I’ve written a couple of posts about studies showing the importance of home libraries to students:

“Home Libraries Provide Huge Educational Advantage”

More On The Importance Of Home Libraries

As I’ve mentioned in those posts, I’m particularly interested in this topic because of the thousands of books we distribute to students that are provided by the Davis Friends Of The Library.

This week, the Voice of America’s Special English program, which provides text news reports with audio support and which are specifically designed to be accessible to English Language Learners, published an interview with the author of one of these studies. You can read/hear it at For Poor Families, Especially, Books at Home Propel Children to More Years in School.

More importantly, ELL students can read it, and learn for themselves the importance of developing their own home library.

There were also a couple of new pieces of information in the VOA interview that were not mentioned in the studies or the news articles about them.

One, is “that the books that have the most impact are history and science.”

Two, I found the response to a question about if electronic media would have the same positive effect. Here’s the response:

“We don’t know. So the question really is, are different kinds of information searches substitutable? My sense would be that they probably are. But at this point that’s just talking through my digestion of bits and pieces of research. Nobody will really know for some time the answer to your question.”