By Robert Oliphant
Columnist EdNews.org

Dear Inner City Dorothy:

The University of Iowa has just officially agreed to cooperate with Google in making the public-domain books in its library digitally available via computer to the over three billion people on this planet who, according to Time Almanac 2007, live in countries where English is either an official language or explicitly listed as an acceptable alternative.Its distinguished supporters claim this project will open up marvelous opportunities for all of us — including your 16-year-old friend who is currently nursing her second baby.

Practically considered, though, how strongly should you prod your 16-year-old friend into becoming a digitalized reader, just like those who via Project Gutenberg currently download classics like Looking Backward and Theory of the Leisure Class from the University of Pennsylvania library.Are digitalized books as readable sentence by sentence and page by page as, say, Silhouette Romances?More argumentatively, if they are or if they aren't, who says so, and what kind of measurable data can they present, ideally in a form that will make sense to your young friend as she moves toward the future?

As far as her future goes, by the way, you might begin by reminding your young friend that not long ago, in Sacramento, California, there was a 16-year-old unmarried mother with two children (twins) who educated, largely through independent reading, and began to raise her voice in public, thundering in the corridors of legislative power and making sleek politicians tremble over their martinis. . . . Her name is Candy Lightner (Google her if you want to), she single-handedly started the advocacy groupMothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), an organization which still gets more than 70,000 hits each day on the internet. . . .

Simply put, the USA can be still a land of opportunity for your friend, especially now that Google's public-domain reading-access program is opening new and wider doors for us, far more so than what's offered by traditional commodity-education (teachers, courses, grades, degrees, etc.).All this assumes, of course, that the digitalized format of these bookish opportunities will be just as readable for your friend as traditional print, paperback or hardcover.Hence the desirability of checking the actual readability of digitalized books your friend may be on the verge of choosing.

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The physical shape of digitalized books. . . . A digitalized Silhouette Romance is far more of a Cinderella than a specific object we can comfortably hold in our hands (to Eric Gill a 300-word page was ideal).Once our Fairy Cyber-Godmother converts a book into digitally defined characters and spaces, it can show up as a guest on our desktop in a variety of costumes, each with its own kind of attractiveness or unattractiveness.Some college-size dictionaries, for example, take up only 7.5 megabytes on your friend's desktop, while others take up 147 — twenty times as much disk space for the same number of words.

If each digital Cinderella is different, the reading style of each Prince Charming can be even more idiosyncratic and bizarre.Oscar Wilde used to read two facing pages at the same time and Sinclair Lewis could quote long prose passages at length from what he had recently been reading.Given this variety, our traditional estimates of readability have focused — Dr. Seuss style — upon measurable physical characteristics:the average number of letters in each word, the average number of words in each sentence, etc.

Reader behavior and book-based learning. . . . In general what we read, including Silhouette Romances and even comic books (a point vigorously made by the USC linguist Stephen Krashen) doesn't seem to matter as much as how much we read, especially that which can be measured by counting words, pages, and books.Appendix 1 presents a brief discussion of this point in connection with university records regarding the positive relationship between the number of library books checked out each year and the pass rate on standardized writing-skills tests.

Practically considered, then, all your 16-year-old friend has to do is to read as many books as she can, especially non fiction, from her local library or via online access from a Project Gutenberg source.As Krashen and others have pointed out, what's involved here is basic turn-the-page reading, not the highlighting and move-the-lips reading teachers customarily demand.So the learning that takes place is bound to be personal-best learning, not classroom-goal learning.

Personal-best learning and reader-friendly compliance tests. . . .Traditionally the learning impact of personal-best reading has been described with statements like "Read. read!Something will stick!"(Lege, lege!Aliquid haerebat!), very much as though each of us has a different kind of Velcro-like mind, and therefore is bound to remember different elements from any given reading target.

These differences, of course, tend to average out in the long run, as indicated by our university library-writing test data; but they certainly indicate that text by text (print or digital format) the most we can expect to discover is whether or not a specific reader has complied with the request to read each page in sequence and give it a reasonably amount of attention.

Appendix 2 indicates how these minimum-expectation "reader-friendly" page-sequence tests can be constructed and scored, very much like asking a 5-year-old questions on the order of, "Whom did Dorothy meet FIRST on the Yellow Brick Road — (a) the Cowardly Lion, (b) the Scarecrow, (c) the Tin Woodman, (d) none of these?"

Learning-friendly tests and readability comparisons. . . . At this point we can ask ourselves a very specific readability question, namely, If our 16-year-old friend reads Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class in conventional printed-book format, will she earn a higher score on a learning-friendly test than if she reads it in conventional digital format, namely, the 10-point html version most of us use for email messages.An authoritative answer to this question would of course require the design of a basic comparison study with, say, 50 print readers versus 50 digital readers.Just as important, it would also invite attempts to make the digital version more learning-friendly, as indicated by higher test scores.

So let the attempts begin!Certainly the effort alone will represent a giant step toward building confidence in digital-based reading and electronic publishing, especially for those who, like your 16-year-old friend, have the most to gain from having the "best that's been thought and said" at their fingertips — literally and cognitively.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . As W. Edwards Deming and his disciples (there are many) might put it, our low-cost learning-friendly tests will establish "statistical control" over any program we might devise to make use of Google's magnificent digital gift of public domain reading materials to the international English-language reading community — all three billion of us.

Reading programs aside, the "public domain" emphasis strikes me as very, very timely, paralleling Harold Bloom's recent The Best Poems in the English Language (HarperCollins 2004), which restricts itself to authors born before 1900, nearly all of whose works are right now out of copyright.

The result of this pre-1923 feature, intentionally or unintentionally, is a centrist emphasis upon what might be called the "Internationalist English-Language Civilizational Community," as opposed to a more "modern" (or "decadent," depending upon one's bias) emphasis upon cultural diversity.

Our 16-year-old mother of two is above all a unique individual, a "majority of one," as Thoreau famously put it.But she is also, like the rest of us, a member of the much larger majority that today comprises the total population of Planet Earth, as it's beginning to be called.Google's gift, as I see it, reminds all of us, including inner city 16-year-olds, that our civilization has a noble past, despite its failings, and that our future — both personally and collectively — deserves to be taken seriously, honestly, patiently, and with good cheer.

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APPENDIX 1. . . . The cumulative impact of high speed personal best reading

As Frank Smith once put it, the factual knowledge that readers have already acquired is a major factor in their ability to comprehend and retain (partially, at least) what meets their eyes on a page or computer screen.It's specialized knowledge, not just reading skill, that equips a forensic accountant to read and interpret a tax return or literary critic to read and interpret a modern poem.Given this variation in reader-knowledge, to say nothing of eyesight acuity, we have been understandably reluctant to link physical-readability features up with comprehension and learning.

The best we can say is that high volume reading seems to have a wholesome impact upon language skills in general.Broadly considered, the most thriftily available evidence for this correlation can be found in the records of universities (e.g., the Cal State system) which keep three kinds of records: (a) individual student performance on a freshman-level English placement test; (b) yearly book-borrowing by students in various academic departments (library bibliographers routinely assemble this data for use in making acquisition decisions); and (c) yearly performance by students in various academic departments on writing-proficiency exams required for graduation.

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APPENDIX 2. . . . High speed personal-best reading and content retentiveness

A recent "Reading at Risk" report by the National Endowment for the Arts has pointed out, much to the concern of educators and book publishers, that Americans under age thirty now read far fewer books than they did as recently as 20 years ago, paralleling a gradual reduction over the last 40 years of our average recreational-reading speed from 600 words per minute down to 250.

It's been argued that this decline in the reading speed of young Americans accounts for our national decline in book use, since younger Americans must now spend more than twice the time to cover the same recreational-reading material.This reading-speed decline clearly parallels changes in our approach to the testing of reading, especially non-textbookrecreational reading.

So it clearly makes sense of us to think about new, more "reader-friendly" ways of test construction — especially practical tests we can make up on our own in connection with a personal-best reading program.

Textbook reading versus personal-best recreational reading. . . . Forty years ago what we tested nationwide was mostly "move the lips" textbook- reading mastery: facts, definitions, processes, comprehension, etc.Recreational readers were therefore free to progress at their own pace through fiction and nonfiction on the old assumption, lege, lege, aliquid haerebit ("Read, read, something will stick"). . . . And stick it often did, idiosyncratically but beneficially, to the degree that the sheer volume of recreational reading still seems to be the crucial element in developing writing skills.

During the last 20 years, however, our educational leaders have begun to test recreational reading using textbook-testing techniques.These now stress factual recall (the Electronic Bookshelf tests, etc.) and interpretation of content — is there any American under thirty who hasn't been asked to explain the symbolism of the turtle in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"?

Inevitably, then, Americans from middle school on have begun to develop test-fearful reading habits, with the result that their overall reading tempo has gone down and down and down.Hence they read fewer in the same amount of time, with the result that fewer books are sold by American bookstores and publishers.

Hence also the need for "reader friendly" self testing as a tool for developing"up tempo" reading skills and satisfaction, especially those who have lost reading speed, not increased it, in connection with their education.

Position-sequence tests for personal-best readers . . . Position-sequence tests can fairly be described as reader-friendly do-it-yourself tests.They're just like asking a 4-year-old"Whom did Dorothy see first on the Yellow Brick Road — the Cowardly Lion or the Tin Woodman?"In music, these tests take the form of playing two passages in random sequence and asking the student, "Which of these actually appears first in the piece you have just studied?"

In reading, a friend can pick a couple of paragraphs at random and ask us the same "which paragraph appears first?" question as a check upon whether we've actually given each page its fair share of attention.Intelligence, general knowledge, interpretive skills, brute-force memorization — these are far less important in producing position-sequence testresults than the honest effort of looking at each page quickly.Hence the term "reader friendly."

Position-sequence reader-friendly tests. . . . More ambitious reader-friendly tests can be constructed and scored very cheaply.One approach simply photocopies five pages, removes all original-sequence clues, places them in a new, random sequence, and identifies them as R1 through R5.It then asks five which-appears-first questions regarding five 3-item "round robin" groups: 123, 234, 345, 451, 512 (note how number 1 and 2 come "round" again in the last two groups).

Start to finish, it takes only 15 minutes to construct a 5-item test like this for any book, fiction or nonfiction and 30 minutes to contract a test with 10 or 15 items.Because of their cheapness, fairness, and security (random sequences can be easily varied), reader-friendly tests have already been used in large-scale recreational reading programs for middle schools (1,200 students, 16 books, 10-item tests) in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . Reader-friendly tests like these can bring honesty and accurate measurement into a personal best reading program.In addition, they encourage a personal-best reader to relax and return to a natural page-centered recreational reading pace, gradually working his or her way back up to 600 words a minute — roughly 25,000 words an hour, or four hours for a conventional 200-page, 100,000-word book.

Most important, this self-testing method extends the personal best reader's range of choice to encompass any book he or she wants to read and be self-tested on.True, 20 minutes per book can add up in a twenty-book program.But the results usually more than justify the time spent, especially in crossover impact and self esteem.

Published Jume 12, 2007