Why can’t children actually read a book?
THe recent articles (mail) on the low average reading age of GCse students come as no surprise to me. I am a retired english teacher of more than 30 years’ experience, and I still work as a GCse examiner and privately tutor GCse english students. most show extreme reluctance to read — it’s ‘boring’ — and rarely read anything not prescribed for an exam. schools do not do enough to encourage reading. One student told me his teacher said to watch a film of Jekyll and Hyde because the book was ‘too hard for 16-year-olds’. another told me that after watching the film of John steinbeck’s Of mice and men, the teacher told them not to bother reading the rest of the book, despite the fact that the GCse exam required them to comment on the writer’s use of language, which the film would not show. In fact, before the reform of GCses and the abolition of coursework, it was possible to write about a film (because it was a ‘media text’). Thus, one girl’s coursework on prose was on the film shrek, and all about camera angles and tracking shots. Not a word about the use of language, and this was for GCse english Language. allowing students to watch a film rather than getting them to read the book it was based on was widespread, as was letting them just read one chapter of a book or one act of a shakespeare play to produce the coursework from that. One boy’s coursework on Great expectations was about Pip meeting miss Havisham, and that was the only chapter of the book he was required to read. at least since michael Gove’s longoverdue reforms, students are required to show a knowledge of the whole text in the exam. But they think it’s ‘too hard’ and a lot of teachers objected to the reforms. It made me wonder what on earth teachers do with their pupils for two years if they can’t get through two books, 15 poems and a shakespeare play in that time! The reading of parts of books still goes on. I tutor a girl in Year 8, and when I asked her if they had a class book, she told me they have a collection of extracts — no requirement to read a complete book! I am sure there are teachers out there who still try to encourage a love of reading, but they are facing an uphill struggle in the face of ‘bite-size’ and the pursuit of ‘easy’. This is demonstrated by your article showing that most secondary school children who do read prefer the Wimpy Kid books and others that are aimed at a primary school audience.
name and address supplied. WHILe some people may think it shocking that children prefer to read the ‘dreadful’ Wimpy Kid books, at least they are reading. For a child who is struggling, what greater incentive than to read an ‘easy’ book, and be able to say: ‘I’ve read a whole book!’ This is exactly why so many children enjoyed enid Blyton, following the adventures of the Famous Five, the secret seven and the girls of mallory Towers or st Clare’s. I bet many of today’s avid readers were once hooked on enid Blyton.
BarBara tHoMaS, Billingshurst, W. Sussex.