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Maya and Miguel, bilingual twins in a PBS show, share a book on a poster for the Get Caught Reading literacy campaign. Like the education system at large, the campaign stresses individualized silent reading. (Image courtesy of getcaughtreading.org)

Caught Reading

Kids are taking the "silent" out of Sustained Silent Reading—and making it "secret."

By April Girouard
LALA Reporter

In the world of elementary school curriculum plans, a scene plays out: the teacher announces that it's time for Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), the class settles down, and each student sticks his or her nose in a book for 20 soundless minutes.

At a UCLA conference on language and social interaction last month, Berkeley education professor Laura Sterponi challenged this widely accepted part of the school day. Sterponi's observations of second- and third-graders at a Westside elementary school convinced her that an effective reading period isn't and shouldn't be silent.

The National Reading Panel concurs that enforced silence is not always golden. The congressionally-appointed panel of experts, educators, and parents presented a 1999 report on learning methods, "Teaching Children to Read," that called the efficacy of SSR into question. They found no evidence that individually-based silent reading affected young pupils' comprehension or vocabulary.

Sterponi shows that this sort of reading takes place less often than teachers may believe, because covert operations are going on under that page-turning. Indeed, in her eyes the kids showed the cunning of lion cubs stalking a gazelle: "The two clandestine readers act with remarkable precision and no superfluous movement," she said at the conference, describing a child who subtly inches his book closer to a neighboring student in the library. Along with intervals between class activities, the half-hour set aside for locating later reading is an opportunity kids use to read together.

Sterponi said that teacher-enforced silence pushes the children to physically position themselves so they can initiate literary discussions without being caught. Many of them "read in the corners, under the desks, in secluded sites sometimes created by the children prior to their interactional activity." To facilitate sharing, they choose books with similar themes. The behavior suggests a discrepancy between how children are told to approach books and how they actually learn.

Date Posted: 3/13/2007