Why we need silent reading

Perhaps you work at a school where silent reading is not taken seriously. I do. Now, I understand that it’s difficult to work a silent reading period into the standard middle-school day. I get it. But just because something is difficult to do doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try; it just means you have to try harder.

(Okay, I stole that from a motivational poster, but it’s true.)

Here are the numbers that argue in favor of incorporating SSR into the day.

1. Number of words the average adult knows
   You’ll hear a wide range of answers for this, some of which depend on one’s definition of “word,” but let’s be conservative and go with 40,000.
2. Number of words you can teach via vocabulary instruction
   Let’s assume 20 words in a vocab list. Let’s further assume that every student masters every single word on every list and stows them away in the ELA toolbox for later use. And finally, let’s assume that this happens every single week from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of high school. 20 x 36 x 13 = 9,360 words.

9,360 is a long way from 40,000, and we’re not even taking into account the fact that “studying” twenty words per week won’t give you enough meaningful encounters with each word to develop proficiency; nor the fact that nobody gets a 20-word vocab list every week from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of high school; nor the fact that, even if a student were to be exposed to all those words, nobody has one hundred percent retention of all the vocab words they are assigned in the course of thirteen years of schooling. In short, direct vocab instruction is not going to get kids up to that 40,000-word mark on its own.

That’s where silent reading comes in. A student who reads copiously and relatively thoughtfully at a reasonably-appropriate reading level—admittedly a lot of assumptions, but there are things you can do to help ensure that it takes place—will have a greater chance of encountering enough new words enough times to add them to their active vocabulary. It’s simple math.

Schools where silent reading is not seen as a worthwhile investment of time and resources are shooting themselves in the foot and shortchanging their students.

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