Letters

Forget the report. An expert insists young people are heavy readers

Last fall, a widely quoted report, "Reading at Risk," announced that reading was in a decline in the U.S., and the decline was especially serious among young people. In my letter in SLJ (November 2004), I argued that this "decline" was probably not real. Recent evidence confirms this and even suggests that teenagers in the U.S., as a group, are very heavy readers.

In January 2005, the Gallup organization asked 1,078 teenagers, ages 13 to 17, about the books they read for pleasure over the last six months: 82 percent said they had read at least one book.

Reading at Risk informed us only about book reading over a year, which should be more than reading over six months: In 2002, 57 percent of the public read at least one book during the last year, down from 61 percent in 1992 and 86 percent in 1985.

Current teenagers thus report more reading than the general public in 2002, in 1992, and even in 1946 (66 percent for the last six months, 71 percent for the last year). The 82 percent reported by teenagers for six months is probably higher than the 86 percent reported by the public for a full year in 1985. Also, teenagers in the U.S. report more reading than adults in Sweden, the best-read country in Europe: 72 percent of adults in Sweden said they had read at least one book during the last year.

The main focus of Reading at Risk was not general reading, but "literature." Today's teenagers are reading good books. The most popular include Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

These reports continue, however, to ignore the real problem: those who come from low-income families have little chance to read, because of the lack of books in the home, the community, and the school.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA

The review of Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin's A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children (AltaMira, 2005; Mar., p. 248) states that the companion volume, Through Indian Eyes, published in 1992, is out of print. It is available from Oyate, at www.oyate.org. Information on both titles can be found on the Web site.

The illustration for Sharon Joyner's article "Birds of a Feather" in the May issue was miscredited. The artist is Ken Orvidas.