The general public believes this is true. All politicians believe it. If you think about, if you believe in skill building, all the things we get from our governments all over the world make perfect sense. Lots of testing, lots of discipline, make school hard, lots of homework, et cetera. But I don't think it's true. I think that the comprehension hypothesis is right. The exciting thing that happened to me 25 years ago when I read a book by Frank Smith and reading, reading is a form of comprehensible input. And that's very exciting for us. Especially one kind of reading that helps more than any other, the kind of reading that some of you did last night before you went to sleep. Reading because you want to. Reading you select yourself. Free, voluntary reading. Our research over the last 25 years shows again and again, free, voluntary reading, reading for pleasure, is the most powerful tool we have in all of language education. What the results are saying again and again, and it's again overwhelming, free, voluntary reading is the source of our reading ability, our writing ability, the ability to write respectable prose, the ability to handle complex grammatical constructions. A lot of our vocabulary, all of our educated vocabulary just about comes from reading. Most of our ability to spell, all this comes from reading. A powerful form of comprehensible input. The evidence for the comprehension hypothesis, and I'll try again to summarize 35 years into a couple of minutes here. I'll just give you a brief outline. This is in all the books and papers and articles and all that. Check out the website. By the way, I'm putting more and more stuff on the website.
一般大衆はそう信じている。政治家もみんなそう信じている。考えてみれば、スキルアップを信じるなら、世界中の政府がやっていることはすべて理にかなっている。たくさんのテスト、たくさんの規律、学校の厳しさ、たくさんの宿題などなど。しかし、私はそうは思わない。理解仮説は正しいと思う。25年前、フランク・スミスの本を読んだとき、読書は理解可能なインプットの一形態であるということを知りました。それは私たちにとって非常にエキサイティングなことです。特に、他のどんな読書よりも助けになる読書がある。読みたいから読む。自分で選