Some of the decline in time spent reading may be related to how it was taught. Todayâ??s young adults began school during the period when early reading education heavily emphasized the whole language method, with its focus on picking up reading through literacy experiences rather than the development of elementary skills, such as sounding out words through explicit instruction.
Whole language made learning to read unnecessarily difficult and robbed many people of the enjoyment of the reading experience. The great irony of the literacy-based methods is that they created readers who do not like to read.
Author: Mark Seidenberg, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.