Especially in contexts relating to school policies, Krashen uses ¡®free voluntary reading¡¯
(hereafter FVR) as a preferred synonym of
¡®pleasure reading¡¯. Here ¡®free¡¯ means that the
reading matter is not assigned, and ¡®voluntary¡¯ signifies that the reader personally selects the reading matter and undertakes to read it of his own free will. A good example of FVR is a child reading the ¡°Harry Potter¡± series or ¡°Spiderman¡± comics under the covers with a flashlight. Krashen advocates FVR as the best method for providing ¡®comprehensible input¡¯3 to facilitate language acquisition.

Why does Krashen place so much emphasis on the need for reading to be voluntary? One reason he gives is that students who are allowed to choose reading material according to their own interests ¡° ¡¦ will tend to read in areas they are familiar with¡± (1985, p. 77), thus will tend to have an abundance of background knowledge that will facilitate their comprehension of written material in those areas. More particularly, this background knowledge will often enable children to make accurate guesses as to the meaning of words and constructions that are new to them, leading to their acquisition of those items.4 ¡°¡¦[D]eep involvement in any topic will provide exposure to a tremendous amount of syntax and vocabulary used in other domains¡± (Krashen, 1985, pp. 73-74).

There is a closely related reason for the effectiveness of FVR in facilitating language acquisition that does not seem to have been mentioned explicitly by Krashen or anyone else. When a person encounters in his/her reading an example of an element of the language that s/he has not yet acquired, s/he has to put forth extra mental effort to infer the meaning from its context, from already acquired elements of the language5, and from his/her background knowledge. Under FVR conditions, what motivates the reader to put forth that extra effort will typically be his/her interest in grasping the message conveyed by the passage in question, an intrinsic motivation insofar as that interest was what led him/her to freely choose the text in the first place.

Another reason for Krashen¡¯s emphasis on the need for reading to be voluntary is implied by his Pleasure Hypothesis: ¡° ¡¦[T]hose activities that are good for language acquisition are usually perceived by acquirers as pleasant, while those activities that are not good for language acquisition are not consistently perceived as pleasant, and are, in fact, often perceived to be painful¡± (Krashen, 1994, p. 299). Many of the studies providing empirical support for the Pleasure Hypothesis show more particularly that ¡°free reading outside of school is pleasant¡± (Krashen, 1994, p. 308). That result is fully consonant with voluntary reading being an intrinsically motivated activity, as was noted in the preceding paragraph, given that intrinsic motivation is associated with greater pleasure than extrinsic motivation (Stipek, 1993).

IV.  EFFICACY OF FVR