ACUTV proudly presents
On Campus with your host, ACU
vice president and dean of campus life,
Dr. Gary McCaleb.
Here's Gary.
Yeah, he's walking down the same
Sebesta, professor of reading
in the College of Education at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
Thank you for being with us today.
I'm delighted we're looking forward to
this conversation because it deals
with an area that is so basic and
education, I think, as we talk about it.
And we hear a lot of expressions of
concern today from various quarters
about how our reading skills
are being developed in the young people
today. Could you give us something
of a sort of general assessment of where
you from your point of expertize
see how we're doing today
in our schools?
Well, Dr. McCaleb, I'm less an expert
than I thought I was.
I started twenty six years ago at
Seattle University of Washington, fresh
out of Stanford.
And I thought I knew a lot more about
reading than I realized.
I know today it's
it's so easy to think of
reading as some little trick that people
learn. But actually, reading reading
is it takes everything
from an individual. It's mental, it's
emotional and physical.
And it's so much a part of our culture
that how people read and what
they read for. It's all embedded in our
culture.
And since I went into this business, it's
changed a great deal.
It seems to me that in the past,
oh, let's say 10 years,
research has taught us a lot about how to
teach reading, how to get along in
reading. And I do think
children do read better than they did.
We have some data on this and there
is a national assessment that until at
least recently, it was showing
a kind of steady improvement in how to
read.
But the situation today,
I think, is that the wanting
to read is going down.
At least the voluntary
amount of voluntary reading children do
has descended, really has
we have some figures and then I'd like to
talk about them.
And I
like to talk about the 90s about what we
can do.
There's so many difficulties in society
as social difficulties that
accompany reading problems that I think
you have to look at the children who are
malnourished, children who
who just have an awfully hard time
functioning in school.
And some of those problems, it seems to
me, precede success
in reading, because reading will
straighten up when a child I think feels
is one. And I've just come
from a conference of teachers and
it's the same high that I usually
feel in these things. I do about 30 of
these a year and
I just want to put in a plug for
teachers. I have never
this year or last year, the year before,
I worked with groups of three or
four hundred teachers. I've never worked
with a group of teachers, but that I've
come away inspired by them.
Society doesn't realize how
much teachers have had to
stand in the place of parents and
caretakers,
and I can see no other way
that teachers can respond and to
take on those responsibilities.
A teacher today can't be like a teacher
of the turn of the century.
Nineteen hundred any more than the
man on the moon, because to date
a teacher has so many responsibilities
to make those children feel wanted and
loved and to buoy
up their spirits and to
motivate them to learn in such a way that
was not so much needed
in times past.
But I think this is true.
Let's let's look a little bit at
the past and present as a and
in order to lay a basis for them where
we were, you see us going in the future
in the nineteen, nineties and beyond.
You mentioned that
you were seeing a decline in
voluntary reading.
Have you been able to identify causes
of that or reasons why everybody's
looking at causes?
But I think
I hate to say this on a TV program.
I think that I don't
do a blanket statement, say that it's TV,
but it's it's a
nonjudgmental use
of TV by parents or
whoever is at home and children.
That's one thing, though.
It's it's it's a little
more complex than that.
It's also the child being very rushed.
But I think my feeling is, above
all, it's that children have not really
seen the rewards of reading.
And the average child,
I can give you sources,
but the average child in America today
does from two to four
minutes of voluntary reading.
That's reading. That's not a sign.
That's not going to book report or
something like that.
But just to pick up a book or any kind
of print on your own, the sports page,
any of those things, and just sit down
and read it as a child on
your own, two to four.
It's the variety is
great, there are children who read 15
minutes a day, average or more,
but there is an awfully large number
of children who read zero minutes per
day.
What when you say they just don't see the
rewards or the benefits in reading
what happened in earlier generations
that were there some
things there in which they did see the
rewards and benefits?
Well, you know, I've written about this
and I'm never quite sure if I've written
something that I was right.
But it seems to me where I grew up,
I was in Kansas.
We had we didn't have electric lights.
We gaslight the mantels.
Things you're younger than.
Well, anyway, we had lights so that one
person could read and the others had to
listen. And so at night was
we were on the farm.
We would sit there and my grandma would
read aloud to us.
Well, I learned to really be excited
about the next chapter.
And I think a parent
or someone at home, I would always say
parent, because that that's no longer
realistic. Somebody at home reading to
a child. That's one way.
And I think we've lost that a great deal.
We still have people who read
aloud, but they don't read very well.
It seems to me I'm getting
older, that there was a time when people,
the oral tradition carried its
interbreeding better.
I think we've been neglecting that.
Another thing I think it's been the fault
of schools probably
get in trouble on this, but
I think that we were so scientific
and so systems oriented and
shoving those skills so hard in the 1960s
and 70s especially, that
we forgot to teach children why
they were doing it, that there was
enjoyment in it.
In schools in my area of the country,
their children might have to be
responsible for one hundred twenty five.
They call them skills accomplishing
these skills. And often they were taught
in isolation.
And I think that.
That was wrong, and I think it was
a bad part of the program, and I hope
that that's going past us in the 1990s.
So are you recommending them some
educational reform
changes that they would correct
for some of these?
I sound like one of these people who sits
here and says it's all phonics.
That's not what I mean.
But I do think that what I
well, I just got through working with 300
teachers who are my teachers.
They are they they put motivation
very high on
one of my friends in this business.
Roger, great man says a child
will learn whatever he or she wants to
learn.
And I think that's that's
been missing a lot in reading.
We have the evidence at that time.
So.
Well, with that, is that as a
temporary basis for looking into
the future, what are the things
you see on the horizon?
Should we speak now of things that can be
done at home or school or both,
or what's coming up?
What do we know?
What why don't we talk, first of all
about home and then let's broaden
it into school and OK
and the nation.
Are we up to this
by our book?
Well, some wonderful
things are happening in the you know
what I what I'd say above all
else is that so much of what's happening
now might be called a grassroots
movement.
It's coming less from
college professors and research
things and coming more from teachers
like the ones with whom I work today and
good parents and parents are against
people at home.
I think I'll name a few things.
One of the things that has slowly grown
in good homes.
I want to precede this by saying
something very significant,
and I'm not making it up,
someone has just done a research study,
which is coming up in January.
Her name is Marilyn Adams, which says,
just listen to this.
The average child has had three
thousand hours of literacy training
before he and she he or she starts
to school.
Now, you start to sing what is literacy
training? It's when you go to the grocery
store and that child picks up the
breakfast food and sees that saying, you
say wheat.
And last night on I was getting on an
airplane and I watched a four year old
run over and put his hands around
the sign that said no smoking on this
flight and ask his mother what it meant.
And she read it to him.
She pointed out the words that's called
pre literacy training, that's literacy
training the average child.
And when you sit down, read to a child
when even more important,
sometimes when the child says, I want
to write to grandma and he starts to
scribble and you sit down, say, oh, yeah,
what do you sing? That's literacy
training.
The average child has had three thousand
hours of literacy training and
an unlucky child may have had
30 hours or three hundred hours and much
less so.
What I think the most necessary thing in
the 90s would be to talk to homes about
how to give literacy training.
I have some ideas.
One is the environmental period.
Knowing that the golden arches
mean something, are we supposed to say
brand things?
OK, because I think brand
names are one of the most significant
ways of helping very young children learn
to read that they can pick out
McDonald's.
And, you know, you say, well, we can't
stop there unless you point out the word
to me, make
it interesting.
That's one way environmental print
all over the place, if that's enough
on that.
And second is the great move
to know that very young
children can write.
There is a stage where a
one year old just, you know, scrawls
all over. But then there comes a stage
where it starts to be in print.
He starts or she starts to make lines
and scribble in lines.
We know now that there is a first
movement toward writing and that is a
kind of literacy that we must
develop later the child may
be able to make.
I have a dear friend who's three
and she can now write her name.
Her name consists.
Her name is Alice, and she makes a
good stab at an A and then the rest is a
bunch of stuff and you don't
stand there and say that's not the way to
do it. You said, that's your name, that's
great. You write your name.
So every child in the age of four should
believe that he or she can write.
We call this invented spelling
when a child writes just some
of the letters, but we don't sit there
and say that's not the way to spell that,
because spelling works in the evidence
shows they become better spellers.
But more important than that, they become
better readers because they've had that
orientation.
The most wonderful thing to teach parents
or other adults at home
is how you can help a child.
Right. Or you can sit and write for
the child and let him or her read it back
like a letter to grandma or a
letter in the dog or anything.
She's like, oh, yes, please.
This is fascinating.
It's fascinating.
I think it's really it's
interesting to see how there are
sometimes I think homes and parents
feel that there's really very little
I can do.
It's up to the school. Yeah, I know.
And what you're pointing out here is, is
there so much that can be done
in this preliterate preliterate, collect
napkins and
napkins, have things printed on like
McDonald's napkins?
I don't know what you got around here.
We've go we have different sets of pay,
hansei say or pay less.
And everywhere you go, collect napkins,
put the napkins up on the
refrigerator, on the wall somewhere and
see if the child can identify which
napkin is from where.
And don't make a mean thing.
I won't make a game of it.
And it's wonderful.
That's pretty literacy training.
Yeah, neat.
So, so.
And with that kind of as a
basis, you're creating a sort of
cooperative arrangement
between homes and school and the
students learning.
It has been ten years since I have
met at kindergarten or first grade
teacher who would scold
a parent for having helped
a child get oriented to print.
No, that's gone.
I still hear college
professors talk about such teachers,
but they don't exist, to my knowledge,
and they shouldn't.
So are there other things?
Are we ready to move on now?
I'd like to talk about one other thing.
I'd like to show a book just for good.
Now, this is a book, and this
is not a book of any
particular significance.
This is just an example.
But I just wanted to have something
before us.
What I would call
good literacy training
for children of any age is
not a parent or parent surrogate
who sits in. Has been quiet.
I'm going to read you this book, but
rather the parent or parent surrogate who
says we're going to interact as I read
this book so that the child follows that
he or she looks at the print as the
parent reads it, the parent can even
start and say, I don't see where it says
rock and give the child
the chance to get this concept of word
and frame that you don't want.
If you point to a word with a young
child, then look at your finger.
But if you frame it like this and they
can, then you're starting to get in the
concept a word we don't we're not born
with a concept of what a word is and all
that. We're not born with left to right
and going down the page.
We're not even born knowing that this is
the print and this is the picture for
that matter. So there's a lot there.
So what they're finding and
you have a wonderful man in Texas,
William Tiel, where
he's down south here somewhere, is in
Texas. William Tell, who's
a great expert on it's probably the best,
best expert in the country, what I'm
talking about. So he should be here.
But it's the idea that he
uses the term scaffolding, a parent
reading a book to a child better,
much better than a teacher with 30 kids
in the room, a parent who sits down and
says, this is the period.
Hey, where did it say rock can do so
much more interaction yet?
I still see parents who say, I read
to my child, I have my child go to bed
and lie in bed, and I sit there and read
the book. You see, you're losing some of
the power of interaction with the child.
As you read the thing, I want to point
out, what can I ask one question?
Because in reading books to
my little nieces and nephews and things
like that, at times I'll
pick up a book or let them pick out a
book.
And often they pick out a book that has
been read to them dozens and dozens
of times before, which I'm going
to say, oh, if you've already read this
book, we've got to find a new book to do
them.
But from what you're describing there, a
lot of that literacy training works
in reading those books they've read
before because we don't open it up and
start a sentence and they already know
the rest is so wonderful and
there's research on that.
And that's actually
a woman named Barbara Keefer that she
called it repeated exposure,
found a lot of things.
A child who wants to hear a book over
and over. She also found that
kindergarten children will go and pick
out those books, always the ones they are
familiar with. The familiar thing, I
don't know whether that really carries
into adulthood. It carries into fourth
grade, third grade.
I see a lot of kids who read the same
book over and over, and they really do.
They're not lying about it.
They just they really want to read those
books to get that satisfaction
in, don't you? Sometimes.
Don't you read Robert Ludlum or someone
who are you going to read some things
again?
Yeah, but you see, he writes the same
book over and over, I think.
And so you read it again.
It's actually a different kind of a
different name, but it's characters
different.
When you take a break for just a minute,
we'll come back and pick up at this
point. OK, talk about other things we can
do. All right. We're visiting today with
Dr. Sam Sebesta.
Tired of getting up on the wrong side of
bed and now for a quick
rundown of today's disaster.
Instead, with intelligence,
depth, whimsy,
business, the arts
commentator.
Morning Edition from National Public
Radio.
Break it in.
This is radio news, the way it's meant
to be, Bruce.
We're back on campus and continuing to
visit with Dr. Sam Sebesta as we talk
about reading and we've been talking
about the importance of pre literacy
training and literacy literacy training.
As you were talking about, we were
talking about some books that
demonstrated ways that parents
can be involved in doing that, which is
so important.
And you were about to make and I like to
make one more point on this and then we
can go on anything else.
But I did want to show this one.
It's not that I'm advertising these
books in particular, but they're they're
a type.
This we must pay attention
to is nonfiction.
And more and more publishers
are presenting these books that are
pretty easy to read and that deal with
nonfiction.
And one of the findings, especially from
some work in Harlem, in New York,
has shown that preschool children,
even before 1st grade, have more
interest in reading nonfiction or having
nonfiction read than fiction is that
we even I mean,
even the people who are reading up until
a few years ago, we would think, you
know, a small child must have a story,
but there is a lot of evidence now that
they want real things.
One theory is they're getting a lot of
their stories from other sources like
Saturday Morning TV and other such
things. But really
to be interested, I know four year olds
who want trucks and they don't want a
story about a truck.
They want a book of trucks or locomotives
and things like that. So I did want to
tell parents and others
do look at the nonfiction interests of
young children.
We have a number of other books here,
types of books.
I'd love to show the types of books,
knowing what I'm talking now
about elementary and secondary.
And I want to point out
two or three things, actually.
One thing is that
we're serving the best classrooms.
I mean, questions that have the highest
voluntary reading, high voluntary
reading.
And we're trying to see what it is that
goes on in those classrooms.
I'm going to talk for a minute
about three things that we found in those
classes. Actually have a lot of data on
this. And you were going to hold down,
and that's my son.
You know, we have failing in classes
that have high voluntary reading where
kids seem to have high attitude.
We also do an attitude survey and I was
speaking really of grades to on
up. We find there's a great emphasis
in those classrooms on whole books.
And when I say whole books, I'm not
talking about textbooks.
We're talking about children's books and
young adult books, fiction and
nonfiction. So great emphasis there
on those things. Second, in this this
we've got to learn is that they're
interactive.
The kids in those classrooms online,
those kids read in order to share.
I read this book. I want to tell you that
Nelia so we used
to say, oh, if you just see this child
silently, they do silent reading and they
sit and read their books and will be
great when it isn't.
They don't seem to and then doesn't
come up, they don't do more voluntarily.
They're just so you mean you build
in opportunities for them to tell about.
Yes.
That they've been one of the recent
things. I think you got some work going
on here maybe. And this is literature
circles, four to seven kids
sitting in a discussion
group and talking about a book, sometimes
the same book, the book they read.
Sometimes each one has read a book
on the same, let's say the same topic
and third guidance.
And here guidance simply means the
teacher or some knowing adult
or librarian.
Maybe a parent will get in there and talk
bookstore person.
Anyway, somebody who knows about books
for kids goes in and helps kids
make selections, gives them some
guidance.
And that seems to be very important.
You know, there are three thousand
children's books published each year
and only about three hundred of them are
worth reading.
I wouldn't say it's sort of you say
kids should self select what a child
in a bookstore is at sea.
So are most adults, frankly.
What kind of advice do you give
to parents in this realm of
guidance if they say, you know, my child
isn't reading much, but I've been talking
to him lately and he or she has said,
yeah, what would be some good books for
me to read? How do you know?
How do you provide the right guy?
I don't. I have some ideas.
Look at we'll look at this.
And I have two kinds of books I've
gotten simply in my old age.
I call them grabbers and stretchers.
By the way, I didn't get the teachers
told about this this morning, but
grabbers are books.
If you put it out, the fourth grader
grabs it. He wants it.
She wants it. If they know anything about
that, the books that you don't have to do
much with but make them available.
But you can't say go check it out your
library because mean that's too far.
It has to be physical.
You have to check him out so you can take
the library. You've got to be sure you
can't send kids to the library once a
month and expect all this to happen.
Here's a grabber. This is the Babysitters
Club and they say
they're thirty for these.
I had three children at my speeches
this morning and they all had read
several of them. And we're dying to read
the rest tonight. This one escaped.
They didn't get this and they took
several of them.
Thirty four. Different Babysitters Club,
these are serious books and girls,
third, fourth, fifth grade, read this,
if they read all three or four, they've
had some of the best training in wanting
to read and actually practice in
reading, which is what the skills lessons
ignored. So I'd say this is great.
I'm just sorry I can't show you one that
matches it for boys because we don't seem
to have.
There's not.
You mean there's not a series like that
seems to do the same thing for somebody
here in Abilene who is good in football
and who's good in other things and trucks
and things needs to write that series.
I know I sound sexist.
I mean, we knew this is Ma and PA
Dracula.
Those of you can really see this.
We'll see. It's the same author as these
books. And probably that's no accident
because here's an author and Martin
Martin who
knows children's interests and she writes
Grabbers and Monopod.
Dracula is a great book.
She does a good job.
It's not great literature.
It's a grabber.
It's a kind of thing.
I mean, this is the kind of book, the
first stage that gets sure.
Gets young people who haven't thought
they enjoyed reading to go and enjoy
it.
But even now, I'm a pretty good reader.
Are you?
I hope so. OK.
Do you ever read grabbers?
I think I do. I have two in my suitcase
tomorrow going home.
I will try to read one.
I just finished. What a grabber
doesn't mean a bad book.
It does if you haven't had
much help in reading.
A Grabber is a book that is pretty easy
reading and enjoyable.
And I
for most of us it might not be
Tolstoy, but it's something
you grab and you read and
we have them.
You want to talk about some of these
others?
Oh, we can just show this, that I brought
this just to show you that there are
grabbers that are easy reading, very
easy reading. That's for fifth and sixth
graders. And it's real easy to read this
is for primaries because some people
don't seem to realize that first and
second and third grade kids can have
grabbers, too.
They're always handing them these very
difficult picture books, which is great,
but not as a grammar.
Berenstain Bears.
We talked to them. This is a great
series. This is called Peewee Scouts, and
there are about 12 of them and they're
second grade level in case
of teachers in the audience or parents,
there's a oh, the crisis
over it. It could take this off and
you'll see there's a readability level on
there in case you're interested in it.
How do you find out? How do you determine
these are great books?
Are these field tested in
terms of the kids say
that? Yes, yes, yes.
Wherever I go in the country and I cover
a lot of ground in a year, I try to get
into classrooms and ask kids what I
should recommend, what's good, what's
great. And in every
classroom I'd say of thirty kids,
you'll find three or four kids who really
can tell you about grabbers and some
others who are pretty good in
children at the end of this book, at
least as distinguished from the others.
In one way, it's thicker.
More pages.
Yes, but can we look at.
It's big but large.
It's large. Good print with with pictures
intervening on their mind.
Lots and lots of lots
of white spaces.
It's not.
And this is an old book I brought along
to show you that for some kids,
especially our future engineers and
people in your type of initiative to be
very creative, these are
fantasies, but they're quite easy.
Thinness is the art books are easy
fantasies. This Fredi book, there's a
series of twelve of them.
I think they were written in the thirties
and they've been republished nicely put
out, and kids are fourth grade kids.
And so there are some examples
of grammar. Now, maybe we need to stretch
your stretch with the stretcher.
All right.
Here's a book that I think it's one of
the finest books of the past ten years.
And I would say that junior high,
eighth grade honor
kids
will profit from this book.
And when they get through, many of them
will say, I loved it and I'd like more
like it. It's great.
It's about Alzheimer's and it's about a
teenager dealing with an
old woman with Alzheimer's.
And it's set in New Zealand.
You're going to know something about New
Zealand. It's going to add a great deal
of world knowledge. It's also when a
great deal to empathy, your ability
to understand others.
And so it's a very valuable, very
wonderful book and wonderfully done.
Much love is just memory, memory,
memory by market mayhem.
But the point I want to make is this
is not a grammar one
kid out of 190 might
grasp. Pick it up and really go to it.
But I don't think so.
You must present it as a teacher.
You must give guidance and maybe read the
first chapter and maybe talk about it and
get it get it going first.
Get them into it in some way.
Yes. But then are you saying they stay
with it after they've I think they'll
stay with if they've been properly
introduced, especially if you then follow
that with interaction for kids who each
have a copy of this book.
How much does that cost? Three.
Twenty five for kids who can
sit around in a group and talk about it
on their own, not with a teacher
intruding all the time.
At this point, discussion
should not be an inquisition.
It should be a dialog among.
So I think I
just brought some my favorite things,
this book is called And Then Be Hard to
See Family posed by
Dean Hughes, who lives in Salt Lake City.
And this I'm most
interested in the unwanted child because
I think we have a great many in our
society.
This is a boy I think he's 12 and he's an
unwanted child. So much so.
He runs away from the foster home and
hides in a big hotel and
they finally find him.
But the staff
rallies around him.
We call it extended family, I suppose.
Don't worry, they become his family.
It's how they work this thing out.
And what age group would you say
this is suitable secondary or eighth
grade? Three years.
And it's not a grammar.
It's a structure.
You might do it with sixth graders.
This is the best book of the past five
years. I said in my I write a book column
in the reading teacher, but I
could be wrong, but I'm not too far from
wrong.
Many of you, I hope, have read The Secret
Garden, and we recently
brought The Secret Garden out,
written in 1944 and
took it to sixth grade kids and
presented it, helped them understand and
helped them get the schema, we call it of
it, and then set them off and they loved
it. Their favorite book, maybe there's
not time to say more than behind the
attic.
Why the attic wall you think is the best
book in the last five?
I would say so. For a sixth graders, for
sixth graders, because that's
a real that's a recommendation.
I probably shouldn't say.
I think that's good.
And here's one. Well, showing more.
This is Navarros, beautiful daughters,
this African folktale.
And I wonder if we could just show
them illustration.
It's so gorgeously done.
It's wonderful.
This is character.
And this is a stretcher because
you have to prepare a lot of kids to
really see the African setting
on all this and to really set them up for
a folktale.
This is the bad sister.
This is a good sister.
It's like Cinderella.
It's every every society has
this archetypal plot.
But this one happens to be.
Isn't that gorgeous?
Beautiful color. Yeah, it's beautiful.
Yes.
And what with this age range are
I would I would work it with fourth
graders, I guess I brought it mainly to
say stretches or at all levels.
But some picture books in stretchers
should be done, not with first grade
kids. This is too hard for first
grade kids to conceive of.
I think they're all levels.
I do this at fourth grade level, but then
I mean, I don't know if the child
wants it, but isn't that gorgeous?
Gorgeous thing. A masterpiece.
A masterpiece?
No, no, no. No child should should
get to your childhood without great
books.
Like, it's interesting that you have a
number of occasions we've been talking
about reading, but you've been commenting
as well on the artwork.
That's right. That's right.
That's right.
So you must see there's a very important
time between a yes art work,
always the artwork, read pictures,
read pictures. The three year old who
reads to me reads wordless
books, but that's still called
reading.
If it's reading pictures, I think
in our age.
Yeah.
Well, thank you very much for being with
us today. I'm sorry we're out of time.
Well, you're a wonderful, wonderful
leader. You made me talk all the time.
Thank you for being with us on campus
with Dr. Sam Sebesta.