"Fifteen-year-old students who are highly engaged readers and whose parents have the lowest occupational status achieve significantly higher average reading scores (540) than students whose parents have the highest occupational status but who are poorly engaged in reading," the report says. All the students who are highly engaged in reading achieve reading literacy scores that are significantly above the international mean, whatever their family background." - BBC News
"Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics. For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education)... Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home." - eScienceNews (May 2010) and Nevada News (May 2010) and EducationNews.org (May 2010) and Evidence Based Mommy (Aug 2010)
"When children read for pleasure, when they get “hooked on books," they acquire, involuntarily and without conscious effort, nearly all of the so-called "language skills" many people are so concerned about: They will become adequate readers, acquire a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical constructions, develop a good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect) spellers. Although free voluntary reading alone will not ensure attainment of the highest levels of literacy, it will at least ensure an acceptable level. Without it, I suspect that children simply do not have a chance. " - (Krashen 1993:84) Quotes from the Power of Reading
Reading Volume and General Knowledge
"The results indicated that the more avid readers in our study —regardless of their general abilities— knew more about how a carburetor worked, were more likely to know who their United States senators were, more likely to know how many teaspoons are equivalent to one tablespoon, were more likely to know what a stroke was, and what a closed shop in a factory was, etc. - "What Reading Does for the Mind" by Anne E. Cunningham, Associate Professor of Cognition and Development (pdf) - Excerpt
Research: Reading Voluminously and VoluntarilyOverview - Scholastic (pdf)
"The connection between leisure reading activities and reading achievement has been established by numerous studies (e.g., Watkins and Ewards, 1992). Part of the reason for this connection may be that students who frequently read for fun not only gain practice in the process of reading, but also are likely to be exposed to a broad scope of topics and situations in their reading that can provide a base from which future reading experiences are enriched and made more meaningful. A clear connection between frequent reading for fun and higher average reading scores is suggested by the NAEP 1994 (and 1992) results. At all three grades, students who more frequently read for fun on their own time had higher average proficiencies." - NAEP (1994)
"Over the past 20 years, I’ve reviewed scores of studies that have compared students in classes that include SSR with those that don’t, and I’m confident that children who read for pleasure do as well or better than their SSR-deprived peers. And the longer the program, the greater the gains. In eight out of 10 studies that tracked pupils in long-term SSR programs of 12 months or more, students who read recreationally outperformed their counterparts in classes that lacked leisure reading—and in the other two studies, there was no difference between the two groups." - School Library Journal (Jan 2006)
Independent Reading and School Achievement - "Voluntary reading involves personal choice, reading widely from a variety of sources, and choosing what one reads. Aliterates, people who have the ability to read but choose not to, miss just as much as those who cannot read at all. Individuals read to live life to its fullest, to earn a living, to understand what is going on in the world, and to benefit from the accumulated knowledge of civilization. Even the benefits of democracy and the capacity to govern ourselves successfully depend on reading." - American Library Association
88 Generalizations about Free Voluntary Reading - Stephen Krashen
Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds "We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," - The New York Times (Dec 2005)
"Reading books is the only out-of-school activity for 16-year-olds that is linked to getting a managerial or professional job in later life, says an Oxford study." - Science Daily (May 2011)
"The Power of Reading - Project Research Summary 2005 - 2009" - CLPE (May 2009) pdf
Book flood describes the recent theory, tested in a number of countries, that being exposed to literature will help students learn English as a second language more quickly and effectively than more traditional methods. - Wikipedia
Free Voluntary Reading and Autonomy in Second Language Acquisition: Improving TOEFL Scores from Reading Alone - Beniko Mason
"In the early grades, children learn to read; in middle school and beyond, they read to learn. Without good comprehension skills, kids lack the ability to manage more difficult text, and their progress across the curriculum suffers. Sadder still, they often lose interest in reading. The process has become more difficult, yet their skills have not caught up. They view reading as tedious, boring, and useless. It doesn’t offer the immediate reinforcement they crave. Unfortunately, reading for pleasure has become somewhat of a rarity among kids. - Youth Development (March 2007)
Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) leads to improved reading skills, writing skills, comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and general knowledge.
"Science backs this up. When researchers tried to figure out what helped third- and fourth-graders remember what they read, they found that the students’ interest in the passage was far more important than the “readability” of the passage — thirty times more important." - Psychology Today Blogl (Oct 2010)
Early love of books, including turning the pages!
Does Educational TV Make You a Better Student?
"Preschool children who watched a few hours a week of educational programming perform better on achievement tests over time than their peers who watch more general entertainment shows, according to researchers at the University of Texas in Austin." - Center for Media Literacy
Note: the researchers did not compare preschool children who watched educational programming with preschool children who watched no TV. Instead, they compared preschool children who watched educational programming with preschool children who watched general entertainment shows. They found that the preschool children who watched educational programming performed better than the preschool children who watched general entertainment shows.
But their study gives the erroneous impression that educational programming is better for preschool children than no television.
Subtitling: "In fact, almost 50 percent of Finnish television consists of foreign TV programs and movies that must be read — and read quickly — in order to be understood. Finnish 9-year-olds want to learn to read in order to understand TV and therefore watch a moderately heavy amount. By age 14, however, the situation reverses itself and Nordic children who watch a light amount of TV outscore the heavy viewers." - Trelease on Reading
Planet Read "Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is a simple yet powerful idea by which lyrics are added as subtitles to film songs on TV programs. Words are highlighted in perfect timing as they are sung. This association of the spoken and written word is a proven method to improve reading skills." (India) Article about Planet Read
"Similarly, we have analyzed a variety of other misconceptions in a number of other different domains—including knowledge of World War II, the world’s languages, and the components of the federal budget—and all of them replicate the pattern shown for this question. The cognitive anatomy of misinformation appears to be one of too little exposure to print (or reading) and over-reliance on television for information about the world. Although television viewing can have positive associations with knowledge when the viewing is confined to public television, news, and/or documentary material (Hall, Chiarello, & Edmondson, 1996; West & Stanovich, 1991; West et al., 1993), familiarity with the prime time television material that defines mass viewing in North America is most often negatively associated with knowledge acquisition. - "What Reading Does for the Mind" by Anne E. Cunningham, Associate Professor of Cognition and Development (pdf) - Excerpt
"Middle-class 6-year-olds matched for sex, age, pretest WPPSI IQ, and TV-viewing time were blindly assigned to a restricted TV-viewing group or an unrestricted group. Restricted parents halved subjects' previous TV-viewing rates and interacted 20 min./day with subjects for a 6-week period. Unrestricted TV parents provided similar interactions but did not limit viewing. Results tentatively suggest that TV restriction enhanced Performance IQ, reading time, and reflective Matching Familiar Figures scores." - Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (Winter 1980)
...watching a lot of television during childhood means you are a lot less likely to have a degree by your mid-twenties, according to new University of Otago research - University of Otago
"Children under the age of three who are allowed to watch too much television have below-average reading abilities by the time they are six, a new study claims." - Telegraph (Nov 2005)
"Middle school students who watch TV or play video games during the week do worse in school, a new study finds, but weekend viewing and gaming doesn't affect school performance much." - USAToday (Oct 2006)
Rembering what you see on TV: researchers found that when formal features (camera edits) increased to more than 10 in 2 minutes (that is greater than once every 12 seconds) that viewers remembered much less. - Scientific American (Feb 2002)
"A major study that compared 10 communities with or without television revealed that television viewing had the greatest impact on other media use, such as comic reading, listening to the radio, and going to the movies.17 Television viewing had little influence on the time that children spent reading books or doing homework, even during its early introductory stages." - AAP Pediatrics (Feb 2006)
So basically the authors concluded that the hours that children spend watching television did not displace reading because reading comic books does not count as "reading". Also note their term "even during its early introductory stages". During TV's early introductory stages people (adults and children) watched much less TV than is common today.
"The most striking results were generational. In general, older Dutch people read more. It would be natural to infer from this that each generation reads more as it ages, and, indeed, the researchers found something like this to be the case for earlier generations. But, with later ones, the age-related growth in reading dwindled. The turning point seems to have come with the generation born in the nineteen-forties. By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago." - The New Yorker (Dec 2007)
Light Reading
Comic Books
"Zappa...reveals he became devoted to comics as a child because they helped him get to grips with dyslexia. He tells Royal Flush magazine, "Comics first got me reading... I fell in love with the pictures and the stories. "I designed MCFearless for dyslexics like myself with tons of images, to really engage the reader on every page and make the reader want to know how these images connect. I actually drew 300 monsters for that purpose."" - ContactMusic (Dec 2009)
"And along with librarians, teachers also are embracing comics, both for recreational and instructional reading." - USA Today
Graffix is a fiction series in comic-strip format, designed for reluctant readers - Word Pool
"There is no current research that I know of on the use of graphic novels, but there is evidence suggesting that comic book reading can be a conduit to "heavier" reading. In our study, we found that middle school boys who read comic books read more in general than boys who did not read comics, read more books, and enjoyed reading more (Ujiie and Krashen, 1996)... There are also compelling case histories of children who were reluctant readers until they discovered comics... Comic reading led to other reading. After a year or two, Haugaard's eldest son gave his collection away to his younger brother (who now "pores over the comic books lovingly"), and Haugaard noted that "he is far more interested now in reading Jules Verne and Ray Bradbury, books on electronics and science encyclopedias" - Stephen Krashen - Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California
“Dorrell and Carroll (1981) show how comic books can be used to stimulate additional reading. They placed comic books in a junior high school library but did not allow them to circulate; students had to come to the library to read the comics. Dorrell and Carroll then compared the circulation of non-comic book material and total library use during the 74 days the comics were in the library, and the 57 days before they were available. The presence of comics resulted in a dramatic 82 percent increase in library use (traffic) and a 30 percent increase in circulation of non-comic material.” - The Power of Reading - page 108
Teen Romance
"Kyung-Sook Cho... worked with a group of women in their thirties who, despite years of formal training (grammar-based) study of English in Korea and considerable residence in the United States, had made little progress in English. Cho first suggested that her subjects read books from the Sweet Valley High series, written for girls 12 and older. These books proved to be too difficult; and they could only be read with great effort, and with extensive recourse to the dictionary. Cho then asked her subjects to try Sweet Valley Twins, novels based on the same characters but at a younger age, written for readers ages 8 to 12. Once again, the texts were too difficult. Cho then recommended Sweet Valley Kids, novels dealing with the same characters at an even younger age, written for readers ages five to eight. Her subjects, all adults, became enthusiastic Sweet Valley Kids readers."
"Cho reported significant vocabulary growth in her readers... and also gathered informal evidence of their progress, including reports from their friends... Perhaps the most impressive result is the report of one of her subjects one year after she started reading Sweet Valley books. After one year, this subject, who had never read for pleasure in English prior to this study, had read all 34 Sweet Valley Kids books, had read many books from the Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley High series, and had started to read Danielle Steele, Sydney Sheldon, and other authors of romances in English" - The Power of Reading - page 111
Home Run Books
"Trelease (2001) introduced the concept of a "home run" book, a reading experience that readers claim stimulated their initial interest in reading... It was difficult to characterize home run books, because, as in other studies, children named a wide variety of home run books. Very few titles were selected by more than a handful of students. The champion home run book was Harry Potter (19), followed by Goosebumps (11), the Three Little Pigs (11), Dr. Seuss (6), Animorphs (5), Scary Stories (5) and Winnie the Pooh (5)... In agreement with previous studies, a large percentage of children reported that they had had a home run experience. Having a home run experience appears to typically lead to greater reading interest, but it does not guarantee it. It was clearly the case that more of those who had home run experiences became enthusiastic readers." - Stephen Krashen - Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California
"The research supports the commonsense view that when books are readily available, when the print environment is enriched, more reading is done. A print-rich environment in the home is related to how much children read; children who read have more books in the home..." - The Power of Reading - page 57
"The report, by the National Literacy Trust (NLT), found that pupils from lower earning families - defined as those eligible for free school meals - are less likely to read for pleasure and more likely to say that reading is "boring". They are also likely to have far fewer books at home." - Guardian Unlimited
"Whatever type of reader your child is, starting a book club can help foster a love of reading and provide a fun way to get families in your neighborhood together." - GreatSchools.net
"The critical role of self-selection is confirmed in this report from a reader interviewed by Carlsen and Sherrill (1988): As soon as I was progressing through the primary grades I remember a distinct lack of enthusiasm for reading because my mother tried to force books on me, which I disliked, either because they were too difficult or they were about subject matter in which I had no interest. My older sister had been extremely fond of horse stories and I could not tolerate them. - The Power of Reading - page 88
What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
"They found that children who used the Internet more had higher scores on standardized reading tests after six months, and higher grade point averages one year and 16 months after the start of the study than did children who used it less. More time spent reading, given the heavily text-based nature of Web pages, may account for the improvement. Jackson also suggests that there may be yet-undiscovered differences between reading online and reading offline that may make online reading particularly attractive to children and teenagers." - American Psychological Association (Nov 2007)
Summer Reading
""What we know is that children who do not read in the summer lose two to three months of reading development while kids who do read tend to gain a month of reading proficiency," Allington said. "This creates a three to four month gap every year. Every two or three years the kids who don't read in the summer fall a year behind the kids who do."" - Science Daily (July 2010)
"Regardless of other activities, the best predictor of summer loss or summer gain is whether or not a child reads during the summer. And the best predictor of whether a child reads is whether or not he or she owns books. While economically-advantaged kids often have their own bedroom libraries, poor kids usually depend heavily on schools for books to read." - Scholastic.com
"Is 'Summer Setback' the smoking gun in the 'reading gap' between rich and poor?" - Trelease On Reading
Highlights of Research on Summer Reading and Effects on Student Achievement - New York State Library
Libraries
"Elley found the availability of books is a key factor in reading achievement. He studied the reading achievement of children in 32 countries and found that factors which consistently differentiated high-scoring and low-scoring countries were large school libraries, large classroom libraries, regular book borrowing, frequent silent reading in class, and frequent story reading aloud by teachers. The highest scoring countries typically provide their students with greater access to books in the home, in nearby community libraries and book stores, and in the school." - EdResearch.info
"Over the past four years, 750 schools and nearly 1000 teachers have been directly involved in the Power of Reading project... The project aims to enhance teachers’ and children’s pleasure in reading and raise children’s achievement through developing teachers’ knowledge of literature and its use in the primary classroom... The response from teachers, children, school leaders and LAs has been one of overwhelming enthusiasm." - CLPE (2009 / 2010)
"The Power of Reading - Project Research Summary 2005 - 2009" - CLPE (May 2009) pdf
"Teacher William Marson shares his success in motivating sixth-graders to read using a program he calls Reading for Fun (RFF)." - Education World
"Over the past 20 years, I’ve reviewed scores of studies that have compared students in classes that include SSR with those that don’t, and I’m confident that children who read for pleasure do as well or better than their SSR-deprived peers. And the longer the program, the greater the gains. In eight out of 10 studies that tracked pupils in long-term SSR programs of 12 months or more, students who read recreationally outperformed their counterparts in classes that lacked leisure reading—and in the other two studies, there was no difference between the two groups." - School Library Journal (Jan 2006)
"This study examines the impact of an intervention targeting economically disadvantaged children in child care centres. The program was designed to flood over 330 child care centres with high quality children's books, at a ratio of 5 books per child, and provide 10 hours of training to child-care staff." - National Literacy Trust
Reading Connects - National Reading Campaign funded by the Department for Education and Skills (Britain) and the National Literacy Trust
"Get the kids to enjoy reading and writing; get them glasses if they need them; give teachers control of their classrooms. Scores climbed." - This American Life (Oct 2004)
Watching TV For Pleasure
New Study Finds Children Age Zero to Six Spend As Much Time With TV, Computers and Video Games As Playing Outside - Kaiser Family Foundation
"I had this sense of kids clamoring to use media and parents trying to keep their finger in the dam," lead researcher Victoria Rideout said. "I found that not to be a very accurate picture in most cases. Instead, a generation of parents raised on TV is largely encouraging the early use of television, video games and computers by their own children." - MSNBC (May 2006)
"According to the study of 1,183 people in January, which was released at TVB's annual marketing conference in New York, adults spent an average of 264.5 minutes per 24 hours watching TV, compared to 125.5 minutes for radio, 85 for the Internet, 20 for newspapers and 16.3 with magazines." - Broadcasting & Cable
The Gaming Krib Challenge - "The parent will now be able to limit the amount of time played with TV / video games / PC games / online activities and cell phone use after installing our suite of products."
Parents Reading to Their Young Children
"Poring over the works of Dr. Seuss, the adventures of the Bernstain Bears or exploring the worlds of Hans Christian Andersen with a child has always been a great parent-child bonding exercise. But, according to George Georgiou, a University of Alberta professor in educational psychology, it is instrumental for English-speaking children if they are to acquire the language skills, particularly comprehension, essential to their future reading ability." - Science Daily (Feb 2010)
"Parents should be encouraged not only to provide language input to their children through reading or storytelling but also to engage their children in two-sided conversations, the study concludes." - Science Daily (July 2009)
"Young children whose parents read aloud to them have better language and literacy skills when they go to school, according to a review published online ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood." - Science Daily (May 2008) and E! Science News (May 2008)
"Children whose mothers began reading to them daily at 14 months of age had more advanced vocabulary at age 3 than children whose mothers began reading to them daily at 24 months. Children whose parents began reading to them daily when they were 24 months had more advanced vocabularies than children whose parents did not begin reading to them daily before age 3. Thus, it is beneficial to start reading daily to children by 14 months (or earlier). Parents who begin reading regularly to children at an early age are more likely to continue to do so as children become older. Children who are frequently read to at early ages also have larger vocabularies, which seems to motivate their parents to read to them even more" - U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
"Toddlers read to daily by their mothers from an early age have bigger vocabularies and superior cognitive skills." - BPS Reseach (July 2006)
Read-Alouds are Good for Literacy Development: A Comment on Freakonomics - SixWise.com (Feb 2007)
"A familiar routine established from an early age can help to encourage a child to look forward to story time, as a way to end a day or as a form of bonding with a parent." - Suite101 (March 2007)
"There was greater frontal lobe activation in children when they were engaged in a picture book reading task with their mothers, as opposed to passive viewing of a videotape in which the story was read to them. Social and verbal engagement of the mother in reading picture books with her young child may mediate frontal brain activity in the child." - Pubmed (Oct 2009)
TV and Young Children
"The number of parents reading to their children regularly has fallen dramatically in the past two years, research has found. " - The Telegraph (Sept 2008)
"The scientists found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them." - Science Daily (Aug 2007)
"Children under the age of three who are allowed to watch too much television have below-average reading abilities by the time they are six, a new study claims." - Telegraph (Nov 2005)
"France's broadcast authority has banned French channels from marketing TV shows to children under 3 years old, to shield them from developmental risks it says television viewing poses at that age." - Otago Daily Times (Aug 2008)
"The results of this study have important implications for language acquisition. It indicates exposure to language via television is insufficient for teaching language to very young children. To learn new words, children must be actively engaged in the process with responsive language teachers." - Science Daily (July 2007)
"The public health implications of early television and video viewing are potentially large. There are both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that the effects of media exposure on children's development are more likely to be adverse before the age of about 30 months than afterward," - Science Daily (May 2007)
"There was greater frontal lobe activation in children when they were engaged in a picture book reading task with their mothers, as opposed to passive viewing of a videotape in which the story was read to them. Social and verbal engagement of the mother in reading picture books with her young child may mediate frontal brain activity in the child." - Pubmed (Oct 2009)
Reading and the Brain
"As the researchers report today in the journal Neuron, brain imaging of children between the ages of 8 and 10 showed that the quality of white matter -- the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of grey matter, where information is processed -- improved substantially after the children received 100 hours of remedial training. After the training, imaging indicated that the capability of the white matter to transmit signals efficiently had increased, and testing showed the children could read better." - Science Daily (Dec 2009)
"A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life." - Science Daily (Feb 2009)
"You can teach an old dog new tricks, say UCLA scientists who found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web." - Physorg.com (Oct 2009)
"Middle-class 6-year-olds matched for sex, age, pretest WPPSI IQ, and TV-viewing time were blindly assigned to a restricted TV-viewing group or an unrestricted group. Restricted parents halved subjects' previous TV-viewing rates and interacted 20 min./day with subjects for a 6-week period. Unrestricted TV parents provided similar interactions but did not limit viewing. Results tentatively suggest that TV restriction enhanced Performance IQ, reading time, and reflective Matching Familiar Figures scores." - Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (Winter 1980)
"Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive screen with Dolby surround sound while wearing 3-D glasses - we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such "inactivation" allows us to lose ourself in the movie" - Frontal Cortex (Jan 2010)
"There was greater frontal lobe activation in children when they were engaged in a picture book reading task with their mothers, as opposed to passive viewing of a videotape in which the story was read to them. Social and verbal engagement of the mother in reading picture books with her young child may mediate frontal brain activity in the child." - Pubmed (Oct 2009)
"Anyway, I started thinking about the difference between reading, in which you immerse yourself in another place, and film, in which you are immersed in another place. (You may notice a difference between "immersing yourself" and being "immersed.")" - Psychology Today (Oct 2010)
Reading and Intelligence
"Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Giraffe carpet cleaner, it does!" - Miller-McCune (Sept 2009)
"Hospital staff make better decisions using textual information rather than medical charts" - BPS Research Digest Blog (2010)
My own conclusion is that reading for pleasure (including comic books and trashy novels) is much, much better than any kind of television, even educational TV. Educational TV does impart more general knowledge than regular TV, but once the TV is in the house, it's very hard to control (like a Trojan Horse). But for kids who are heavy TV watchers, and who aren't very interested in reading, Mr. Trelese's suggestion of turning off the volume, and turning on the closed captioning was excellent.
Only 31% of college graduates were proficient! This helps explain, I think, this shocking fact.
A big selling point with TV is that it is both entertaining and educational. But after 50 years of research, it turns out that it isn't all that educational after all. Reading for pleasure, on the other hand, turns out to be not just educational, but essential for learning the literacy skills necessary for life in the 21st century.
So the next time you come home exhausted after a long day at work, consider sitting down with a good trashy novel or comic and losing yourself in the story line (with no commercials !) Your brain will get an enjoyable work-out and if you have children at home, they'll learn that reading can be fun and rewarding (from their most important role-model).
If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were
laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
"By imagining many possible worlds, argues novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley, fiction helps us understand ourselves and others." - Sharp Brains (Sept 2009)
"Those who read Chekhov's story changed significantly more in their personality traits and emotions than those who read the non-fiction-style courtroom report. The changes in personality were small but measurable, and they were mediated by their emotions: the more emotion people felt when reading, the larger the change in personality." - Psychology Today Blog (Sept 2010)
"While previous treatments—painkillers, physiotherapy, acupuncture, hyperbaric oxygen therapy—have failed, the self-prescribed reading cure works." - Daily Good (Oct 2010)
"Reading books is the only out-of-school activity for 16-year-olds that is linked to getting a managerial or professional job in later life, says an Oxford study." - 
