Stephen+Krashen

Stephen Krashen  Stephen Krashen is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, in the School of Education since 1994. He is a linguist, educational researcher and activist. Dr. Krashen has published more than 350 papers and books, contributing to the fields of second language acquisition, bilingual education and reading. In this wiki posting I will be talking about Dr. Krashen's ideas of free-voluntary reading.

Free- voluntary reading simply means reading what interests you. Another term for the subject is Sustained Silent Reading (SSR). Students are often not given a set time in their day to do this. But studies have shown that those students who are given a set time for SSR are more likely to have better vocabulary, spell and write better, and do better academically as a whole. In an 2009 article from SLJ Krashen refers to the 81 Generalizations about free-voluntary reading. http://successfulenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/81-Generalizations-about-FVR-2009.pdf

Stephen Krashen in an article from the 9/1/2006 edition of School Library Journal about "free-reading" claims, "the real challenge of transforming today's children into competent readers isn't about teaching them the basics (sooner or later, nearly all children get them). It's about helping students develop richer vocabularies, understand complex oral and written language and become proficient writers and reasonably accurate spellers. In other words, it's about moving children to higher levels of literacy." kc