Becoming a Nation of Non-Readers

Students are reading fewer books than they used to, but there's a lot schools can do to reverse the trend.

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Almost 40 years ago, in 1985, a panel of experts produced a report called Becoming a Nation of Readers. While students had made some progress in reading—primarily Black students who were benefiting from the end of de jure segregation—trends were mixed. On international tests, for example, the U.S. was ranked at or below average.

At the same time, the panel noted, the previous decade had seen “unprecedented advances” in research on reading. If those findings could be widely disseminated to American classrooms, they wrote, “the improvements would be dramatic.”

Suffice it to say that those improvements have not yet occurred. Scores on national reading tests have been stagnant or declining since 1998, and American students still fall in the middle of the pack on international measures. In addition, kids are reading for pleasure far less than they did when the report came out.

In 1984, 35 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun every day or almost every day, according to a national survey; only 8 percent said they never or hardly ever did. By 2023, those percentages had almost reversed; only 14 percent said they regularly read for fun, and 31 percent said they never or hardly ever did.

What happened? Lots of things, of course—including screens and social media. But I’d say there are at least four other reasons students can’t or won’t read:

1. Many students, including many at higher grade levels, have difficulty deciphering written words.

2. Even if they can read words fluently, many lack the background knowledge and vocabulary to make sense of text, especially if it’s complex.

3. Even if kids can read and understand text, they don’t see it as an alluring leisure activity.

4. Even if kids read for pleasure, they may not want to read or may struggle to understand text that is lengthy, complex, and/or uses archaic language and sentence structure.

Schools and teachers can address all of these issues, but the approaches need to vary depending on the problem (or problems) to be solved.

Are These All Real Problems?

People generally agree that Issues 1 and 2 are serious problems—and obviously, they’re related to Issues 3 and 4. If kids are struggling to decipher words and understand text, they’re unlikely to read for fun or tackle challenging books.

Most states are taking steps to address Issue 1—for example, by training teachers to teach phonics effectively—although many see the problem as limited to the early elementary grades. Students at higher grade levels often need support in reading multisyllabic words even if they’ve gotten adequate phonics instruction in K-2.

As for Issue 2, there’s less recognition of the need for schools to build knowledge and vocabulary—along with familiarity with complex syntax—to enable reading comprehension. Still, more and more schools are adopting content-rich elementary curricula, generally alongside systematic phonics instruction.

Some would dispute the idea that Issues 3 and 4 are anything to worry about. The National Council of Teachers of English, for example, has issued a statement calling for “decentering” book-reading in favor of other media. Some educators dismiss the idea that students should be required to read classics from the canon of “dead white males,” arguing that they should be free to choose novels that reflect their own lives.

But reading for pleasure is associated with a host of positive outcomes, including language skills and empathy. That’s true, apparently, even if kids are reading “light” books like science fiction or thrillers. So it’s worth doing whatever we can to ensure that more students want to read for their own enjoyment.

As for students having difficulty reading and understanding more challenging text, the evidence comes from a recent spate of articles focusing on students at elite colleges who—professors say—can no longer handle the kinds of assignments that used to be routine. Instructors say they’ve had to lower their expectations, assigning fewer books and shorter texts.

Many college students just don’t do the assigned reading if it’s too long. These students presumably aren’t struggling to decode words, and they’re likely to be among the minority who read for pleasure. But Pride and Prejudice, or even a 14-line sonnet, is a different story.

Although we lack hard data, it seems that many students, including high-achieving ones, aren’t being required to read those kinds of texts in high school, leaving them unprepared to meet college-level expectations (or at least what used to be college-level expectations). If this is happening at elite institutions, it’s surely happening elsewhere as well.

Why It’s Important to Read Challenging Texts

Do high school students really need to read nineteenth-century novels and Shakespeare? Maybe not as a steady diet, but I’d say it’s worth the effort to introduce them to at least a few.

For one thing, the apparent reason that reading fiction develops empathy is that it enables readers to inhabit other worlds and identify with characters very different from themselves. It follows that reading a novel or play from a different era has the potential to develop empathy more powerfully than a story that reflects the reader’s own experience.

Plus, while the Western canon is surely not the only component of the nation’s culture, it still comprises a lot of it. Those unfamiliar with, say, the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet may be confused by allusions like “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Beyond that, making the effort to understand complex language can expand students’ vocabularies and cognitive abilities.

And in many cases, there’s a reason these texts have become classics: they tell good stories and reveal lasting truths about human nature. Teachers may need to provide more support than they’re used to in order to enable students to understand and enjoy these texts, but I’d say it’s worth the pay-off.

Lightening Up on the Nuts and Bolts of Novels

But first: how do we enable more students to discover that reading can be fun? Before the rise of smart phones and social media, more students apparently discovered that independently. Now schools may need to do more to make that happen. I’d say we need to lighten up on instruction—and use novels to get kids hooked on reading.

At the elementary level, brief excerpts are often used as vehicles to teach supposedly abstract reading comprehension skills like “making inferences.” Not only does that approach fail to boost comprehension, it turns reading into a chore.

Why not just read aloud a good story—or even better, a “chapter book” like Charlotte’s Web? Especially when kids are still learning the basics of reading, the experience of listening to an adult who reads fluently and with lively expression can demonstrate how transporting—and fun—reading can be.

At higher grade levels, the focus often shifts to literary analysis—themes, character development, and the like. While there’s some merit to that approach, a heavy dose can kill students’ interest in reading for pleasure. One study of 200 undergraduates found that those who disliked reading often blamed classroom experiences that placed “too much emphasis on analyzing the compositional nuts and bolts of texts.”

The Faster Read

One approach, developed in the UK, that has produced impressive results across all grade levels is called The Faster Read. Teachers pair one classic and one contemporary novel—perhaps Jane Eyre and The Hate U Give—and read them back-to-back in class at a fairly rapid pace, spending three to four weeks on each one, following by an additional two or three weeks deepening students’ understanding.

The teacher reads aloud for 30 minutes or so a day, posing simple open-ended questions only at the beginning or end—questions like “What’s going on for this character?” Students also do some reading aloud and discussion in groups, using comprehension strategies like questioning and summarizing, as appropriate to the text. After completing a whole novel, they engage in some analytical writing.

Reading two thoughtfully paired novels back to back enables students to make “inspired comparisons,” according to the developers of the approach—and maybe helps with the challenges of archaic syntax in the classic novel. (A good story read aloud can do that on its own too; I once saw a class of middle-schoolers in a working-class London neighborhood apparently mesmerized by a teacher read-aloud of Jane Eyre.)

The Faster Read has now been used at over 200 schools across the UK, many of them high-poverty, and teachers report dramatic improvements in students’ attitudes towards reading. “They went from hating reading to running into the classroom saying, ‘Are we reading today, are we reading today?’” one middle-grades teacher recounted. An administrator at another school said that—contrary to national trends—more students were planning to study English in college, “because our students really enjoy reading.”

A study of this approach ten years ago—which I wrote about in a previous post—found a similar increase in enthusiasm for reading. And that wasn’t all. After 12 weeks, struggling readers had made 16 months of progress as measured by a standardized reading comprehension test.

Providing More Support for Reading Challenging Text

As for enabling students to understand more complex text—including classic novels and nonfiction, which also generally requires more effort to comprehend—teachers may need to do more instruction than they’re used to, or at least engage in a different kind of instruction.

One issue is ensuring that students actually do reading that’s been assigned. Another is enabling them to understand it, which may require assigning fewer and/or shorter texts. Providing students with a template for taking notes as they read—and requiring them to take those notes by hand and turn them in—can serve both purposes.

Requiring handwritten notes avoids the ChatGPT problem. And having an ongoing check on how students are understanding what they read can enable teachers to spot problems in comprehension before it’s too late.

I recently spoke with a relative of mine, Greg Valdespino, who teaches history at the University of Iowa. He told me that he gives his undergraduates a hard-copy template for taking notes, with questions keyed to the specific reading assignment. Eventually students use the notes as the basis for an essay, also handwritten.

In their book Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension—and in Episode 5 of their series for the Knowledge Matters Podcast—David and Meredith Liben describe a similar approach called The Structured Journal. It has students track their thoughts as they read, using four questions as a guide—for example, “What don’t I understand completely?” and “What are the most important ideas in this section?” Although David developed the approach when teaching a college history course, the Libens say it can work at all grade levels, and for narrative as well as expository texts.

Yet another possibility is to have students complete thoughtfully designed sentence-level activities embedded in assigned reading. Completing sentence stems can be an effective way of helping students master complex syntax at any grade level. It can also be a rigorous intellectual exercise.

Judith Hochman—creator of the Hochman Method and co-author (with me) of The Writing Revolution—likes to say that the rigor of a writing activity depends on the content. In a college philosophy course, for example, students might be asked to complete the following sentence: “Although Immanuel Kant believed that space and time are subjective forms of human sensibility, __________.”

There’s no one simple trick that will turn American students into avid consumers of books. But a combination of these approaches—explicit instruction in reading words, knowledge-building beginning in the early grades, the opportunity to become immersed in novels, and support for writing in response to complex text—may go a long way toward ensuring that we will, at last, become a nation of readers.