The relationship of school materials and resources to reading literacy: An international perspective

There is great interest in the effect of school resources on academic achievement, but it is seldom that an opportunity arises in which this relationship may be examined in an international milieu. ?his paper presents the types of resources available in the 27 countries participating in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievements (IEA) Reading Literacy Study, and explores the relationship of the most pertinent variables to achievement. More particularly, the focus is on school and classroom libraries, their description and use, and on classroom teacher's practices as they relate to library use. In my fourth year of public school teaching I was appointed as Head Teacher of a three-room rural school with about 100 students. In this position I was responsible for all aspects of running the school including spending a small budget on materials, supplies, and books. A locked hallway cupboard approximately 30 inches by 30 inches by 12 inches deep contained what was termed "the library" and it had traditionally been accessible to students at a few designated times for "checking out" books, so I was told. Needless to say, I found the situation appalling, and two years later when graduate school beckoned, I was pleased to leave the school with three classroom libraries each approximately three times the size of the original. How many books were in those spaces do you suppose? Many years later having earned two graduate degrees in Reading Education I became Head of the Department of Language Education at the University of British Columbia, and what should I find located there but a School Librarianship program under my supervision! And when I became the Research Coordinator for the BC component of the IEA Reading Literacy Study in the early '90s, and in this capacity gained access to information from 32 different countries, numbers of "books" again took on a new significance. While "literacy" was the focus of attention in the study, I casually mentioned this wealth of data regarding resources to Anne Clyde who indicated a keen interest in it, and encouraged me to tease out those aspects of interest to librarians. And that brings us to the topic of this paper and to my presentation at the IASL-ATLC Conference in Vancouver. You will have noticed that the word "books" was used inside quotation marks since it oversimplifies what libraries are all about, but it is the stereotyped symbol of libraries in common use. As I was writing this article the University of British Columbia opened a new library building and celebrated its faculty authors; the Vancouver Sun headline read "It's a big week for books at UBC." Therefore it is with "books" and "magazines" that I wish to begin my story; then we will move to the uses of school and classroom libraries; then to teachers' practices; and finally we will examine some vignettes relating various variables with achievement. This approach is supported by the type of data gathered as part of the IEA Reading Literacy Study of 1991 and first reported in How in the world do students read? (Elley, 1992).