Language Permits Us to See

Reading Quotes

There is more treasure in books than in all pirates’ loot on Treasure Island.

Walt Disney

Ultimately, we want teachers in all the content areas to understand that teaching reading in their discipline is teaching the content, that the texts and ways of talking about and interpreting those texts are at the heart of their discipline.

Cynthia Greenleaf

As we read text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier. We can go into it as far as its words allow, embracing all their possible definitions; we can bring other texts to bear upon it and to reflect it, as in a hall of mirrors; we can construct another, critical text that will extend and illuminate the one we are reading; but we cannot escape the fact that its language is the limit of the universe.

Albeto Manguel

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain

I have been learning to read all my life and I cannot yet say I have achieved the goal.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Prior knowledge can account for more variation in reading performance than either I.Q. or measured reading achievement.

P. Johnston and D. Person

If I were to do one thing to raise test scores, even on standardized tests, it would be to build vocabulary. In chemistry, for example, students would write ‘Dilute the solution with three milliliters of water’ rather than simply, ‘Add more water.’

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

Love for reading is not taught, it is created; not required, but inspired; not demanded, but exemplified; not exacted, but quickened; not solicited, but activated.

Russell Stauffer

Like scientists, proficient readers constantly entertain hypotheses about the content communicated in the text.

T. Rasinski and N. Padak

Unfortunately…literature is treated more like information to be memorized and tested than an experience to be enjoyed and appreciated.

J. Dugan

Test tomorrow.

7th Grade Teacher

A Postscript Standard Spooler usually runs on a piece of software connected to your network. The spooler’s name appears when you access the chooser desk accessory. Standard Spoolers let you take advantage of printer description files (APD’s). The APD decides the printer configuration.

Computer Manual Literacy is so fundamental that some people take it for granted. We can’t do that because we know literacy is the gateway to success.

Susan Castillo

Literacy is not a luxury; it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the 21st century, we must harness the energy and creativity of all citizens.

Bill Clinton

Literacy is important because it enables pupils to gain access to the subjects studied in school, to read for information and pleasure, and to communicate effectively. Poor levels of literacy impact negatively on what pupils can do and how they see themselves.

John Hertich

An excellent reading teacher without a well-coordinated program can only do so much. In these situations, even the best of teachers can offer students only isolated moments of engrossed learning and rich experience in an otherwise disconnected series of classes.

Judith Langer

This year I started to enjoy reading because I’m learning how.

5th Grade Student

How could I understand anything about Vietnam? I couldn’t even find it on the map.

6th Grade Student

You’re dumb if you have to look back. Smart kids get it after the first reading.

8th Grade Student I’d rather be punished then read a book.

7th Grade Student

Talking about books I can read has helped me enjoy reading.

5th Grade Student

The hardest part about reading is remembering what I’ve read.

9th Grade Student

I am not a speed-reader. I am a speed-understander.

Isaac Asimov

If the reading is too hard, I just get the Cliff Notes or skim through chapters. If I can’t get the Cliff Notes, I just listen to what the teacher and kids in the class say.

10th Grade Student

If teachers are going to make the process of reading visible, they can’t sit safely at the edge. As older, more experienced readers, they have an obligation to talk aloud about groping for understanding or reaching for a genuine reading.

Dennie Palmer Wolf

If someone could teach these kids how to read, I could teach them science.

High School Science Teacher It really isn’t hard to avoid reading – you just ask someone what it means, or wait for the teacher to explain it.

12th Grade Student

The science textbook is hard for me to read. It has a lot of information with diagrams and pictures. All of these things are helpful to people who know the subject, but to me it is very confusing.

11th Grade Student

That’s it? That’s how the book ends? I don’t even know what happened.

9th Grade Student

When I get stuck, I quit reading.

9th Grade Student

I read everything the same way. It doesn’t matter if it is my science book or Sports Illustrated. What is the point? Reading is reading.

10th Grade Student

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, must construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay – the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

Walt Whitman

Read widely and wildly.

Shelley Harwayne The knowledge is now available to make worthwhile improvements in reading throughout the United States. If the practices seen in the classrooms of the best teachers in the best schools could be introduced everywhere, improvements in reading would be dramatic.

Becoming a Nation of Readers

The assignment for tomorrow is Section 2, pages 183 to 188. Write out your answers to seven review questions on page 188. You may use the rest of class time to get started on this homework.

10th Grade Social Studies Class

Struggling readers are especially dependent on teachers to tell them what they need to know.

Judith Irvin

These students might be termed “First down punters”, readers who come up to the line of scrimmage in their text and decide to “punt” on first down rather than running a play or two to see if anything might make sense. By bailing out early, they hope that the teacher will shortcut the process and move directly into telling them what is important.

Judith Irvin

Reading is the highway from the shadow to the sun.

Maya Angelou

The most logical place for instruction in most reading and thinking strategies is in social studies and science rather than in separate lessons about reading. The reason is that the strategies are useful mainly when the student is grappling with important but unfamiliar content.

Becoming a Nation of Readers “Sammy read: What do firemen do?  make bread  put out fires  sing He poked Willy. ‘Firemen get your head out when it’s stuck,’ he said. ‘My uncle had his stuck in a big pipe, and the firemen came and got it out. But none of the boxes said that.’”

First Grade Takes a Test by Miriam Cohen

You can’t read a math textbook the same way you read a novel. That’s why teaching students to read is more than just the work of language arts teachers.

Rachel Bilmeyer

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Groucho Marx

Reading is declining among all groups, in every region, at every educational level and within every ethnic group.

Educational Leadership

Boys lag behind girls one and a half years in reading and writing.

Educational Leadership

The tests used to measure reading achievement do not reflect recent advances in our understanding of the reading process. If we are to foster effective instruction, the discrepancy between what we know and what we measure must be resolved.

S. Valencia and P.D. Pearson You don’t have to read every day, just on the days you eat.

NAEP Report

Reading comprehension is the process of deriving meaning from text and is key to learning in all content areas.

Rachel Bilmeyer

Vocabulary knowledge is the single most important contributing factor to reading comprehension.

J.G. LaFlamme

The sense of a word…is the sum of all psychological events aroused in our conscious by the word….A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different context, it changes its sense. The dictionary meaning of a word is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, not more than a potentiality that finds diversified realization in speech.

L.S. Uygofsky

The idea that reading instruction and subject matter instruction should be integrated is an old one in education, but there is little indication that such integration occurs often in practice.

Becoming a Nation of Readers

The real world requires substantially higher reading proficiency levels than most students possess.

Willard Daggett

We’ve taught children how to read but forgotten to teach them to want to read.

Jim Trealease You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I will you never be – I had a mother who read to me.

Strickland Gillilan

If reading aloud to children were common instead of a rarity, we’d be facing fewer academic and social problems in this nation.

Jim Trelease

A learner is only a partial biologist, for instance, if he cannot read or write to discover information and meaning in biology. When a student takes the results of his or her observations about lobsters, reads, writes a draft, talks, reads, then writes again, he or she learns what it is to think critically as a biologist.

John Guthrie

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Mortimer Adler

Direct teaching and modeling of the strategies and readers application of the strategies to the text they hear and read increases the ability of students to develop literal and inferential understanding, increase vocabulary, and make connections between parts of a text, between separate texts, and between text and personal experience.

Reading Framework – California Public Schools

In a world constructed around the assumption that everyone has the basic skills of literacy and where literacy and freedom are indissolubly linked, to be illiterate is to be unfree. Koichiro Matsuura A positive dimension of our research is that all of our studies have demonstrated that reading yields significant dividends for everyone – not just for the “smart kids” or the more able learners.

A. Cunningham and K. Stanovich

This is an extremely complex problem, and the longer we let these kids go the more serious the problem becomes. The problem exists because (after third grade) we stop providing reading instruction, and the instruction we do provide is not what they need.

Michael Kamil

Research shows that students who receive intensive, focused literacy instruction and tutoring will graduate from high school and attend college in significantly greater numbers than those not receiving such attention.

Scott Joftus

Reading has cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of lifting meaning from a particular passage. Furthermore, these consequences are reciprocal and exponential in nature. Accumulated over time – spiraling either upward or downward – they carry profound implications for the development of a wide range of cognitive capabilities.

Ann Cunningham and Keith Stanovich

The act of reading seems to be more powerful for vocabulary development than direct instruction. Focused, efficient vocabulary as well as lots of reading is essential for successful reading in the content areas.

R. Anderson and P. Freebody

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another.

Anna Quindlen Some kids are born good readers and some kids aren’t. I’ve always been a bad reader and I always will be. It’s too late for me.

8th Grade Student

There is nothing I did that made my good readers good and there is nothing I can do to help my poor readers improve. If they can’t read well by sixth grade, it’s too late.

8th Grade Teacher

Assigning students material they can’t read is a waste of time.

Cris Tovani

As recently as 150 years ago, literacy was defined and measured as the ability to sign one’s signature as evidence of rudimentary reading and writing abilities. J. Flood and D. Lapp

The difference between printed and electronic texts is substantial enough to alter current conceptions of literacy.

D. Reinking

When teaching reading is everyone’s responsibility, no one seems to actually do it.

Judith Irvin

Every time I read a sentence, the sentence before disappears.

5th Grade Student “Tell what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

Francois Mauriac

Books are the carriers of civilization, without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara Tuchman

In 1974 auto technicians were responsible for 5,000 pages of print, in 1999 it increased to 5,000 pages, and by 2000 car mechanics needed to understand 1,000,000 pages of service manuals to fix an automobile. Students must be equipped with strategic reading competencies to navigate in this information age.

Rachel Bilmeyer

Prior knowledge can account for more variation in reading performance than either IQ or measured reading achievement.

P. Johnson and D. Pearson

While researchers stress the importance of balance between narrative and informative reading in the elementary school, studies have shown that as much as 90% of what is read at the elementary level is narrative in nature. Students who are taught with only literary text become incompetent comprehenders of informative texts. They wait for the story to seize their interest when they should be focused on main points and sequence. Rachel Bilmeyer

Reading is the highway from the shadow to the sun.

Maya Angelou Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. Mortimer Adler

To read is to empower. Jane Evershed

Why do readers struggle? The problem is not illiteracy, but comprehension. The bulk of older struggling readers and writers can read, but cannot understand what they have read!

Reading Next Report

Stopping reading instruction at 3rd grade is like a builder who builds a foundation and then stops and leaves the walls, plumbing, roof, etc. for the homeowner.

Bob Wise

Reason would tell almost anyone that the ability to read was the most difficult single accomplishment ever achieved by any man. But in this day people did not set off skyrockets and dance in the streets when their little boy tackled and subdued this Everest of culture at the age of nine or ten. Nor did they reward the kids patient teacher with rubies and a crown of laurel. It was more like rubles and a crown of poison oak. Learning to read was taken with little more enthusiasm in the average family than the regular defrosting of the automatic refrigerator. Learning was expected; only failure to learn caused family comment.

Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.

D. McGuiness

Reading is one of the most uniquely human and complex of all cognitive activities.

P. Vanden Broek and K.E. Kremer One of the most heartbreaking sights in American schools today is that of children – once so eager to read – discovering that they are not learning how. There comes over those sparkling eyes a glaze of listless despair. We are not talking about a few children and scattered schools. We are talking about millions of children and every school in the nation. And the toll in young spirits is the least of it. The toll in the learning and thinking potential of our citizenry is beyond measure.

Sylvia Farnham-Diggory

We can, whenever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us. We already know more than we need to. Whether or not we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.

Ron Edmunds

Despite a significant body of research suggesting the effectiveness of strategy instruction, especially for lower-achieving readers, strategy instruction has not been implemented in many American classrooms.

J. Dole

Without diminishing the importance of good early reading instruction or what the children with disabilities face when reading, I would like to assert that many “poor readers” are actually lazy readers. This is not a reflection on their character. It’s simply that no one ever told these children that reading was going to be work. Students turn on their stereos, kick back on theirs beds, and expect the book to transfer information from its pages to their brains.

C. Jago

Teaching reading is rocket science. Louisa Moats

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx If you can read this, thank a teacher.

Anonymous

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Joseph Addison

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Edmund Burke

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Jimmy Calano

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

Never judge a book by its movie. J. W. Eagan

It is a mistake to think that books have come to stay. The human race did without them for thousands of years and may decide to do without them again.

E.M. Forster Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

W. Fusselman What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.

Harold Howe

There should be a little voice in your head like the storyteller is saying it. And if there’s not, then you’re just lookin’ at the words.

9th Grade Student

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Walter Savage Landor You’ve really got to start hitting the books because it’s no joke out here.

Spike Lee

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, even if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.

Horace Mann

Life happened because I turned the pages.

Alberto Manguel A library is thought in cold storage.

Herbert Samuel Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?

Fred Stoller A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

Bert Williams A library is a hospital for the mind.

Anonymous I read my way out of poverty long before I worked myself out of poverty.

Walter Anderson

Reading does not teach you how to read. It teaches you how to read better.

Anonymous

WARNING: Reading may lead to an increase in knowledge, altered perceptions, and deepened insight. All such reactions are normal, but may lead to a serious reading habit.

Anonymous

Am I supposed to do these reading strategy things consciously or unconsciously? Because if I’m supposed to do them without thinking, I’m in trouble.

12th Grade Student

In our classrooms we need to be honest about the needs of our students. If they can’t read the text, it’s not fair to simply assign the reading. Nor is it fair to give up and skip reading entirely, favoring an approach that focuses solely on content learning. This may help students to pass a particular course, but it won’t help them in the long run.

Author Unknown