predictor of TOEFL scores. Applied Language Learning 8: 111-18.

Cooper, H. 2003. Summer learning loss: The problem and some solutions. ERIC Digest, May 2003. ED475391, 1-7.

Cooper, H., et al. 1996. The effect of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and meta-analytic review, Review of Educational Research 66: 227-68.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1991. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: HarperPerennial, 117.

Friedman, Audrey A., and Cataldo, Christina A. “Characters at Crossroads: Reflective Decision Makers in Contemporary Newbery Books.” The Reading Teacher. 2002, 56: 102-112.

Heyns, B. 1978. Summer learning and the effects of schooling. New York: Academic Pr.

Ivey, Gay, and Broaddus, Karen. “Tailoring the Fit: Reading Instruction and Middle School Readers.” The Reading Teacher. 2000, 54: 68-78.

Kim, J. 2004a. Summer reading and the achievement gap. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 21.

Krashen, S. 2004. The power of reading: Insights from the research, 2nd ed. Englewood Colo.: Libraries Unlimited.

Studies by the National Summer Learning Association* (originally the National Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University)

*Anne McGill-Franzen and Richard Allington are education professors at the University of Florida. They can be reached via email at mcgillUFL@aol.com. This article was originally published in the May/June 2003 issue of Instructor.