“I hate reading.”
In the classroom, this phrase can be whispered, with a look of abject fear, or loudly declared, with murmurs of encouragement around the room for other learners to add their own sentiments. It’s often a response in the opening moments of a teacher’s happy announcement about the task for the day – or when discussing this key skill.
So why do some learners hate reading? And what can teachers do to encourage a love of the written word?
Why Reading Gets a Bad Rap
According to the annual ‘What Kids Are Reading’ report from Renaissance Learning, secondary school learners read the same difficulty of books as upper primary pupils. Great for primary learners, but not so great for secondary. Why is this happening? I have a few ideas:
Lack of fundamental reading skills.
For many learners, reading is a minefield. Without encouragement and support, learners will struggle. This can lead to lower performance across the curriculum, as reading speed and comprehension will be affected. Of course, teachers, learners and their caregivers will benefit from discussing these concerns to determine if they are shared, but regardless it makes sense to address them together.
I remember a day in my English class when one of my learners candidly stated that they preferred my reading to the whole class rather than their own, as they could not disseminate different voices for the characters, leading to a really boring read in comparison to mine. Whilst I was flattered, I tried to invigorate the passion for reading in this student by using texts that definitely had an audiobook associated with it and recapped key moments from the book using an after reading task focusing on an important event from the book, storyboarding, hot seating, and other dramatical elements to liven the text up for all my learners.
Taking away the stress of reading by scheduling a reading time and encouraging different ways to approach the reading can really build enthusiasm and improve relationships. Literacy circles (stay tuned – these will be available from Conduit soon), paired reading and short chapter reads are positive steps toward embracing a reading culture.
The subject isn’t interesting
Giving learners a choice in their texts can improve engagement and using a variety of fiction and non-fiction can help learners choose their favourite kind of writing and style; however, in the classroom this variety cannot always be catered for. For example, in history, biased and non-biased first-person accounts need to be read, despite a learner possibly not enjoying the subject matter.
In this instance, linking the topic to the wider world – be it interdisciplinary, revising the moment in history, looking at how a device changed the world, or how a person created a movement - is a great way of embedding the learning and making it appealing to read. A starter or plenary could be a great way to demonstrate this, but other examples such as blether stations, short exemplars, turning what has been read into a different type of text, learners becoming the teacher or a “Beat the Teacher” challenge based on their reading consolidates learning into long-term memory. According to the Learning Pyramid created by the National Training Laboratory, this active learning allows 75% of information to be retained by practising with others and 90% by teaching it to someone else.
Reading feels pointless
82% of young people aged 12-15 play video games. This blog post is not going to detail the pros and cons of video games but what needs to be emphasised is that by playing these games, often alone with their screen, learners live in their own world: the games are fun to play, instantly gratifying and often involve fantastical situations and scenarios. If you now think about a typical classroom, where the learner has less control and requires patience whilst they sit and learn, this change in pace and expectation feels like a lot of work that is not fun to do – and reading is usually the first skill that feels dated in comparison to the urgency of digital gaming.
Perhaps the reader has never gotten lost in a book or experienced a book hangover - that feeling of being cut off from an immersive fictional world because the author decided (for their own selfish reasons) to finish their story…how dare they! To encourage this, choosing more advanced books to encourage your class to read something everyone is unfamiliar with - even avid readers - can get them curious about the story. Once they are hooked, there are a myriad of effective strategies to enhance their reading experience: trade pages; let students read aloud with others or with you as one character; use starters to ask predictive questions about the text; use hinge-point questions in class halfway through the lesson to gauge comprehension - you can even incentivize this to make classroom learning like a game. If you have access to digital resources, depending on your school policy, you can also utilise this as a means of encouraging reading for pleasure.
Reading isn’t fun
By the time they reach secondary school, learners know what to expect with a reading task. They groan as they anticipate that they’ll need to read a text, break it down beyond recognition and analyse it with various paraphrasing efforts. Close reading or “reading for information” is what American professor and literature researcher Louise Rosenblatt has dubbed ‘efferent reading.’
Such skills as those listed above have often to be completed quietly, with learners providing feedback on what they have learnt - a process which is conspicuously lacking in the fun and instant ‘LOL’ response that social media and video games provide. Reading requires time and isn’t instantly spectacular or gratifying when compared with what lurks within a learner’s phone, console, or laptop but if we focus on the process of reading, we lose the joy. With most subjects pushing this skill, students rush out the building, grateful they might not have to read anything else that day. This takes away from ‘aesthetic reading’ – or reading for pleasure.
In the English department, we have amazing opportunities to encourage reading for pleasure: we can inspire learners to meet new people within the pages, to see these people making choices they might disagree with, and to build a positive classroom culture where students can choose, engage and consolidate their understanding in ways that make sense to them. We get the joy of seeing students navigate different texts and truly pick up a book out of curiosity rather than coercion.
Our After Reading Activities are designed to consolidate learning and provide choice once a text has been read. We already have a diverse selection of light activities that allow at-a-glance understanding, but there is so much more to come from Conduit as we continue in our goal of helping teachers teach. We truly believe teachers are the conduits of knowledge and reading is one vital way to unlock this.
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