Wealden Times | WT179 | January 2017 | Health & Beauty supplement inside

Read On
Education
Susan Elkin looks at the way reading is taught in schools and at home
There’s a great deal more to teaching reading, than – well –
teaching reading. Far too many schools, teachers and even
parents get so hung up on deciphering squiggles, worrying
about phonics with all its esoteric graphemes and phonemes,
‘sounding out’ and all the rest of it that they forget that this
mechanical stage is the beginning and not the end of the process.
The real purpose of teaching reading is to develop competent,
fluent, ‘deep end’ readers with enough stamina to immerse themselves
effortlessly in print for a sustained length of time. And this, in my
experience, is where many children hit the buffers. They can tell you
what the squiggles ‘say’ but they fail to develop into Real Readers.
My contention then, has long been, that encouraging reading
matters much more than ‘teaching’ it. And most schools – and
parents – could, in my view do far more to make Real Reading
a normal part of everyday activity than they currently do.
Children need to see adults buried in books (or reading books on
tablets). Otherwise they get the message that reading is a ‘do as I say
but not as I do’ childish thing and soon stop doing it. And the early
teens is the most vulnerable moment for this – they want desperately
to be cool and grown up and (as they see it) adults don’t read do they?
Role modelling is an immensely powerful, often undervalued
teaching tool. Every school should have a block of time every day
when everyone – including all the adults – reads silently. It used to
be called USSR (uninterrupted sustained silent reading) or ERIC
(everyone reads in class) and there is nothing like enough of it now.
At home, parents – especially male adults – need to be seen
reading too. Otherwise boys get the impression that reading is
a ‘girly’ thing which self respecting men don’t bother with.
Some schools use reward schemes such as Renaissance
Reading which sets levels and provides quizzes on books read.
Sponsored reading marathons can work quite well so can
projects such as a Book Week in which almost all the time is
related to book events such as author visits, telling each other
about favourite books and lots of extra reading time.
At home, for most of us, it’s probably a case of less TV and
more quiet time. And it’s not hard to switch it on when there’s
something you or your children really want to watch. And we
still – despite some closures in some areas – have many fabulous
public libraries. They need to be part of every child’s experience
almost from birth because they help to normalise the reading habit.
Don’t reject Kindles or similar reading devices either. They make
access to books easy and work well even for quite young children.
Let’s teach them to Read rather than allowing them to infer
that applying phonics is the be-all and end-all of reading.
Susan Elkin is the author of Encouraging Reading (Continuum,
2008) and Unlocking the Reader in Every Child (Ransom, 2011).
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