Biliteracy and Sustained Silent Reading

Because Sustained Silent Reading is part of the Esperanza Literacy Program, the following information was extremely helpful. 

The authors--Karen Beeman and Cheryl Urow--gave some great ideas about sustained silent reading in their book Teaching for Biliteracy. 

"When teachers can dedicate 15 to 30 minutes a day to SSR and couple this with readers' interviews (one-on-one meetings with individual students), they are providing students with an opportunity to practice comprehension in a low-stress environment that encourages reading for the sake of reading."

They suggest the following for a successful SSR program:

• Establish a regular time for SSR three to five times a week.
• The first few times SSR is implemented, refer to it as reading for pleasure and explain the following:

         How to choose a book
         How to read quietly and without talking to anyone
         How to ignore interruptions by others in the room

• For students with little experience reading silently for a sustained time, allow 5 minutes for a session of SSR, so they can be successful from the beginning.
• As students become more comfortable with the routine of SSR, increase the sessions to between 15 and 30 minutes a day, depending on the age of the students and the time available in the daily schedule. 

The authors also suggest that it is important to develop a system to  monitor the books each student is reading, including the language or languages the texts are in.

IMPORTANT:  "While free book choice is a key element of SSR, teachers developing biliteracy in the United States should require the students to read books in Spanish and English during SSR to ensure that students to not read only English books...Teachers can reinforce this requirement that students read books in both languages...by asking that students sign up for readers' interviews at least twiiring that one interview be about a book in Spanish and one about a book in English."

Teacher modeling is extremely important in SSR.  If the teacher is doing this modeling only with an English text, she is sending the message that English is preferable to Spanish.