Reading gives you all this language stuff, all this literacy stuff.

I want to give you some other advantages of reading.

Reading is fun.

It's pleasurable.

People want to do it.

They're addicted to it.

Victor Nell wrote this amazing book in 1988 called Lost in a Book.

If you can find a used copy of this, this is such an entertaining book.

First of all, he interviewed people about their reading habits.

Here's what they said.

Reading removes me from the irritations of living.

For the few hours a day I read trash, I escape the cares of those around me, as well as escaping my own cares and dissatisfactions.

That is true.

Somerset Maugham, quoted by Nell, who was a very weird guy, Conversation After a Time

Bores Me.

And my thoughts, which were told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry.

Then I fly to my book as the opium smoker to his pipe.

Reading addiction.

Nell did a very interesting study.

It's in the book about reading before you go to sleep.

He had people come into his lab and bring a book.

These were dedicated pleasure readers, 26 people.

They'd bring a book that they were deeply involved in, that they really were enjoying.

Of the 26, 14 brought The Power of Reading by Steve Krashen.

He then asked them to sit down and he hooked them up with all kinds of devices, galvanic skin response, like lie detection, respiration, perspiration.

All these are measures of arousal.

First he got their baseline.

Then he asked them to start reading.

The arousal went up.

But then when they put the book down, the arousal level went below the baseline.

Reading relaxes you.

There's one other bedtime activity that does that, but we can talk about that later.

When he talked to these people, he found they were nearly all bedtime readers.

24 out of 26 read in bed nearly every night or most nights.

Even if I read for only five minutes, I must do it.

A compulsion like that of a drug addict.

My addiction to reading is such I almost can't sleep without a minimum of 10 minutes, usually 30 to 60 reading.

We keep worrying about how to get kids to read.

No, once they're into books, man, you can't get them to stop.

Same thing with us.

It's our book that counts.

Okay, we've got two things going for reading.

It gives you all these grammatical and vocabulary things and it's fun.

There's more.

Reading makes you smarter.

It gives you knowledge.

When I talk about these studies, I'm about to tell you, I'm really talking about fiction because these are studies in which they ask readers how much they know about certain topics, compare them to non-readers, et cetera.

When they ask people how much they read, they're talking mostly about fiction.

Victor Nell's data confirms this.

Two-thirds of books taken out of libraries are fiction.

I'm in favor of non-fiction.

I'm not against it.

I think it's great.

I write a lot of it.

People accuse me of writing fiction, but it's not true, okay?

I looked at the New York Times bestseller list for young people, 10 books, all fiction.

It is fiction we're talking about.

Keith Stanovich, University of Michigan, a number of studies correlating how much people say they read and how much they know about certain topics.

People who read more know more about literature.

This makes sense.

They know more about history.

How do you like that?

They know more about science.

You get all these things from reading stories.

They have more cultural literacy.

We're all concerned with this.

They have more everyday practical knowledge.

Readers are not nerds.

They know more about everything.

Career success and reading.

Keith Simonton is my all-time favorite author on research on creativity.

One of his books, his conclusion is, omnivorous reading in childhood and adolescence correlates positively with ultimate adult success.

Lots of case histories, only two, just for illustration.

Malcolm X. I saw the Malcolm X movie.

Spike Lee, did you see that 10, 15 years ago?

It's a very good movie.

Denzel Washington played Malcolm X.

He was so good that he was a better Malcolm X than Malcolm X.

It was so convincing.

Anyway, the movie was very good, except they left something out, which was in the autobiography of Malcolm X, and that's his history as a reader.

He says in the autobiography, when he grew up in the Midwest, when he was in seventh grade, he was the president of his class doing okay, but then the family moved east, and he said his life in the streets erased everything he had ever learned in school.

In prison, in his early 20s, he met a significant other, very important term in sociology, someone who opens a path for you.

This other prisoner introduced him to the library, the prison library.

Malcolm X says, I became a reader.

You couldn't have gotten me out of books with a wedge.

He tells about every night the guards would come by with flashlights.

He was under the cover reading, reading with a flashlight, just like you did when you were in high school.

My favorite quote from the book, he said, a reporter telephoned me asking questions.

One was, what's your alma mater?

I told him, books.

Michael Faraday, genius scientist, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, chemist who basically discovered electromagnetism and changed the world.

Einstein had Faraday's picture on his wall.

Well, as you see, he lived 1791, 1867, a while ago.

Let me tell you his story.

Michael Faraday grew up in London, lived in very high poverty.

When he was 10 years old, he left school and was apprenticed to a bookbinder.

The bookbinder changed the world.

We owe a lot to this bookbinder.

He told Michael Faraday when he was a little boy, yeah, I want you to help me get the books together, put them together.

Take some time off.

It's okay.

Take a few hours a day.

Read the books.

You'll find them very interesting.

Michael Faraday read for 10 years.

He read everything.

He read Aesop's fables.

He read everything.

When he hit his 20s, he realized he wanted to be a scientist.

It was reading that helped him find out what he wanted to do, his life path.

He got apprenticed to a chemist, a famous chemist, published his first paper when he was 26, and changed the world with his research.

Michael Faraday never took a test.

Michael Faraday never studied.

Got that?

He had the two components that I think are the basics of an education, free voluntary reading and try to solve problems of great interest to you.

Those are the two crucial characteristics, and you'll see that schools that work encourage these two.

Individuals who've made it without school, Edison, Lincoln, all had these two components.

I want to present a new hypothesis today.

I should give you young people some advice.

Would you like to become a big shot like me and have people quote you and be invited to give speeches?

And, oh, Dr. Krashen, we thought you were much older.

We thought you were dead.

My grandmother took a class, and I get this all the time, oh, yeah, I took your, I saw your stuff.

I'll tell you the secret.

Invent new terminology.

It's worked for me, and it doesn't matter if you invented the idea.

People will think you did.

I keep getting credit for affective filter.

It wasn't my idea.

It was Julian Burt.

I keep telling them, but they don't care.

They give me the credit.

Comprehensible input.

A lot of people knew about that before I did.

James Asher knew about it, Kenneth Goodman, Frank Smith, a lot of people did.

I put it in a theory, gave it a name, et cetera, so I get the credit.

Some things I made up.

Some things I didn't.

And you've got to make sure the terminology is not too clear, because if it's really clear, people think they're just as smart as you are.

And if it's a little bit confusing, they think you must be a lot smarter.

Those of you who have taken courses in my work, I plus one.

Everybody's confused.

I really scored with that one.

So I gave you a new one.

Compelling comprehensible input.

My idea.

Give me credit.

Here's another one.

I have a hypothesis called the conduit hypothesis.

I didn't call it there, but I'll tell you what it is.

I hypothesize that we develop academic language in three universal stages.

You know what academic language is.

That's a bad term.

It should be specialized language, because when you say academic language, it gives the false message that everyone should go to college, which is not a good idea, in my opinion.

Not at all.

The Obama administration has really pushed this.

I really like President Obama, but his education policy, believe it or not, is worse than the

Bush administration.

Can you imagine?

And it's getting even worse, all right?

Anyway, they keep sending this message, college, college, college.

They say or career, but they keep saying college over and over.

And this is a mistake.

I don't think college is better.

I think it's different.

For some people, for me, it was exactly right.

For a lot of people, it isn't.

You need to do your specialized genius work in some other area that does not involve college work.

We have done our society a disservice by focusing on college as universal.

I will quote John Gardner, former secretary in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton, and he had this quote, if we praise mediocre philosophy and we disrespect competent plumbing, neither our theories nor our pipes will hold water.

This is exactly what's happening.

Vocational education is gone from schools in the United States.

The government keeps telling us there are shortages and shortages in technical areas.

We need everyone to get engineering degrees.

No, it's not true.

The same thing is happening in Canada.

I've read the research for you.

It's the same as ours.

There's actually a surplus.

There's no shortage in technology.

There are three engineers for every job.

This is overwhelming.

In computers, there are enough computer programmers, exactly.

There are a few little shortages in some areas in computer software development, but it's not large because there's not a lot of people involved.

I'll tell you where the shortages are, and I got this from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the states, elementary school teachers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians.

This is where the jobs are, and these people will have jobs long after the computer programmer is out of work because they have changed the computers around so much.

You've got to come up and do a new program, et cetera.

Let's talk about, I'll sometimes slip and say academic language, we're really talking about specialized language that people need in their specialties.

I maintain there are three stages that are universal for first language and second language.

I'll tell you what I think they are, and I'll give you a case history as I go.

Stage one, stories.

Lots and lots of stories.

In first language, we have a very rich research literature on this.

Children who are read to regularly, either at home or at school, outperform children who are not read to regularly on any kind of a test you give them.

It works because they hear a higher form of language that they don't normally hear in conversation.

They get a little bit of book language, and they get excited about books, and they want to read on their own.

There's a wonderful program in the states called Reach Out and Read.

It's amazing.

They work in high poverty areas, and they work through hospitals, and they wait till children come in for free checkups called a well child visit.

They meet with the parents and the child, a volunteer will read stories to the child in the waiting room, and give some hints to the mom or dad how it's done.

When they see the pediatrician, the pediatrician gives them a free book.

That's the entire treatment.

You know, we spend millions of dollars on these fancy tests and things.

No, just give them a book and tell them how to do it.

They have published about six high quality papers.

Children in these who are influenced by Reach Out and Read, with as little as three or four visits, make up anywhere from a third to half the gap between the rich and the poor on vocabulary.

So this is quite, this is the power of read alouds.

In second language acquisition, we have a program I'm very enthusiastic about.

How many of you have heard of TPRS?