Whole Books or Excerpts? Which Does the Most to Promote Reading?

Tim Shanahan

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several inquiries about the importance of whole book reading within reading instruction. And no wonder. Social media has been aflame with righteous claims about this purported and purportedly damaging shift to having students read excerpts within reading lessons rather than taking on whole books.

I say “purported” because the claim seems to be that in the past, teachers were teaching their kids to read books, and now they aren’t. I’ve been around quite a while, and I don’t remember the past that way.

I say “purportedly damaging” because the idea that teaching reading with excerpts harms kids or limits their learning in any significant manner is a claim made without evidence – you know, an opinion. Not only do we lack research showing that books do a better job of increasing reading ability, but we also have no evidence that one approach does more to encourage kids to read on their own.

I must point out here that I’ve worked on various textbook reading programs, on and off, for almost 50 years. All those programs from various publishers depended heavily on short stories, magazine-style articles, and excerpts from longer works. Those programs have also usually included options for book-length texts as well.

I’ve engaged in that work not because I thought shorter works were necessarily better than books when it comes to teaching reading, but because I see it as a reasonable option. In other words, I’m not against using complete books to teach reading, I’m just not persuaded that it’s necessarily the best way to go.

This is the kind of question I’d like to answer with research. I’d love to say that “Smith and Jones (1998) found that teaching reading with books increased reading levels by 26 points over what resulted for the excerpts group.” Or vice versa.

The problem is that there is no such research.

The major claim that books outdistance shorter works is that they somehow foster greater “reading stamina.” That sounds important, though the assertions are decidedly foggy. For example, how does one measure stamina? That concept is more complicated than it might appear at first blush.

Even more hazy is instructional guidance for teachers. What grade levels are we talking about? How many books should be used for instruction in a school year? And, most importantly, how are these books best taught?

As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been flamed over the years for discouraging high school English teachers from reading novels to their classes (or using Audible or its competitors to do this for them). Book teaching may be a wonderful practice, but is the point for the kids to know the books or for them to know the books through their own reading efforts? I’ve argued for the latter, but many whole book proponents seem to be on the other side of that discussion.

It seems to me that there are (at least) two factors in reading stamina. The first of these has to do with being able to process words and ideas continually for some length of time. You know, sustaining attention. Can a student, for example, productively read a 1000-word passage with comprehension, and without interruption (neither stopping to check messages nor to respond to teacher queries)?

Each year, we’d like to see kids making progress in this kind of stamina – increasing the number of words/pages/minutes they can productively keep reading.

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