[etni] Stephen Krashen on reading fiction

From: Bari Nirenberg <bnirenberg@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Etni <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2012 00:06:06 +0300
The following is from Stephen Krashen's Facebook page. There was no option
to share, so I had to copy/paste (complete with references).

Those who read more (fiction), know more.
Stephen Krashen
May 20, 2012

The recent insistence that English Language Arts standards include more
nonfiction and less fiction is based on the assumption that nonfiction
reading will better prepare students for the rigors of the real world.
There are no studies I know of that compare fiction and nonfiction reading
in terms of knowledge development, but a number of studies done by
Stanovich and his colleagues show that those who read more fiction know
more about a variety of subjects.

?Reading? in these studies included a great deal of fiction reading.
Stanovich and his colleagues used the Author Recognition Test (ART) in
several of these studies, a measure in which subjects indicated which
authors? names they recognized (West and Stanovich, 1991; Stanovich and
Cunningham, 1992, 1993; West, Stanovich and Mitchell, 1993). The ART was
?dominated by ?popular authors? as opposed to ?highbrow? writers who would
be known by only the most academically inclined readers? (Stanovich and
Cunningham, 1993, p. 213). Although the ART included different genres, most
of the authors were fiction writers (e.g. 36 out of 40 in Stanovich and
Cunningham, 1993), and subjects clearly did better recognizing the names of
fiction writers (in Stanovich and Cunningham, 1993, the best-recognized
non-fiction author was recognized by only 5.2% of the subjects). Data from
Ravitch and Finn (1987) also suggests that a great deal of reported reading
is fiction: About 44% of those who were readers said they preferred to read
fiction, and about 29% said they read both fiction and nonfiction, a total
of 73% (figures derived from p. 163).

Stanovich and Cunningham (1992) confirmed that college students who
reported reading more did better on a test of history (from Ravitch and
Finn, 1987), and this relationship held even when nonverbal ability factors
were controlled.

Those who read more also do better on various measures of cultural
knowledge. West and Stanovich created a cultural literacy test, a checklist
of 30 names of artists, entertainers, explorers, philosophers, and
scientists. Those who had more print exposure did better on this test, even
when other factors, such as SAT scores (West and Stanovich, 1991), age,
education, exposure to television (West, Stanovich and Mitchell, 1993), and
nonverbal abilities (Stanovich, West, and Harrison, 1995) were controlled.
Stanovich and Cunningham (1993) found similar results for a test of
?practical knowledge,? and a test of science and social studies.

Ravitch and Finn (1987) reported that those who reported reading more did
better on a test of literature, but this result is probably irrelevant for
many fans of the English Language Arts Common Core standards.

References

Ravitch, D., and C. Finn. 1987. What do our 17-year-olds know? New York:
Harper and Row.

Stanovich, K., and A. Cunningham. 1992. Studying the consequences of
literacy within a literate society: the cognitive correlates of print
exposure. Memory and Cognition, 20(1): 51-68.

Stanovich, K. and A. Cunningham. 1993. Where does knowledge come from?
Specific associations between print exposure and information acquisition.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(2): 211-229.

Stanovich, K., R. West, R., and M. Harrison. 1995. Knowledge growth and
maintenance across the life span: The role of print exposure. Developmental
Psychology, 31(5): 811-826.

West, R., and K. Stanovich. 1991. The incidental acquisition of information
from reading. Psychological Science 2: 325-330.

West, R., K. Stanovich, and H. Mitchell. 1993. Reading in the real world
and its correlates. Reading Research Quarterly 28: 35-50.



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[etni] Stephen Krashen on reading fiction

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