This is a must read post from Nathaniel Hardt on reading:
Three years ago I had a class in which we did SSR (Sustained Silent Reading*) using Blaine’s readers. Students started with Pobre Ana and progressed at their own rate through the books. One student’s experience is noteworthy. In the fall, she regularly groaned when I told them to get their novelas. She was not unkind, just being honest, and requested we do something more to her liking.
In the spring, I started to realize that she wasn’t groaning about it. Eventually, she would come into class and ask, “Are we going to read today?” I said, “I thought you didn’t like to read.” She said, “I didn’t like to read before, but I do now.”
It was not just that she did not like to read Blaine’s readers or even Spanish. She did not like to read period. She did not like to read in her spare time or in any of here other classes. But in Spanish class she learned to read due to the type of classes we try to do, despite my haphazard, stay below the radar attempts at TPRS and CI. In addition to the CI they were getting when not reading, one benefit of Blaine’s books is that they are graded and allow for students to grow into the more challenging stories.
I have her younger sister this year. We started doing a class reading of Carl Didn’t Want to Go to Mexico (a past tense rewriting of Carl Doesn’t Want to Go to Mexico). The younger sister does not like reading Carl. In fact she does not like reading at all. Where have I seen this pattern before. They don’t just look similar. Apparently there are entire families of non-readers out there who are doing well in schooling. Will the younger sister get drawn into the magic of reading? I am less perturbed by her premature confessions of being a non-reader.
Repeating the SSR approach last year, I witnessed similar experiences. Talking with two students at the end of the year last year, I learned how their reading experiences changed from the beginning of one year (two years ago) to the end of the following year (last year). When they first started reading on their own it was a more tedious process. They read the words in Spanish and then consciously translated them in English to ascertain the meaning. By the end of their second year of reading they were reading without translating, deriving meaning directly from Spanish.
*I had done Free Voluntary Reading in previous years, but this was not free or voluntary since they read through the series in the sequence which Blaine wrote them.