If you’re watching TV while flipping through this article, it could mean you are greatly influenced by moving images and audio-visual information but are not ready to abandon reading. Read on…

Recently a colleague shared the following story. He was confronted by a student in his English class after arguing in favor of the usefulness of reading. The student stood up confidently and said, “Sir, why do I need to read? I get all my information on TV. It’s like a novel only with moving pictures.” His frustration at having to continually justify reading to a generation of students who see movies, television and radio as their source of learning and general knowledge was evident. His students seem to believe that books or novels don’t bring value to their lives and are too slow a medium in these fast times. Having recently looked at the “Future of Reading” in articles recently published in The Middle East Educator, I have already argued that the time has come to expand our vision of readers and texts beyond the romantic views of reading of bygone generations. (I’m not even sure that nostalgic view of reader really existed. One problem with nostalgia is that it is often accompanied with amnesia!)

But even in a new vision of what it means to be a reader, young people still ask why should I read? I am not sure making academic arguments in favor of reading will convince students who already think that television is providing them with all the information they need. Some of the arguments of the past are falling by the wayside as technology rapidly changes. We use to be able to say that reading helps us cope with leisure time. It was hard to take a television show to the beach or on a train ride, but that now has become possible. We use to argue that books had the advantage when it came to control. Television programming use to be limited and available only on someone else’s schedule, but now programming seems endless and always available. So why read? Let’s try a few reasons that are still true today even with all the technological advances.

You’ll improve your language

Believe it or not people have studied the language used in printed texts vs. television shows vs. adult conversation. When one closely examines the syntactical complexity and the sophisticated nature of the words used in printed texts, almost all types of printed materials exceed the language quality used in television shows and adult conversation. Even children’s books, comic books, magazines and newspapers offer better language models than a steady diet of television programs. The best models of language are in printed texts. Research shows that the amount of time one spends reading is actually one of the major differences in vocabulary development in individuals. Reading actually provides more encounters with language subtleties that are crucial to fully understand the information being presented in other media. In the end, the volume of your reading correlates strongly with not only your vocabulary, but your general knowledge, spelling skills and verbal fluency.

Don’t let your image making faculty atrophy

The problem with television can be the very advantage this student is touting – the moving pictures. The ability to make one’s own visual images is critical for many creative processes. In a visually-oriented society, however, many individuals over- ly rely on others to make images for them. Think about it. Harry Potter will always look like Daniel Radcliffe. Instead of creating your own visual images to go with a favorite song, your images are supplied by the music video you watched. For some individuals, this lack of mental exercise has caused their image making faculty to get lazy. On the other hand, reading texts without pictures forces the brain to activate its image-making faculty. This helps individuals get stronger at bringing their visual images to text without pictures improving their understandings of those texts. This may also help individuals grow in their abilities to create visually interesting writing, bring visual interpretation to texts being performed or visualize products to be created through the fine arts.

You may get smarter

If reading improves your verbal skills and your visualization strategies, then it shouldn’t be too surprising to conclude that it could also make you smarter. A friend of mine was a college counselor at private girls school. She wished she could tell every parent who came in distraught over their daughter’s low college entrance scores that it was too bad they couldn’t turn back the clock and encourage their child to read voraciously throughout her life. She knew intuitively what researchers Cunningham & Stanovich observed in their analysis of the correlations between reading volume and new knowledge. When they looked at individual differences in knowledge acquisition in college students (after controlling for measures of general ability), differences in reading volume accounted for over one-third of the variance. Differences in exposure to television contributed to none of the variation. On the other hand, when probing the acquisition of misinformation in these same students, students with the highest exposure to television and the lowest volume of reading were more likely to have inaccurate information than those with high reading volume and low television exposure.

The researchers concluded that mass viewing of primetime television was often negatively correlated with knowledge acquisition.

Why not do both?

The amazing thing is that very few of us have to choose between getting all of our information from watching television or from reading books. It doesn’t have to be a choice -- one or the other. Both sources can be tapped for information. You’re fooling yourself if you think you are getting all the information you need from television.

Different texts whether visual or print-based contained different content and concepts presented in different formats organized in different ways. In other words, people get different things out of different texts.

The person that both watches and reads different texts will probably have more information than the person that only reads or especially only watches a show. Let’s face it…you may want to be able to do both. You can’t watch the final book in the Harry Potter series…yet. And even if you could, sometimes the book is just better!

By Michael Ford

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