The Power of Reading - Stephen Krashen

okay it says turn off when you go to the bathroom okay did you see that movie remember is one of the police story movies with a guy kept okay Thank You Kristen for that wonderful introduction I do have some comments on the introduction though I have to add some information it's true about the black belt that is true but I got the black belt on the basis of the written examination as for the weightlifting that part is true and that's part is that's from my days in Venice Beach California and Gold's Gym where I worked

out with Arnold you want some Arnold stories this is usually the only thing people remember from my talks my mention is yeah I worked out with Arnold in the old days in Venice Beach and in Gold's Gym and I got to tell you a real story about Arnold nice guy no question absolute Prince Arnold was legendary on the beach for being a nice guy and being a big help he'd be working out by yourself you know doing your concentration girls and Arnold would come over and say you know can I make us a joke can

I make a suggestion please and it's a try it like this you know don't quite extend put your mind in your bicep always write everything he said turned out to be true we would share things you don't earn 'l told me he told and he was always right he was already the world's number one bodybuilder mr. universe three times when he came as for governor oh my airplane pilot needed no experience necessary learn on the job and a colleague of mine have an article coming out about how Arnold really learned English did he go through

immersion or was it bilingual ed which he opposes it was bilingual ed he had a good background in the first language let me reintroduce myself a little as well too because Kristin has emphasized my background and second language acquisition foreign language and bilingual education which is where I come from with all this but I feel like a country-western singer crossing over in that today I'm going to be talking entirely about literacy in general in fact I'm going to be talking about the literacy crisis in America now what makes me an expert on the literacy crisis

I am an expert and I want to give you my credentials I was there when the literacy crisis began the literacy crisis the literacy crisis began officially October 4th 1986 on a Thursday afternoon 3 o'clock Pacific Coast time it began on The Oprah Winfrey Show now what was I doing at home watching Oprah Winfrey at the time I was a tenured full professor at a major research university are there any questions what a job it was great anyway every time they tell you we feel your pain no they don't anyway Oprah had this show and

you know when Oprah is very influential she did this very compelling program about these six adult illiterate these are guys who had gone to our schools in the United States and were native speakers of English and never learned to read and write at all they got passed along every year you know social promotion and they described in great detail all their strategies for getting through the day making people think they were literate you know they go to restaurant wait to see what you're going to order and they ordered the same thing etc the reason this

is part of our national fabric is because of Oprah well it was very compelling I sent for the transcript in fact after that there was a made-for-tv movie with Dennis Weaver about an adult illiterate and then we had Stan Lee and iris Jane Fonda full Robert DeNiro feature film about an adult illiterate if you read the newspapers you get the impression that our schools are turning out millions of students millions of children who can't read and write at all guess what it's not true of course they also say that teachers are to blame that's not

true either in fact if you look at the research and I've looked at it I just told you I'm a professional okay you look at the research you see that literacy in America I'll write this big enough so their first three rows can see literacy in America has been on a steady increase for the last hundred years in fact it's very hard to find anyone in this country who's gone to our schools who's completely and totally illiterate these people are very rare in fact they're so rare when you find them they get on Oprah Winfrey

that's how rare they are there is a problem but it's not the problem that the Media has been talking about thick I'm so down on the media I don't even believe the sports section anymore I mean that's how cynical I've gotten okay anyway are you sure that was the score okay anyway you look at research on literacy you see we are a very literate country literacy as I've said has been rising for the last hundred years total illiteracy is extremely rare the problem though is that the demands for literacy have been increasing faster that's the

problem our teachers have been very successful at making people literate the problem is getting harder and harder that's the problem if you talk to automobile mechanics for example they'll tell you the reading and writing they have to do is much more demanding than it was 15 20 years ago computer manuals technical forms legal things etc so the issue is not how do you get from no literacy to low levels of literacy everybody gets there let's call this basic literacy somewhere between second and fourth grade literacy everybody gets there they get there at different rates are

you with me say yes yes okay they get there at different rates because human beings do everything at different rates the typical definition of low literacy is the lowest quartile the lowest 25% so newspaper article says 150,000 kids have sent to summer school because they're low literacy well they're the lowest quartile you could quadruple literacy scores and you would still have the lowest 25% by the only one who understands this we have a math problem in this country while I'm on this let me use you as my therapy group for a moment this is very

frustrating we want all kids at grade level right I heard that do you know what grade level is it's the fiftieth percentile you see what's wrong we want everyone above average no it can't be done when I tell people about that they say well we'll try hard yeah this is a math crisis a great Byung anyway we want to get with this we've done we want to get to the higher levels the sixth grade level the tenth grade level the 12th grade level that's what we're really interested in okay if that's Lady gaga the answer's

no I'm busy can't help her today I know how to do it I know how to get from lower levels to high levels I know how to develop academic literacy I know how to bring people to the highest levels of literacy I know all about it because I'm an expert and the answer we all know is one word reading and there's one kind of reading that works better than any other and it was the kind of reading you did last night before you fell asleep how many of you read last night before you fell asleep

how many of you like me read last night even though you shouldn't've it was too late this is addiction the kind of reading that really counts is the reading you and I do all the time that we do obsessively we call it free voluntary reading fer reading because you want to know book reports no questions at the end of the chapter you don't like the book you put it down you pick up another one free voluntary reading is the source in my opinion of our reading ability it's the source the source of most of our

vocabulary all of our educated vocabulary just about comes from reading in most cases our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions our ability most of our ability to spell to spell well not perfectly but to spell well all of this our ability to write with a good writing style much of our knowledge of the world comes from reading now I don't want to oversell this I don't want to say if kids read a lot they'll all go on to the University and get master's degrees that may or may not happen but if they start to read

they're going to have a chance if they don't start to read they're not going to have a chance I want to take a few minutes we have to what 730 is there right I've ordered pizza for six o'clock Fast Times at Ridgemont High right anyway I want to show you a little bit of the research and I've got some charts here to back it up the case for free voluntary reading and I really want to go through this to some extent because this research for many of you who are becoming teachers is going to make

your lives easier it's can this is a money-back guarantee if this does not work for you I will return the entire $50 honorarium and divide it equally among you this life is this research is going to make your professional life about 5% easier that's not bad okay but let me give you the data behind it no discussion of reading would be complete without talking about how it started in the United States and it started in a book with the book that came out around 1965 which you can still get in paperback it's called hooked on

books the author is a guy named Daniel fader Daniel fader worked with boys who are in reform schools reform school boys juvenile delinquents native speakers of English juvenile delinquents between ages 12 and 15 one group got the hooked on books program each Y was given a paperback book this is yours do with it what you like if you read it fine if you don't read it fine but you want a new one turn it in you get a new one no overdue fines no book reports no nothing they had a pretty good idea what the

boys interests were now this is back in the 60s the favorite author and Fleming James Bond the boys read the books when you give kids interesting things to read they will read them no question all right some of the boys in fact averaged a book every other day for a whole year all voluntary he gave them tests at the end of two years the readers improved in everything attitude towards school writing fluency writing complexity etc the comparison group stayed the same or went down now fader was clever enough not to just rely on test scores

he looked at the boys behavior in their daily lives for example he looked at their behavior during basketball games when they watched their school team play against other schools during halftime timeouts free throws some of the boys were looking at their books which they had in their back pockets we've known this since 1965 I have a couple of studies I want to share with you that are examples of what we call SSR SSR means sustained silent reading okay some of us remember when it was called USSR it's true uninterrupted sustained silent reading anyway in sustained

silent reading you take a few minutes out of the school day and the students read the students read whatever they want to read 10 15 minutes or so and the teacher gets to read whatever the teacher wants to read now we've got to find out if this works I have calculated if you do 10 minutes a day your teacher you do 10 minutes a day of sustained silent reading with one class over a normal teaching career this amounts to about three months paid vacation do I have your attention okay teaching is tough enough anyway in

the typical study one group does sustained silent reading and the other group does skill building the traditional program and you know what that is all the things that our state governments the federal government's Pearson publishers mcgraw-hill publishers want you to do more of and as many of you know to some extent it's the same people anyway you then give them tests of reading comprehension vocabulary and you see which group makes the greater gains the research in favor of sustained silent reading on this stuff in my opinion is overwhelming I'll give you the bottom line the

worst thing that happens in these studies the worst result is no difference they make the same gains now think about this which is easier on the children free reading or workbook exercises you don't know let me try this again let me reverse it which is easier on the kids workbooks and exercises or free reading free reading thank you which is easier on the teacher free reading so if there's no difference in test scores which is better free reading of course I also find in looking at the studies that the studies that show no difference are

nearly always short-term studies some as short as two months ten weeks now I've seen sustained silent reading programs and I now know what some of you know the first couple of weeks nobody's reading they haven't found a yet when you give the program a chance to run the readers are better I found the cutoff to be about an academic year you let her run an academic year longer the readers are consistently better well I want to show you a couple examples and you'll see on the handout what happened to me the day I discovered Excel

to studies in fact I'm going to reproduce some of this on the board I just pulled out these two because I find them first when I find the most significant study it was published in a journal called the reading research quarterly now those of you who know the reading journals know that the reading research quarterly is the number one snob journal in reading most in the articles in this journal are long dense and nearly completely incomprehensible which is why everyone thinks it must be the best journal in the field okay the only people can read

these articles are monks who have meditated for years and can have these great powers of concentration and that's where it came out the author which is great author is the first authors Warwick le who is our hero and his colleague Frances mangu hi another really interesting guy have worked with Warwick le is a retired professor from New Zealand it's important I tell you this and he is well respected by everybody in the field he has done his work for the field let me tell you he's been the editor of this the director that's the president

of this he's really put in a lot of time and effort everybody likes him so he was one of the authors of this study the study took place by the way I'm deliberately presenting to you research from very different areas so you can see the universality of these results the study was done in the Fiji Islands this is an EFL study children in the Fiji Islands begin English in kindergarten for 30 minutes a day in Le and mangu high study and I'm going to reproduce on the board which is already on their handout the children

were looked at by le and mangu high between grades four and six and I'm sorry grades five and this is five and six or four or five four and five thinks they look they divide the kids into three groups one group got the audio lingual method which in my opinion is a combination of everything that's wrong in language teaching combined into one method you know grammar drills tests for speak all this stuff second group got sustained I'm sorry second group yeah got sustained silent reading here are the books boys and girls enjoy that was the

only treatment I have to emphasize the books were comprehensible they have English since kindergarten a third group got a program called shared book experience which we know of here as big books children are read to from very large books the teacher discusses the stories with them and they do free reading I'm now going to put on the board what's already on your sheet and that's the gains in reading comprehension and standardized tests after the first year now let me emphasize what we've got here we've got Warrick Ellie who's very well respected scholar standardized tests the

reading research quarterly the flagship Journal of the field the most conservative journal in the field this was not published in the newsletter of the American Communist Party how did it come out we expect native speakers to gain ten months in a year let's see how these children did audio lingual six grades you see in your sheet six and a half months gained sustained silent reading and I regard this next number as one of the most significant in our field 15 months gained not even close big books 15 months game audio lingual fifth grade of pathetic

two and a half months game sustained silent reading a modest for respectable nine big books 15 the readers were better the second year of the project this nine disappeared these groups were equal and were even a farther ahead of the audio legal group they were better in reading writing better and listening better and grammar better everything tested le replicated this result in Singapore refer to this is the Singapore study in another major journal language learning very similar results get this the students who did reading did better on grammar test than those who had grammar classes

she was basically test preparation very interesting now why should this happen I think it happened because the students couldn't help it if you read a lot your knowledge of the conventions of writing your knowledge of vocabulary grammar its acquired not learned it subconsciously absorbed its stored deep in your central nervous system it becomes part of you they have no choice but to write well let's say there are hundred people here I just made that up and let's say I asked you to write something don't worry I won't but let's say we each wrote a page

and we traded it with our neighbors and evaluated hundred people here there'd be a hundred respectable papers there wouldn't be a bad one in the room I promise you we all make little mistakes here and there tiny little punctuation spelling but all of it would be good be very accurate and it would be coherent all your papers would be easy to read easy to follow you always write correctly you have no choice you cannot write poorly you don't even know how the only way you can write poorly is if you've just read a pile of

student papers okay comes to read you go to someone's house their books everywhere you would be amazed to see a sample of their writing with serious problems it's extremely rare the next big table is the study I published in a free journal check it out folks i j FL t dot-com free journal international journal foreign language teacher i decided to look at all the studies i could find in EF l English as a foreign language in high school and college I thought this would be a good laboratory because in these cases many of these cases

students major exposure to English is in these classes and the first column the study column are the papers the studies themselves and these are from various countries Yemen Korea Taiwan Japan its Singapore etc the last two columns are the results of two kinds of tests we call a closed test where you delete every fifth word or six word and the student puts the word in which turns out to be a test that correlates very highly with other deaths so it's a good general test it's a lousy pedagogical technique but it's a good test the last

column is reading comprehension the numbers you see there are called effect sizes tell you what those are if the effect size is positive the ones who had sustained silent reading did better in every case the numbers are positive in all these studies the students who had sustained silent reading did better than the comparison groups no exceptions that's pretty remarkable the size of the effect is what counts here effect size of around 0.2 0.3 is considered low effect size of 0.4 0.5 modest 0.7 point 8 you're really getting there for both of you who remember your

statistics class effect size of 1.0 means the experimental group was one standard deviation better than the comparison group okay everyone else come back the average effect size between 0.4 and point 7 depending on how I calculate it in other words this stuff really works sustained silent reading works everywhere we've tried it I want to supplement this with case histories which I find to be very very convincing people say oh just case histories but if you do enough of them you see patterns and I find these quite interesting the first one is politically loaded Geoffrey Canada

is the hero of a movie called Waiting for Superman he is the founder of the Harlem Durin's zone of schools which emphasizes hard data tough love etc he wrote an autobiography which is all about growing up in New York and tough areas and living with violence all around there are two versions that are published as a regular version and a graphic novel version I of course read the graphic novel version okay and about two thirds through here's what he says I loved reading and my mother who read voraciously too allowed me to have her novels

after she finished them my strong reading background allowed me to have an easier time of it in most of my classes he also had a friend his best friend was a reader they found books shared them children who grew up with poverty who have access to books are the ones who make it those who don't don't make it this is the conclusion I'm coming to another case Liz Marie who wrote a book called breaking night similar case grew up in New York under extreme poverty here's what she did she said she and her novel in

her novel in her autobiography she said she only showed up in elementary school the last couple of weeks before the examinations just to find out what was going to be on the test her father had this interesting habit in those days the public libraries in New York were not connected by computer they were all independent so her dad had this practice of going to a local public library in New York area getting a library card taking out all the books he could and never returned them then he go to another library take out all the

books he could have never returned them so she had this huge House of fugitive library books all over here's what she says any formal education I received came from the few days I spent in attendance mixed with knowledge Ives or from random readings of my or daddy's ever-growing supply of unreturned library books and as long as I still showed up steadily the last few weeks of classes to take the standardized test I kept squeaking by from grade to grade now people who think that comic books are bad for you might consider or lead you to

lives of crime which is what people claim consider the case of Nobel Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu said this was his route to English one of the things I'm most grateful to my father for is that contrary to educational principles he allowed me to read comics I think that's how I develop my love for English and for reading some of you have read Richard Wright's autobiography a wonderful writer called black boy about growing up in the segregated south he says he grew up in a family where reading and writing was actually discouraged his grandmother did

not approve of fiction hmm she'd be right at home in the common core curriculum committee okay she thought these are stories you shouldn't be doing this you'd stay with the real world a border lived in the home a schoolteacher she read stories to Richard Holden stories grandma found out and asked her to leave he took a newspaper route only so he could read the newspaper he finally got access to books by borrowing a library car from the white friend of his and was able to take books out of a public library pretending they were for

someone else here's how he describes his reading writing development I wanted to write and I did not even know the English language I bought English grammars and found them dull I felt I was getting a better sense of the language from novels than from grammars Wow well let's say this is true let's say I've made let's pretend I've made the case that free voluntary reading is the way this happens if this is true how do we get kids to read should we give them pizza remember book it Pizza Hut okay alfie kohn discusses this in

his book punished by rewards and he quotes a friend of his it says if you give kids pizza for reading all you're going to get is a lot of fat kids who don't like to read I'll explain why that's true in a moment then there are all kinds of newspaper articles about children principal has to sit naked on the school roof for two weeks or you know eat worms or dive dye his hair green or whatever because kids read 4,000 books or whatever newspapers love this stuff I don't see the motivation there anyway that's the

idea that we have to record we have to reward kids for reading and the most popular way of doing this is to use a commercial program called accelerated reader now again for both of you haven't heard of this accelerated reader is in one-third of all the schools in the United States it's a reading management program works like this the child types name of the book into the computer the quiz pops up low-level questions so there's no ambiguity about the answer and usually questions that are not too important to the theme of the book was her

money left-handed or right-handed I just made that up exaggeration you get points for how many get right you need to get at least six out of ten right to get credit at the end of the year you can turn in your points for a baseball jacket or whatever reward you want this has become the reading curriculum in a lot of schools I was asked by a journal the Journal of children's literature to do a survey of accelerated reader research and I happily accepted it was a lot of fun I looked at every single paper ever

done an accelerated reader only a few were in professional journals most of them were a couple of dissertations but most of them were from the accelerated reader company Renaissance learning from their website as advertising their product I accepted those at face value just to see how it would come out in order for me to give you my results let me review for you what accelerated reader does it has four components number one when you order the program you have to order books lots of them are it doesn't work number two time to read Renaissance learning

recommends 60 minutes a day Wow sustained silent reading is like 10 minutes this is a lot of time number three the tests the quizzes and number four prizes now based on what I've said so far of these four elements which are the ones we know really work books in time one and two terrific so if you want to be a scientist what you want to do is compare books and time to books time tests and prizes to see whether the tests and the prizes add anything so far so good they've never done that instead they

compare it to doing nothing you see what the problem is let me put it to you this way I've just invented this new anti-anxiety medication I'm going to make a lot of money on it it's called Combe and it has two elements sugar and zoloft prozac and I've given this to a lot of people and they all feel much better can I say I've got a new product here no we already know that zoloft works and all that sugar is not really good for you same idea we already know that this works the issue is

whether the tests and prizes are adding anything so my conservative opinion on the accelerated reader research is that we don't know and my conservative advice when people ask me if you've got a couple thousand dollars in your book budget don't buy accelerated reader we have no evidence although I suspect it's doesn't work but we really have no evidence use the money to buy books for the library the classroom libraries and school libraries this we know absolutely works now this is my conservative conclusion let me give you my conjecture I learned the word conjecture from my

son who's now sitting on the floor in the back Danny okay in the math department here and Danny has pointed out to me Danny has pointed out to me that in mathematics if you have a hypothesis that you're not really sure of it's really borne out you can call it a conjecture then you could say well it was only conjecture okay so I have a conjecture on this actually it's alpha cones conjecture I'll tell you about alfie kohn he's really interesting guy alfie kohn dot-org okay check out his well his website and his interesting books

in his book punished by rewards here is his conjecture and this is based on actually it's pretty well established based on studies in psychology and education he says that if you give someone a reward for doing something that's already Pleasant what you're telling them is that it's not pleasant and that no one would do it without a bribe he tells the story of this old man who lives in a house and kids come play outside they make a lot of noise and he wants them to go AC goes outside and says tell you what come

back tomorrow and play and make a lot of noise I'll give you a dollar great so they do it next day says ok 75 cents alright next day 50 cents fine when it gets down to 10 cents the kids say we're not going to do this for a dime and they never return we might be extinguishing behavior when we give people rewards there have been no long-term studies of accelerated reader we don't know what happens in the long run whether children will stop reading because they're not getting the reward anymore so if we're not going

to use bribes we're not going to use pizza what are we going to do well have a radical suggestion probably the best motivator of reading that we know of is reading itself students who are involved in sustained silent reading programs when you look at how they're doing at the end of the year they're doing more reading on their own than students who are not in the program and another area of research is presented to us spired by the work of Jim's release those you who don't know how many you've heard of Jim's release he's the

author of a book called the read aloud handbook okay Danny did I ever tell you what my mom said about the read aloud handbook she read it my mother Danny's grandma and she is a beautiful buckets amazing and my perfect mother said Steven why can't you write like this and I said I wish I could okay it's absolutely wonderful anyway in the read aloud handbook which is I think put read Aloud's on the map in North America overwhelming bestseller beautifully written he does great presentations etc he introduced in two editions ago a concept called the

homerun book which he got from Clifton Fadiman who said one's first book one's first kiss one's first homerun are always the best my first home run was the best it was also my last but you know I'm not a complete nerd I go to the gym workout and all that I don't mind getting in a ball game I was in a game last spring I was pitching I had a no-hitter going for six innings then the bell rang and the big kids came out oh well we decided to check out this idea of the home

run book which says that one positive reading experience can make you into a reader correct we did it with fourth graders fifth graders eighth graders we asked kids was there one experience that got you into reading over half of the subjects said yes and they told us what the book was Garfield I found something better than television captain underpants changed my life my gosh you want subversive literature check out Captain Underpants etc so reading itself the big one though in addition read Aloud's literature all gets kids into reading the big one is making sure there

is access to books this is the major thing we must make sure books are there and we've done a very poor job in doing this the problem is is that children and I'm going to emphasize this tomorrow but more children of poverty have practically no access to books they have fewer books in the home they have fewer books in their school libraries in their classroom libraries and they live in neighborhoods of fewer bookstores in fact when you look at wealthy children versus poor children the ratio of books per child is the differences in the thousands

to one wealthy children children hyper high-income families one researcher said is do are deluged with books children of poverty have a hard time finding books anywhere I want to share with you one of the studies we've done on this I'll talk about this more tomorrow which I think might be the most important of all the studies I've ever looked at I've ever participated in what you have on your sheet it says multiple regression and now and I'm going to give you the english-language translation of that this is a study I've done with two of my

former students they were students in mind in the 90s and we're still hanging together doing studies exciting this was based on the pearls examination the pearls examination is given to kids in 40 different countries ten year olds and when the results are announced the newspapers get very excited because they want to know who won Germany wants to know if they did better than France Korea wants enough they did better than Japan and every country declares a literacy crisis except Finland because Finland always comes out on top all right we ignored all that by the way

alfie kohn recommends that the test scores be put in the sports section anyway we ignored all that instead we looked at the factors and the pearls manuals just gave us all the raw data we need it all we needed to do is put in the computer we did analysis to see which factors were the most important which predicted reading scores the best we did several analyses we did one very complex analysis where we put in everything in them that we could find and then you know try to boil it down into simpler factors and then

another one which stay which I like better statisticians call it plan comparisons you pick out the factors in advance that you want to test and you ignore everything else all the analysis came out the same so I'm going to give you the simple one first we looked at poverty poverty was a very strong factor and of course negative the higher the level of poverty the lower the scores number two we looked at sustained silent reading what percentage of children in each country had a chance to do free reading in school the more they could do

sustained silent reading positive factor but quite modest apparently low but it was their bordering on statistical significance the third factor we looked at was school libraries presence of a school library of at least 500 books by the way multiple regression is a very nice technique you to pretend through doing mathematical magic that each of these factors is independent they don't influence each other anyway this is the big one folks the presence of a school library was a strong factor and positive nearly as strong as the effect of poverty I'm pausing for effect what this suggests

is that supplying books in a school library can balance mitigate offset the effects of poverty on reading comprehension scores providing the access that was missing this is big stuff we then looked at the number of hours of actual reading instruction the effect was modest and negative the more reading instruction the worse now I don't want to jump to conclusions although I'd love to in this case it could be the case that children who had poor reading had to have more instruction my suspicion is if you graph it out and this is a conjecture that if

you look at it would probably look like this from no instruction to a little you probably see gains a little basic alphabetics and all that is helpful after that diminishing returns on the chart you see something there called r-squared it says r-squared equals point six three what this means is that if you know the poverty level of the country you know if they're doing sustained silent reading you know about school Huibers and you know instruction this is 63 percent of the data you need to predict their reading scores Wow this is science fiction this is

really high because in education you get r-squared 2.2 you think you're doing very well you can explain 20% of what's going on here we're getting nearly 2/3 we thought we had done something wrong wrong scuse me it was too good to be true but other studies have found the same thing so in conclusion I have a little closing number before we do questions but let me come to conclusion reading works how about that free voluntary reading we've discovered that reading is good for you and if we want to encourage reading by far the big necessary

factor access to books libraries libraries libraries libraries let me conclude I've given you information that I think is of use to you right now used to us as teachers and dealing with our children etc let's fight for libraries let me give you some new research looking around it will probably be of use to you taking a good look at you guys in about 40 50 years our latest research from the scientific laboratories at the university of southern california i've been very very interested in aging and the brain I got interested in it because there is

some dementia in my family on my dad's side and I think you know I want to prevent this and also I've had some very horrible experiences I must share with you and I'm still in recovery one of them happened in Philadelphia when I was visiting my son and family when they were in Philadelphia now in Philadelphia you land in the airport you have to take the train train takes you into the train station in the city I got on the train and the sciences $11 fare oh my gosh that's a lot of money senior citizens

one dollar great must show ID and Medicare card I had my Medicare card I was ready the conductor comes through this punk kid and I have my dollar ready and I have my Medicare car ready I give him the dollar I'm about to show my card he looks at me and says oh that's okay they should be told no matter how old the person looks always check ID okay sunny air Euler well there's a balance on this actually I have to tell you what also happened to balance this and this is also why Adam Sandler

is my favorite Hollywood personality good old Adam Sandler he can do no wrong after this they tell everyone I can about it because he deserves all the credit Maimonides says the highest form of charity is when the person you know doesn't know this is pretty close I was in the Malibu gym the only people in the gym were me my daughter and my granddaughter the adorable Sydney Melia who was like 7 months old my daughter was pumping iron and my job was to take care of the baby ok Adam Sandler walked in he came up

to me and said the absolute best thing you can say to someone my age he said oh is this your child yes I said no it's my granddaughter and he gives me the equivalent of the masculine hugging a little punch gazes good-looking grandpa he could do no wrong as far as I'm concerned this is a real man nobody else was around to see it anyway so I got interested in the research and the research I did a paper on this which is now being translated into Chinese is that cool or what's being translated in Hong

Kong anyway uh 3 factors can keep the brain young and prevent dementia from prematurely occurring actually I'm not too worried about dementia I follow the wisdom of Bill Cosby who said don't worry about senility when it comes you won't know it it's made me feel better anyway factor number one bilingualism isn't that neat people who are bilingual have better executive control this means not getting distracted like what was I doing you know people who switch all the time back and forth and language you know how does you get up in the morning to go down

and get the newspaper you go outside and you see something on the lawn you take care of that put it away you see something else you put that away and you forget why you went out there in the first place we all do that and we do more of it as we get older but bilingualism slows that down isn't that nice number two reading free voluntary reading people my age who read a lot have the same verbal memory as people in their 30s who read less and number three coffee is that cool or what now

what I'm going to tell you what the research says this takes discipline and dedication but I know you can do it three cups of freshly brewed coffee a day all the studies converge on this people and independent laboratories will delay senility significantly this is great news in fact there's one study where they extrapolate I know there's one study where they extrapolated from mice and the conjecture I love that word thinks that it's wonderful the conjecture is this might reverse Alzheimer's because it did in these mice the equivalent of five cups a day now when I

find interest by the way a former student of mine comes look chose it why don't you tell Starbucks about this okay because I figure you know Starbucks has these little words of wisdom on their cups okay so maybe they'll include this and they'll include reading and bilingualism yes we can get in a few points so I sent I wrote a note to Starbucks I found the address on their website the email address and I wrote and I said I have this paper you interested it they wrote back and they said I'm sorry we are not

interested in new economic venge at this time corporate dementia alright so I wrote the banks it no no no there's no money I just do you want the paper you can use it publicly so that was it for Starbucks what is interesting about this is that you can do all three of these things at the same time sit down have a nice cup of coffee read a book in another language the Fountain of Youth my request is if any of you are interested in doing research on this I would like to serve as a subject

so I can get free latte okay may I have wild applause and then we'll do questions all right Oh shucks oh I do have a constraint on questions the first one has to be friendly after that you can ask whatever you lice ed that once at a university three hands went down and let me introduce to you my son Danny say hello the real doctor crashing is here thank you professor here at UGA and the father of my grandchildren yes okay what a giunta's yes is the definition of reading changing I can give you a

clear answer yes and no the idea what we've had through the years is complaints that kids aren't reading these days by the way the complaints go back to 1840 that kids don't know anything etc if you look at my website which is listed on their Keene free stuff operators are standing anyway I have an article called stop blaming teenager stop scolding teenagers and I look to see how much teenagers are reading these days compared to 20 years ago etc including reading on the computer first of all in terms of book reading they're actually reading more

than in 1946 it's about the same it's very close it's a little more the only decant the only category that's declined is newspaper reading and magazine reading and newspaper reading is going down for everyone because the Internet very few far fewer people read newspapers today when you add the internet reading and that's blogs and things like this kids are reading today just about the same as they always have then I did a closer look this is cue foundation data they have it all there it's easy to look at about how kids use the Internet and

it turns out that using the internet for entertainment which is YouTube in games versus using the internet for social interaction social interaction is much more frequent they use the internet for reading and writing to each other when you factor that in you get a lot of action now people tend to deprecate that to me the jury's out I don't know if it's beneficial I suspect that it is because we know when kids write back and forth writing makes you smarter helps you think etc something might be going on here and there is meaningful and important

to them relevant to their lives we had a friend of the family who had a website for teenagers it was Debbie voxel nanny okay and she told me that this was for kids 12 13 14 years old girls nearly everything they posted this was years ago had to do with their social interaction with other girls and you know this Suzy came to school she wasn't talking to me today I wonder what's going on and you know deep discussions about this stuff put it this way let's say we discovered through history a group of kids in

16th century France who had the habit of writing notes to each other based on their personal lives we think oh what an exciting literate group that must be and today we give this know respect so I think kids are reading as much as ever even though they're reading different things and I'm very hesitant to condemn computer reading and writing it might very well be beneficial it has not really been seriously study good question good questions are those I'm prepared to answer yes Oh internet slang actually internet slang since you're my BFF I can tell you

internet slang the only thing that's really been looked at seriously has been text messaging that's been around a little longer and the studies people said oh gosh kids aren't going to be able to read and write they're going to misspell everything and all this stuff and it turns out number one when you look at it it's conventionalized you can't just make up your own now you can't just decide this is my abbreviation you look kind of silly so you've got to know when to use lol and all that stuff because it could mean all these

different things also it has no negative effect on writing accuracy none and this this has been a very popular research topic I think it's kind of the same attitude people had toward teenage slang in general they assume it's going to make things worse so far it hasn't been shown to be the case I think it improves communication their part there might be something good going on I don't know I suspect there is oh by the way email comment on email my hypothesis email should be nearly perfect but not quite if it's too perfect it looks

insincere so we these conventions right yeah question here yes yes the reason this has not been widely investigated is that it's very hard to test speech because you've got to record it and it takes a lot of time and it's easy to test writing it's right there and we have computer programs that will help you with it etc so they've been very few studies and one of my former students conclude choke keep bringing this up every six months you know we've got to know cuz she did a study of the sir dissertation study of women

who read Sweet Valley High novels this is before Twilight and found a very positive impact okay I think Elizabeth should have jumped dump Jessica a long time ago okay that's my opinion all right anyway they read these teen novels and their everything got better and better and better and she claims their reactions their comments as their speech got more fluent and their friends said their speech got more fluent but I don't know any study that's used speech as a dependent variable it's looked to see so that'll be your research and please let us know what

happens my suspicion is it's going to have an impact and it's going to be positive of course you'd have to do some listening as well so just if you take everything else equal you add reading it's going to help that's prediction okay thanks very much the CEO a lecture series is a production of the UGA College of Education the University of Georgia copyright 2012