English Companion Ning Group

The issue is less stuff vs. reading than it is a question of what sorts of and how much of stuff. When stuff dominates instructional time, warning flags should go up.

In less-effective classrooms, there is a lot of stuff going on for which no reliable evidence exists to support their use (e.g., test-preparation workbooks, copying vocabulary definitions from a dictionary, completing after-reading comprehension worksheets).

In these classrooms, lower-achieving students spent their days with books they could successfully read.

English-language learners

audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs

2nd through 4th graders over 16 weeks as they used webcams to see themselves reading and then he identified their mistakes.

We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work.

Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.