September/October 1999

Beyond the Reading Wars: How to Raise a Generation of Readers
Featuring Jeanne Chall, Jim Trelease, and John Merrow

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on April 8, 1999. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Introduction by John Merrow
Discussion with Jeanne Chall and Jim Trelease
Questions from the Audience
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Introduction

John Merrow: If there is a moment of truth in public education, the time that sets the tone for nearly everything else to follow, it’s first grade. That’s when many children learn to read. Children who master the skill are more likely to do well in later grades and in later life. They’re more likely to live longer, make more money, and have more satisfying lives. Those who struggle with reading are more likely to be held back, more likely to be classified learning disabled, more likely to need long term remedial help, more likely to drop out, more likely to end up in prison. Given the importance of a good start in reading, it is not a good sign that 40% of all United States fourth graders score below basic on national tests. We can do better. Here to tell us how are two experts in the field of reading.

Jeanne Chall: Well, the basic knowledge was known for the longest time. Even the Greeks knew what kind of combination you needed in teaching reading. Thirty years ago, I said the research showed that you do need phonics and then you do need to read, you see. So you've got a combination here. If you don’t read, then you don't use the skills. It's like the learning all the forms of a skill but you're not practicing it. So reading is the practice of it. It's not just a matter of phonics and literature. Because when you look at the first readers that children use in the United States, when they got away from the English ones, they start with phonics and with letters and then with little words that follow phonetic principals, then very soon they go into reading sentences and stories. So in a sense, the basic things have been known for the longest time. And the thing that was known is that you need to understand the relationship between the alphabet, the letters, and the sounds.

Merrow: But if we'd known for so long, why is the great reading war continuing? Let me postulate that it's a pendulum. We just go back and forth.

Chall: No, it's not a pendulum. Phonics says that you've got to pay attention to, you've got to learn from an adult, although some brilliant and unusual children do discover the whole thing all by themselves.

Merrow: Reading, though, is not a natural act.

Chall: Well most children don't discover it. It took the people who developed the alphabets and the sounds-- somebody sat there and said, "buh, buh, mm, mm" and he talked and he said, "You know, there are just a certain number of these sounds. And then they converted them into letters, so that the Greeks did it, the Hebrews did it, the Romans had to-- See, to learn to read, reading is not language. We have language. All human beings have language. But not all human beings have a writing system and an alphabet.

Now, half of the world still doesn't have an alphabet although they have converted. The Chinese have converted and the Japanese have sort of developed part. Somebody was very, very clever, converted what we said into sounds and into letters so that the letters don’t stand for anything except for the sounds. And the kids need to learn that.

Merrow: But why do we keep fighting in this country between whole language and phonics? It’s not a pendulum, so I’m guessing it’s an economic argument here.

Chall: No. I know many of my friends say it’s a political thing. The ones who like the alphabet are right wingers. Republicans. Can you imagine? At any rate, the others, somebody then discovered, way back, that you really don’t need to know all the letters, you could remember the words. And that went with a different conception of children and child development. And that it is more fun, you don’t have to drill. Because you do drill. You have to in a way. We don’t call it drill now, we call it practice.

Merrow: And those fun people are the Democrats? The ones who don't do any work are the Democrats.

Chall: Yes. The liberals.

Jim Trelease: I’m completely in agreement with Jeanne, except I see it from a different perspective. We are within a stone's throw of Fenway Park right now. I see the phonics and the basic instruction in reading and the alphabet as the equivalent of what a father would do with a son or a daughter if you wanted them to be a Red Sox fan. You certainly would instruct them in how to hold the ball and throw the ball and catch the ball and hold the bat, and first base, second base, third base-- the basics of baseball. But if you really wanted them to be a fan, then you would do the other things. That is, you would roll the ball across the rug to him when he's an infant, and then take him to the T-ball games when he's 4 years old and then to the school games when he's a little bit older. And then you take him to Fenway and you let him do things at Fenway you're not allowed to do at home: yell at grownups down on the field. And you eat in proportions you aren’t allowed to eat. And you listen to games on the radio and you watch games on TV and you hear dad or mom talking about that awful bullpen, "They've got to do something about that bullpen!" All that creates a baseball fan.

In the same way with reading, you teach the sounds, you teach the letters, you teach the little words, but you go beyond that and you read to the child and you read with the child and you let the child see and hear you reading and arguing about what you are reading. "Honey, listen to this letter in the Boston Globe. I’m telling you there is some village in this country looking for its idiot and he just wrote this letter right here in the Boston Globe." All of those things create a lifetime reader. Baseball fans come back to baseball because they have favorite players and favorite teams. Readers have favorite stories and favorite authors. Nobody has a favorite sound. [laughter]. Nobody has favorite endings and blendings

Chall: I hate to disagree with you. They do.

Trelease: They are important, but that is not what motivates you. And you have to have both the mechanics and motivations.

Chall: If you could have your choice, this would be just fine. But you have to realize that in this country there are more and more parents who cannot do what you are saying.

Merrow: What do you say to a parent who says, "I don't have enough time to read to my kids."

Trelease: The time thing, that's the biggest joke in America. How many hours did you get yesterday? 24. Did anyone in this audience get less than 24 hours yesterday? Anyone get more than 24? So you have different colors and different creeds and different size families and different work backgrounds, and what have you, and yet everybody gets 24 hours. And the people who read to their children yesterday got 24 hours, and strange, the people who didn’t read to their kids yesterday got the same number of hours. Except the ones who didn’t read to their kids yesterday somehow found the time to play a lottery ticket, to listen to their favorite ball team win or lose, talk to their best friend for 35 minutes on the telephone about nothing. They found time to watch their favorite show, but they didn't have time to read to their kids. Basically it comes down to priorities. What one person values, another person doesn’t.

Merrow: How important to you, Jeanne, is reading aloud to your children?

Chall: It’s important, but it’s not the central thing. If children haven’t learned to read, I don’t think it’s because the parents don’t read to them.

Trelease: I agree with that. I would say that there is a deeper reason for kids being turned off. Because, as Jeanne said, there are people who achieve great success without having been read to.

Chall: And then there are parents that speak a different language than their children. And we are having a bigger kind of immigration than we had in the 1920s. And those people, many of my colleagues at Harvard, came from homes where English was not spoken. I can understand what you are doing is very important, but you have to realize that there are all these parents. My point is that the school must adjust to all of these things and know that some parents do like to do other things and they cannot read to their children.

Merrow: 15 minutes a day, Jeanne? I’m going to take Jim’s side on this. 15 minutes a day?

Chall: Yes, but some people are illiterate.

Trelease: Okay, I’ll take that. But nobody is born with a library card in their hand. How do you get from being the child of these immigrant parents to the library? There has to be an intermediary and, Jeanne, are you suggesting it's the classroom teacher?

Chall: It’s the school; it’s the whole business of education. And this is again why we had the current debate. The current debate was that reading a very natural thing. You just have to read to the child and the child will pick up the book and read to himself. Well, it doesn’t work that way. Now this is kind of an easy thing, you see, and the teachers saw it. I sat in classrooms and I said, "How come these children are not reading?’" First and second grade under a whole language program. "Oh, well they're sevens." I’m supposed to know that sevens don’t like to read.

But when you have this different population, then you have to work with it and. The school must see to it that the child learns to read with whole language. If the child didn’t read the middle-class parents–the ones with money-- buy a tutor for the child. But the poorer ones don’t. They just fall farther and farther behind.

Merrow: That’s a question of the economic argument. I mean, somebody is making a lot of money on our schools' failure to teach children to read.

Chall: Definitely. My God, I don’t want to mention names. There are schools that teach children that fail from the schools. They are making millions a year.

Trelease: These are commercial schools located in strip malls around the country and the parent would take the child to that location at 3:00 in the afternoon or 6:00 p.m. and they are tutored in the very subject that the child had in school at 9:30 this morning.

Merrow: And you are saying that he didn't learn in school because the teachers are using a whole language method or teachers don’t know how to teach reading? What are you saying?

Chall: You have to have good methods. You have to be sure that the children learn in school.

Merrow: Are teachers trained to teach reading? Well trained?

Chall: If they aren’t, they should be. Most are not. You see, when you go through these wars, to be on a certain side isn’t very good. And the teachers are pressured into doing certain things, even though they know it is wrong. The whole school moves over to a way and some of the teachers know that the children aren’t learning, but they have to do it.

Merrow: I spent a year documenting and watching a first-grade class with two different teachers. And it was clear that one teacher used phonics and whole language together and was not only teaching the kids to decode but also learned to like reading.

Chall: Because they were learning.

Merrow: And the other teacher was just out of teacher training and was trained in whole language and the kids were memorizing.

Chall: They didn’t know what to do.

Merrow: But they thought they were. So it was like a double deception. They were being told they were reading.

Trelease: There is something else here though. Jeanne has said several times during the course of this conversation that has been glossed over that "they have to read."

Chall: Yes, but they have to know how to read before they can read.

Trelease: But with the instruction, and even at 7, we still have to give them the time in which to read.

Merrow: Do schools give children time to read?

Trelease: I’ve done a survey for the last five years interviewing 250 teachers a day, one week in the spring, one week in the fall, and one week in the summer. So I've got several thousand teachers across the United States that I surveyed and among the five questions I ask them is "Does your school have any form of sustained silent reading?" SSR, which is just 10 or 15 minutes a day where children read in an unstructured way, read for pleasure, be it a magazine, a newspaper, or book. Does your school have anything like that? Eighty percent of schools do not have any time set aside for pleasure reading. The sad thing is that schools will say, "Children should read. Absolutely they should read. In order to get better at reading, you have to read. But if they are going to read for pleasure, they should do it outside school. Inside school you should read for pain."

Stop and think about it. What do we ask children to read in school? We ask them to read things that no one in their right mind would ever read unless they were being paid to read. That is a textbook. Textbooks are so badly written. Could you go to the library and borrow a textbook? No. Could you go across the street to the bookstore and buy a textbook? No, because they wouldn’t stock them because no one would buy them.

We want the kids to get excited about this stuff. Could you walk along the beach in the summer and see a teacher reading a history textbook? No. You only read a history textbook if you're paid to read it or forced to read it.

Merrow: So schools don’t do it because there is this attitude that schools are not supposed to be fun?

Trelease: That’s the reason they wiped out kindergarten in Atlanta. The kids were having too much fun. They are eliminating recess. They can’t be learning anything on the playground if they are having fun.

Merrow: Contrast that with Japanese schools where the kids will have breaks every hour. I remember when my children were in elementary school, I was in the PTA, and we pushed for sustained silent reading and the principal instituted it. It was going to be 20 minutes during the day when everybody would read. And I was curious, and I was a reporter, so I didn’t have to go to work and I could walk around and stuff. I went around and almost every classroom the kids were reading, but the teacher was keeping track of attendance or catching up, writing letters. I mean, modeling seems like it would be critical.

Trelease: The two places where SSR fails are when the teacher is not modeling, when she is policing or doing lesson plans, and two, if there is not broad enough cross-section of reading material to accommodate the variety of interest that you would have in that classroom. We’re only talking 10 minutes per day. But how about 10 minutes per day times five days a week times an entire year!

I know of a principal, Thomas P. O'Neil, who walked into a junior high in the Boston Public Schools. The school was ranked 22 in the reading scores of the 22 junior highs. His first year he instituted SSR, 10 minutes. Secretaries had the phones off the hook, custodians read, security guards read, every teacher, every administrator was assigned to a class.

But there were complaints. I don’t want to do this. I need the time to clean up. The first people to complain were the coaches. Now, that was the first year. The second year he instituted reading aloud. Just 10 minutes per day every teacher, every administrator assigned to a class to read to the class. Within four years, he took that school, same faculty, same children coming from the most endangered homes in the entire Boston school district, took them from number 22 to number 1. What he did was change attitudes from negative to positive. Now I would hope and pray that the teachers were also doing the basics, were still instructing in the class. But he stole 20 precious minutes a day from the curriculum and devoted it to motivation, because motivation is three-quarters of the battle.

Merrow: What do you think about that Jeanne?

Chall: I wish it were true. I don’t know. Motivation is very important, but you need instruction.

Trelease: Of course! But if you only have instruction and you don’t have motivation, any probation officer or any therapist would tell you, it’s not going to work. I can tell you how to break the addiction but, if you don’t want to break that addiction, you’re not going to make it. And the same works with this.

Merrow: Is there a danger, Jeanne, that the schools will get so focused on the decoding stuff that they’ll forget the larger purpose?

Chall: Certainly. My God, of course. That is exactly what has happened over the last 100 years. It’s not a–‘Don't take back the thing.’ I've recently analyzed it and it is not a pendulum. What you find is that to release this kind of view, this strong motivation, the interest in books, having books, what is now called whole language. It used to be called by different names. It doesn’t matter what the name is. Individualized reading was one of the names, and so on. They started it around the 1920s with progressive education. And this kept on until about the 1960s, 1950s really, when Rudolf Flesch really blew up the whole field and said that the children were not learning enough phonics. After I wrote Learning to Read: The Great Debate, which showed that phonics was needed, some of the publishers did change their books. More phonics was taught, but before you knew it, before the 10 years were over, whole language came in again with reading to children. "It’s like language, it’s natural." All of these terms you find going way back nearly 100 years ago, they come back again. But the whole trend has been very phonics or skills and it doesn’t exist only for reading. You also find it in math and different kinds of concepts and social studies and science.

Merrow: So it’s not a pendulum, it’s a downward spiral. We're going down.

Chall: It’s a trend; it’s a development. And every so often there is a blip. How long is it going to last now? We are going more into phonics now.

Merrow: You made reference to older books. Is the vocabulary in those books more difficult than the vocabulary today?

Chall: Of course it is.

Trelease: Oh, absolutely.

Merrow: So our expectations of our children are lower today than they were 50 years ago, 100 years ago?

Trelease: Yes, but you wouldn’t want to go comparing the dropout rate for American schools in the year that I was born. In 1941 it was 76%. Today's dropout rate is between 11 and 12%.

Chall: In '41 they were easy already. I’m serious because I have done studies of textbooks over the years and the readability level of them, and it has gone down.

Merrow: In the 1980s the state of Virginia stopped using the story, "The Tortoise and the Hare," in the third grade or fourth grade because those two words were too tough.

Trelease: We continue to insult our children. I think that Jeanne and I disagree on some things, but we agree on many things and one of the things I think we agree on very strongly is that we have insulted our children’s minds so greatly, certainly over the last 25 years. People shouldn’t still be reading to a 6 and 7 year old, Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop or Green Eggs and Ham. Dr. Seuss didn’t write those books to be read to 6-year-olds, he wrote them to be read by 6-year-olds, and here is this parent still reading a 50-word book to a kid who has a 6,000 word working vocabulary.

Chall: This brings up a very important point if we are going to improve what schools do and to see the relationship between schools and publishers and books. The schools don't write their own books. They have to buy the books. And the books have gotten easier, and I did a study and others have found the same thing, that when the difficulty of the books goes down--the language goes down-- then the scores go down. Children need the challenge. They don’t learn enough. We put so much on the phonics and we have not gotten to what reading really is later. Reading later is language. It's words. It’s terribly important that a child learns words, and not only the words that are familiar to him, but also words that are not familiar, abstract words.

Merrow: I think that is why Jim argues for reading aloud to your children when they are very young because the vocabulary just expands and expands.

Chall: Well it’s important, but I hate to disagree with you.

Trelease: You’re not really disagreeing with me because you think I’m saying that's the only thing a parent should do. And I’m not saying that at all. It should be one of many things that they do with that child that enhances the child’s reading.

Audience: I’m Catherine Snow from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I wanted to shift Jeanne's and Jim’s attention to the preschool period, because it seems to me that it sounds like you are disagreeing. I know you don’t think you are disagreeing all the time, but it does sound like you’re disagreeing. And I think part of the apparent disagreement has to do with the focus in Jim’s case on the preschool period and in Jeanne’s case on early reading instruction. So, I would like to ask Jim what he thinks should change between the treatment available to the educational or parental experiences provided to preschoolers and primary school kids. And Jeanne, what do you think are the most important kinds of experiences they should have, before children get into school?

Trelease: In 1991, the biggest international reading test was given. 210,000 fourth graders and ninth graders were tested. 32 countries. Finland finished first among the fourth graders and first among the ninth graders. The United States finished second among the fourth graders and we were eighth, I think, among the ninth graders.

Finland is a wonderful example of what we could and should be doing here. They are not allowed by the education laws of the country to formally instruct children how to read until 7 years of age. They give us a two-year head start. We start when they are 5. So they spot our kids a two-year advantage and then they are tested at 9, our kids are tested at 9, and they beat our kids. Now you have to wonder, is there a genetic difference between these Finnish children and these American kids? No, there is no genetic difference. But the children in Finland are ready, socially, emotionally ready at 7 to be instructed, where too many of our 5-year-olds are so busy focusing on abstract concepts and being taught to read before they are intellectually or emotionally or even physically ready to learn at 5.

Merrow: So, your answer to Catherine Snow’s question is relax on the drill?

Trelease: Lighten up on those early years, especially in the preschool years, and surround those children in a sea of print. Let them hear stories, let them feel stories, let them play with books, let them attempt to read books and become visually literate before they become print literate. So you look at the pictures of the whale and you read that story to the child and then let those children touch those books and play with those books. You can even have SSL, Sustained Silent Looking, for a couple of minutes every day for that child.

I have a 3-1/2-year-old grandson. Beginning around 2 or 2-1/2 he was going to bed every night with seven books read to him. The average takes five minutes to read, so he’s getting 35 minutes of stories being read to him. So, now at 3-1/2 he’s into short novels being read to him. He’s going to get to kindergarten and have an attention span that’s going to be wonderful. He’s not going to have a problem paying attention to what the teacher is saying, nor understanding the words she is using because he has been immersed in a sea of print and language.

Chall: I think what the young ones need before they go to school is language and to do some thinking, some understanding of what is going on. They should be read to, but I already said that I don’t think that it is absolutely essential. And it would be nice if somebody was there to help them learn the letters and to get them interested in letters in a playful way before they would start school at 6.

Now back up to Jim, I don’t know if you are aware of the fact that during the 1940’s and 1950’s and so on, some of your outstanding private schools, sort of progressive private schools in New York like the little red school house and schools like that, delayed reading until the child was 8.

Trelease: And what were the results of that?

Chall: I got many of them to tutor. I didn’t do a study and I don’t take these things lightly. But there were some very brilliant children who didn’t pick it up.

Trelease: Maybe there is no hard and fast rule. Maybe the finish rule is too ridged. Some kids are, in fact, ready much earlier.

Chall: Reading by what the child can do and then really teaching them. It was accepted that each child was different and you give to each child, but when it worked its way out, the teachers didn’t have time. In the fourth grade, they didn't have time to teach a child who was still on a first or second grade level. What you need is the money and the people who can take those who are doing poorly and work with them.

Audience: My name is Donald Kennedy and I’m superintendent of schools in Maynard, Massachusetts. All over America there are going to be a lot of teachers retiring in the next few years and I and other superintendents are going to be hiring many, many new ones. I’m here tonight with my daughter, who is a master's student. She is training to become a first grade teacher. She was an English Lit major as an undergraduate, and I’d like to know from Jim and Dr. Chall what they think that someone who is training to become a first grade teacher should be learning about the teaching of reading.

Chall: You assume that this is a human being who knows children and can work with them and get them to work and so on. Now if it is specifically for reading, there are things that a first grade teacher should know. And that is the whole business of what's called phonics or teaching the alphabetic principal, if you want to get away with phonics. Phonics is not a very nice word, so everybody has invented things like phonemic awareness and so on. Anything to get away with phonics.

But they do have to know books for children and how to work with many children. One thing that is left out is the working-- you see. When you have, let's say, an individualized program, it falls down after a while because very few teachers can take all the things that are going on at the same time, and see that each child gets everything. So, this has to be planned out.

Merrow: That’s one reason teachers use all those worksheets-- they are going to go work with little Jeanne and little John and they say give the other kids worksheets. Jim says in his book, why don’t they let the kids read?

Chall: Yes they can, but, in the first grade, many of them cannot read by themselves.

Merrow: But they can do worksheets?

Chall: Yes they can. They can match a picture to a word. I’m not saying that that's good, but you have to keep each child working and that takes a lot. A lot of doing, a lot of knowing how to do it. And then you have to read to them. What's very important for a teacher is to know when the children are doing well and when they are not doing well, who is having difficulty and why they are having difficulty, so that you can help them and if you can’t, other people can.

That is one of the things that I have found that is very difficult. Teachers in the schools sometimes don’t want to say the child isn’t doing well, and I feel that they should start screaming earlier that they need help.

Trelease: I would ask you to be a professional. If you want to be treated like a professional, paid like a professional, like a doctor or a lawyer, then as a professional you have to read like a professional. You have to read Phi Delta Kappa and you have to read The Reading Teacher, Journal of Reading and Reading Research Quarterly. You have to act like a professional. And unfortunately, only 20% of reading teachers in the United States read professionally.

Merrow: And many teachers in the United States do not read for pleasure.

Trelease: Right, almost 50% of the faculty do not read. You cannot give to children a love of reading if you do not have it yourself. It’s just like you can’t give someone a cold if you don’t have a cold.

Chall: It’s interesting. I do agree with you on this, definitely.

Merrow: Let the world note that 40 minutes into the program they agreed. [laughter]

Chall: In the 1960s, there was a study-- I forget the author's name. One of the things they found that made a difference in the learning of children was the professionalism of the teaching.

Merrow: Just as an aside trip. If you look at other countries and the way schools are staffed, it’s really quite remarkable. In Belgium, of every 100 people who work in schools, 80 teach. In Japan, I believe the figure is 70. In the United States it’s 43 out of 100 are teachers.

Chall: What do the other people do?

Merrow: The others watch the 43. What we do in the United States is we hire people who don’t have a lot of training and pay them very little money. Then we hire more expensive people to watch them. Jim said, "Be a professional." To be a professional you have to pay professionals as well and trust them to do their job.

Trelease: I can always spot the great teacher in the grocery store. The really great teachers are never off. They never watch a clock. They're on 24 hours a day. They're always thinking how can I use this, how can I use that in my class? And you watch that great teacher in a grocery store and she is standing in front of a huge life-size cardboard cut out of the Jolly Green Giant and you can see the wheels turning, ‘how do I get this damn thing out of here and into my classroom without anybody noticing.’

Audience: I’m Rose Feinberg. I'm principal of the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. My question is directed to Dr. Chall in part, but Jim Trelease chime in. We are finding that many children are being labeled or diagnosed more as having learning disabilities if they are not able to read by the third grade. And I think that many of the statements about the need to read by third grade have put tremendous amount of pressure on children and on teachers. With the concern that are we not doing enough for children since the reading hasn’t clicked for them, can you address that?

Chall: This is a very, very big problem, you see. And I don’t know if we are going to solve it by saying that they have to do it. Let’s forget about all the rules and the laws and so on. If you have a child, if anybody here has a child who cannot read by the third grade-- now, they could read if they could read like the Dr. Seuss Hop on Pop. If they could read a first grade book, that isn't too great. A second grade book, that’s better. But if they can’t read at all by the third grade, it is very serious.

Now, I couldn’t make the diagnosis. You would have to find out why this is so. That child may have been in a school where he wasn’t taught. You see another thing that has happened is that the teachers are really very kind, very considerate, most of them. They are so considerate that a child sits there, doesn’t read, and they let him not read. So by the third grade it is very serious. Once they get to be in the fourth grade and they can hardly read, it’s getting very serious. That is if they are intelligent enough.

Audience: My name is Phil Murphy and I got my degree here at the Ed school. I’m not teaching first grade reading, but my question is how counterproductive do you think television and the web are to reading?

Chall: It’s having profound effects which we really don’t know. Hardly anyone is studying its effects on reading. A lot of people say from time to time that it does. You see, what it does is take away time. You see, when I was a little girl, I had time to read these books about pueblo Indians. Today I would be watching channel 2 [public television], which has marvelous shows.

Merrow: But even the good shows are bad? Work against reading?

Chall: Yes. I’ll tell you how it works against reading. One is time. It’s a thief of time. The second thing is the language. The child does not acquire a good, big vocabulary just by watching TV.

Merrow: I think Jim Trelease would say that it's also a thief of imagination, television.

Trelease: Definitely, because you don’t have to imagine anything while you're watching.

Merrow: So television really is the enemy. How do you handle it then? How about some advice for parents?

Trelease: I do 120 lectures a year with parents and teachers groups across the United States and I never do even one without addressing for ten minutes the subject of television and I say exactly what Jeanne said, that it eats your child’s time. I show them the chart that came out from Educational Testing Service in Princeton where they studied a million eighth graders and you saw how much time they spent watching 37 states and territories. And where they watch the most TV in eighth grade just happened to be Washington, D.C., and then where they watch the least TV, which is North Dakota.

And then I flip the chart and you see what the math scores are for Washington D.C. eighth graders and what they are for North Dakota and it is the complete opposite. Where they watch the most, they know the least. Where they watch the least, they know the most. The same thing was true for math, for science, writing, and for reading. The whole time a child is watching television, he is not drawing, not coloring, not painting, not building a plastic model, he’s not doing chores, he's not doing homework, he’s not talking to grandpa on the telephone. He’s not talking to a neighbor, he's not playing house, not losing friends, making up with friends. He’s doing nothing but vegetating in front of a plastic box. You cannot get smarter and develop completely as a human being sitting in front of a plastic box.

Merrow: Same for video games? Same for computers?

Trelease: Absolutely.

Chall: There is still one more factor in all this, it’s that every study that asked how much time children watch television, the children from the lowest socioeconomic families watch the most television and they have the lowest reading scores.

Trelease: Yes, this is a correlation not a cause, however if you stop to think about it, at the same time this is happening and the achievement gap in education between rich and poor is growing. Poor children at the 12th grade read on an 8th grade level. So you already have this. And if this happens, this is a very bad thing that will happen to this country if this continues.

Audience: Thank you for squeezing me in. My name is Beth Johnson and I’m a master's student here at the Ed school. I was teaching 4th grade in a public school before I came here and I’ve come to recognize 4th grade as kind of a transitional year where children are no longer learning how to read but learning from reading, or reading to learn. I just wanted a last word of wisdom before I go back into my fourth grade teaching position next year for how to balance that. Because it is important for children to get meaning from text and to learn from it. Yet, at the same time, it really is a big demand to give them the basic skills so that they can gain that meaning.

Chall: You made a very important observation. You see reading is not the same as you go through the grades. Fourth grade, I have found, is a cutting-off point. For some it's third, for some it's more. But then it becomes really language and vocabulary and ideas and so on, and thinking about what they read. Because when you read-- sometimes the simple books on a fourth grade level, an adult could read and learn from. You’re getting into something else.

Now if a child in your class is still on a primary level, that child needs help. The school should either train you to do it, and if you don’t have the time to do it, to have somebody, some teacher, work with the child on the phonics. Because that's not the thing most people do by the fourth grade. It should be finished, most of it finished then.

Merrow: Let’s sum up some do’s and don’ts for parents who are going to read aloud to their children or for teachers who are going to read aloud to their students.

Trelease: The one thing that parents say that shocked them the most of all the things that I say was what I say about the difference between the child’s listening level and reading level. They had never considered it, and strangely, the teachers say the same thing after a teacher inservice. "I had never considered the difference between where my class is listening and where they are reading at."

The difference for a 6-year-old is that he can sit down and watch one of the old "Cosby" shows and understand almost everything on the show. The parents sit there and understood the show, they laugh at the funny parts, and yet when I took the script of the "Cosby" show and I brought it to a reading specialist and they applied a Harris Jacobson Wide Range Readability formula to the text, the "Cosby" script came in at 3.7.

Now here is this child who is 6 or 7 years of age reading on let's say-- if he's a good reader, reading on a first grade level. But he is listening almost two to three grade levels above that. They can hear stories that are a whole lot more complicated and more interesting than anything they could read on their own. So they can read stories on their own, but the last thing you want a first grader to believe is what they are reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get. That’s why it is important to read to children–even children who can already read.

Merrow: You also write that it’s okay to make mistakes, too.

Trelease: Because when you make a mistake in the course of your reading, that says to the child, "Oh, you don’t have to be perfect in this." In The Read-Aloud Handbook, I recall a child who went to the teacher and remarked to the teacher that, "I thought that all of the reading had to be perfect but then I heard you when you were reading to us and sometimes you skipped a line, you skipped a word, you mispronounced the word, you went back over. It’s okay to be human."

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