Edutopia has published a new article by Youki Terada. It is titled ‘The Benefits of Reading for Fun’.
Mrs. Mason was “the perfect reading ambassador,” said Sandra Martin-Chang, recalling an early reading role model, her high school English and drama teacher. “She encouraged me to read excellent books with great storylines. We read The Handmaid’s Tale, and it was fabulous.… We’d envision it first and then think about how to enact it and bring it to life.”
Now a professor of education at Concordia University, Martin-Chang studies how reading storybooks and novels influences cognitive development.
In a new study published in Reading and Writing, she and her colleagues found significant differences between students who read for pleasure outside of class—immersing themselves in fantasy novels or spy thrillers, for example—and those who primarily read books to satisfy school assignments. Not only was there a powerful link between reading for fun and stronger language skills, but students who disliked reading frequently attributed their negative outlook to experiences they had in classrooms. Too much emphasis on analyzing the compositional nuts and bolts of texts and reading merely to absorb information came at a psychological cost, the researchers found, as students disengaged from voluntary reading.