Kids and reading enjoyment
One of the biggest challenges I have faced as an English teacher over the past two decades is encouraging kids - particularly boys - to read for pleasure. The emotive reading experience seems to have escaped an entire generation of readers, though surely this cannot be true of all students in our schools. After making various investigations into reluctant readers’ habits and attitudes, I decided to formulate a list of affecting factors that may provide an explanation for this widespread lack of interest in reading for leisure. I begin with the aim of developing a plan of action, involving readers, writers, teachers, parents and guardians and community partners, that would restore reading to its rightful status among young adults.
The importance of reading has been the subject of numerous books, studies and discourses. Perhaps the most obvious and noble purposes promoted by scholars are the impacts of reading upon literacy and knowledge. For the asthete and the writer, it is an intrinsically valued pursuit that adds richness to the inward life of the reader. To the avid bookworm, it provides a means of escaping the humdrum reality of the world, and the opportunity to explore possibilities and indeed, impossibilities. Reading contributes to the wholeness of a person’s experience of life, the world, other cultures and alternate lifestyles. It shapes the intellectual self, requires and nurtures emotional connections and promotes and exploits one’s sense of creativity. But at its core, reading fulfils an even higher, yet simpler function - influence.
In English-speaking cultures, every work of literature - great and pathetic – has been generated using the same humble set of twenty-six letters. Passages of prose have influenced people to explore the universe, to change legislation, to aspire to personal greatness, to react against oppression, to set themselves against a common enemy, to give up their lives for a cause, to risk social change and to rethink their personal and spiritual ideals. The simple yet profound fact is that those phonemes and graphemes - the code that has such power for good and evil – are equally available to everyone. And everyone is equally susceptible to their influence. One discovers the power of both the spoken and the written word through reading. And only when this discovery is made can an individual realise their potential to influence the world and to be influenced, for better or worse, by the power of language.
Statistics reveal that leisure reading is declining among Australian adolescents. School-based studies show that many students don’t enjoy the reading they undertake at school. Yet, pleasant encounters with books have been shown to improve the acquisition of educational outcomes among school students of all ages. It therefore seems prudent to seek a clearer understanding of the way a reader’s interest in a book is initiated. Academic and anecdotal evidence suggests more must be done to promote reading for enjoyment across a range of genres and for a variety of purposes. In fact, encouraging reading for enjoyment is an explicitly stated objective in the New South Wales Education Standards Authority’s (NESA’s) Stage Four and Five English Syllabuses.
Reading enjoyment hinges upon close engagement with a text, but this cannot occur without the establishment of initial reading interest. My Master’s degree research study showed that the central human figure of a narrative plays a key role in securing and sustaining the personal interest and emotional involvement of the reader. The key role of character provides an important point of contact between the reader and the protagonist. In my research, I focused on the sub-genre of young adult fiction, which is well-suited to, and indeed aimed at winning back this dwindling readership of adolescents.
Factors affecting the development of reluctant or avoidant readers
SCHOOL-BASED FACTORS
- examination and critiques of current fiction titles most popularly used in schools
- dissatisfaction with the new canon
- a mismatch between reading interests of students and their teachers’ text selection criteria
- genres popular with curriculum writers conflicting with students’ personal tastes
- current availability of appropriate books for kids who struggle with literacy
- expectations of readers and reading outcomes
- classroom strategies that don’t work (such as forced group reading, reading aloud to the class, and impatience with struggling readers who are required to read aloud)
- limited choices among school resources
- perceptions about other, more rewarding activities to do
- perceived self-efficacy as a reader and interpreter of texts
- failure to perceive the potential of reading to empower the reader
- perceived lack of academic ability
- inconsistent or confusing literacy scores derived from ‘snapshot’ national testing
- social stigmas associated with liking or disliking reading
- ‘static’ created by teachers’ use of technical jargon in reference to reading
- the different worlds kids occupy – at home, in class, with their friends, privately and how books tune them in and out of these settings
PERSONAL FACTORS
- previous experiences with books
- personal interests
- family influence (valuing of reading at home)
- culture and ethnicity
- perceived gender influences
- language barriers
- medical and physiological barriers
- opportunity for reading in leisure time
- competing leisure interests
SOCIAL FACTORS
- dissatisfaction with fleetingly popular genres
- publishing trends in the Australian market
- changing language trends due to digital media
- the implicit devaluing of traditional literature by the media and popular culture
- prioritising high academic results in non-literary subjects that more directly affect employment prospects
