1. Jim Trelease has devoted the past 16 years to promoting what he considers the best-kept secret in education today. “Most people don’t three reasons: One, it’s simple. Two, it’s free. Three, the child enjoys it. So how good can it be?”
吉姆·特里斯花了16年的时间来宣传他认为当今最好的教育方法“当人们最初听到这一方法时，大部分人不相信我的话。”他说，“他们不理睬我有三个原因：一是简单；二是不花钱；三是孩子们喜欢。所以它能够好到哪儿去？”
2. His audience tonight, mostly young parents and teachers gathered in the ST. Helena, Calif., elementary-school auditorium, giggles nervously. “I know what you’re thinking,” Trelease says. “There are only 24 hours in a day. It’s true. But who ever told you that parenting was going to be a time-saving activity?” Trelease continues to persuade them that no matter how busy they are, the foremost nurturing they can give a child, next to hugging him, is reading aloud to him.
今天晚上，他的听众聚集在加州圣·赫勒那的一所小学的礼堂里，其中大部分是年轻父母的教师，神经过敏般地咯咯直笑。“我知道你们在想什么，”特里斯说，“一天只有24小时，千真万确。但又有谁曾告诉过你们父母照顾子女会是一件省时的事情呢？”他接着劝告他们无论多么忙，他们所能够给孩子的最重要的关爱和教育，除了拥抱外，就是为他朗读。
3. He backs up his pitch with facts. Numerous studies, including recent reports by the Center for the Study of Reading and the National Council of Teachers of English, confirm that reading to children builds vocabulary, stimulates imagination, stretches the attention pan, nourishes emotional development, and introduces the textures and nuances of the English language. Reading aloud is, in essence, an advertisement for learning to read.
他用事情来论证他的观点。大量的研究，包括阅读研究中心和全国英语教师委员会的最近报告都证实，给孩子阅读既可以构建和扩大词汇量，又可以激发其想像力；既可以拓宽孩子的注意力范围，又可以培养其情感的发展；还可以帮助他们了解英语语言的结构及其细微差别。从本质上讲，朗读是学习阅读的一种广告。
4. Trelease laments that elementary-school students are too often conditioned to associate reading with work. “We have concentrated so hard on teaching children how to read that we have forgotten to teach them to want to read,” he says.
特里斯痛感小学生常常太受限制以致不能把阅读和学习联系起来。“我们在教孩子如何阅读方面下了很大的工夫，但却忘记了教他们认识阅读要自发地想要阅读。”
5. His audience is surprised to hear that only 22 percent of eighth-graders read for fun daily, while 65 percent watch three hours or more of television each day. Research also indicates that average reading proficiency drops when TV viewing reaches about three hours a day. Their parents’ habits are no better: a recent survey shows a decline in newspaper readership among u.s. adults.
他的听众惊讶地听到仅有22%的8年级学生每天阅读并从中获得乐趣，而有65%的学生每天要看3小时或更多的电视。研究同时了表明，当每天看电视的时间达到3小时，人们平均阅读熟练的水平就会下降。他们父母的阅读习惯也好不了多少；最近调查显示美国成年人阅读报纸的读者总数在下降。
6. Lest there be any doubt about the stakes involved, Trelease makes a bold claim. Reading, he says, is the single most important social factor in American life today. “The more you read, the smarter you grow. The longer you stay in school, the more money you earn. The more you earn, the better your children will do in school. So if you hook a child with reading, you influence not only his future but also that of the next generation.”
为了不让人们对以上所述各种利害关系产生任何怀疑，特里斯做出大胆断言。他说读书是当今美国生活中唯一最重要的f社会因素。“你读书越多，就越聪明。你在学校学习的时间越长，你挣钱就越多。你挣钱越多，你的孩子在学校会做的越好。因此，如果你能引导孩子读书，那么你不仅会影响到他未来的前途，也会对他的下一代产生影响。”
7. Trelease found his calling not because it spoke to his intellect, but because it nurtured his emotions. When his two children, Elizabeth and Jamie, were young, Trelease and his wife, Susan, fed them as many books as meals. “I read to my kids because my father had read to me,” he says. “I just wanted them to have the good feelings I had had.”
特里斯具有这样强烈的责任感，不是因为它证明了他的智慧，而是因为它培育了他的情感。当他的两个孩子，伊丽莎白和杰米小的时候，特里斯和他的妻子苏珊给了他们像饭菜一样多的书籍。“我给我的孩子读书是因为我父亲过去给我读书。”他说，“我仅仅想要他们具有我所具有的健全情感。”
8. When he was growing up in the 1940s in Union, N.J., the Depression was still a fresh memory. “We didn’t own a car until I was in fifth grade or a house until I was in seventh,” Trelease recalls. “But for as long as I can remember, we subscribed to several magazines and two daily newspapers.” He remembers scarcely a day of childhood when his father didn’t read to him.
20世纪40年代他在新泽西州的昂尼长大，对30年代的经济大萧条仍记忆犹新。“但是就我所能记得的，我们订了好几份杂志和两份日报。”他回忆起他童年的时期，很少有一天他爸爸不给他读报纸。
9. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Trelease went to work as a newspaper reporter in nearby Springfield. Then in 1967 a fourth-grade teacher invited him to talk to her class about his career. He had so much fun that he was soon making 40 unpaid local school visits a year.
特里斯从马萨诸塞大学毕业后，在斯普林菲尔德附近当一名记者。随后在1967年一位教四年级的教师邀请他为学生谈谈他的职业生涯。他对此事如此感兴趣，一年之内他竟免费走访了当地未曾到过的四十所学校。
10. On his way out the door of one classroom, he spotted a novel he had just read to his daughter. “Who’s reading this?” he asked. Three girls sheepishly raised their hands. “Don’t you just love it?” he said. And for the next 45 minutes he and the kids talked about books.
有一次在教室门口，他售出了他曾给女儿读过的一本小说。“谁在读这本书？”他问道。三位女孩局促不安地把手举了起来。“你们都喜欢这本书吗？”他说。在随后的四十五分钟里，他和孩子们谈论了书籍。
11. “From then on I always saved time to ask the class what they had read lately,” Trelease says, “and with time I began to see that the kids were reading less and less, except where the teachers read aloud to them. I wondered whether there was a connection between how much you read to children and how much they want to read themselves.”
“从那时起我总是找时间问学生们最近在读什么书”，特里斯说。“随着时间的流逝，我开始注意到，除了教师给他们的朗读之外，孩子们读书越来越少。我想搞清楚你给孩子们读多少书与他们想读多少书之间到底有无联系。”
12. In professional reading journals Trelease found a wealth of research to support his hunch. Talking to neighbours, relatives and colleagues, he realized that to most people reading aloud was something you did when your child wouldn’t go to sleep. Perhaps that was because these parents were rarely read to as children.
在专业期刊的阅读中，特里斯发现了大量的研究都在支持他的设想和观点。和邻居、亲戚及同事谈起这个话题，他意识到大部分人在孩子不想入睡时都读书给他们听。也许这正是当孩子时他们的父母很少给他们读书的原因。
13. “It is the child’s listening vocabulary that feeds his reading vocabulary,” Trelease says. To illustrate, he reads the opening paragraph of Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile. “Two crocodiles lay with their heads just above the water. One was enormous. The other was not so big.” Now let’s suppose a child does not know the word enormous. Which is going to be more effective: hearing it in the context of a story, or seeing it isolated from meaning on a flashcard. Remember, if a child as never heard the word, he’ll never say it. And if he’s never heard it or said it, it’s going to be difficult when the time comes to read it.”
“这正是孩子用听到的词汇促使其扩大阅读的词汇，”特里斯说。为了说明验证这一点，他读了作家罗尔德·达尔《巨大的鳄鱼》中的开篇段落。“两条鳄鱼浮在水面刚刚露出它们的头。一条是巨大的；另一条不那么大。”现在让我们假设一下，一个孩子不认识这个词—enormous。下面哪 一种方法更加有效：是通过故事的上下文听到这个词，还是通过孤立地看教学识字画片上的这个词形呢？记住：如果一个孩子从没有听到过这个词，他将永远不会说这个词。如果他没有听过也没有说过这个词，当他要读这个词时，那将是很困难的。
14. Trelease advocates reading aloud to children as soon as possible. “When did you start talking to your child? On the day she was born. If a child is old enough to talk to, the child is old enough to read to.” Case histories bear him out.
特里斯提倡尽可能地让孩子朗读。“你是什么时候才对你的孩子说话的？就是她出生的那一天。如果孩子大到已经会说话了，她也已经大到会读书了。”有病例证明他是对的。
15. Upon the birth of their daughter, Marcia and Mark Thomas received a copy of Trelease’s best-seller, The Read-Aloud Handbook. They had a special reason for wanting to promote Jennifer’s intellectual development: she was born with Down syndrome. “We figured it couldn’t hurt,” says Marcia, “so we put her on a diet of ten books a day.” When Jennifer required surgery as an infant, her parents left books on tape for the nurses to play. By age five Jennifer was reading on her own.
马西娅和马克·托马斯夫妇在女儿出生时，收到了一本特里斯的畅销书《朗读手册》。他们有特殊的理由去帮助珍妮弗发展智力，因为她一出生就患有综合病症（身体和脑部的紊乱）。“我们估计这个会伤害她，”马西娅说，“所以我们每天给她十本书作精神食粮。”当珍妮弗婴儿时期需要做手术时，她的父母把书制成录音带让护士给她听。至五岁时，珍妮弗就能自己读书了。
16. Now a ten-year-old in a regular fourth-grade class in Concord, Mas., Jennifer Thomas is a voracious reader with a vocabulary one of her teachers describes as “phenomenal.”
珍妮弗现在已十岁了，在康科德的一所正规学校读四年级，珍妮弗·托马斯是个非常嗜好读书的学生，好的词汇套用她老师的话说是“相当出众”。