{"id":934,"date":"2012-06-05T18:26:32","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T16:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.teachenglishtoday.org\/?p=934"},"modified":"2012-06-11T08:36:36","modified_gmt":"2012-06-11T06:36:36","slug":"teach-the-books-touch-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachenglishtoday.org\/index.php\/2012\/06\/teach-the-books-touch-the-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Teach the books, touch the heart’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"image_pdf\"<\/a>\"image_print\"<\/a><\/div>

\u2018Teach the books, touch the heart’<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h1>\n

(With apologies to the New York Times<\/em>, April 20, 2012)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u2018This is not a (talk) about books. It\u2019s a (talk) about people.\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n

(The Reading Promise<\/em>, by Alice Ozma)<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Pamela Neethling<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Media Centre Hilton College<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The following is a presentation which Pamela gave at the Hilton College English Conference on 18 May this year.<\/strong><\/p>\n

C. S. Lewis said, \u2018We read to know that we are not alone<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

Lewis was absolutely not<\/em> thinking about literacy in South Africa when he uttered that much-quoted line, but I have still found it comforting. We are not alone in South Africa, as we face the terrifying truth that many of our young people cannot read, or will not read, never mind read adequately enough to \u2018meet the demands of (future) work and social networks\u2019<\/em> (The Global Literacy Challenge<\/em>, 2008).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Literacy is a global concern because it is \u2018a survival tool in a fiercely competitive world\u2019<\/em> (The Global Literacy Challenge,<\/em> 2008).\u00a0 We are nearing the end of UNESCO\u2019s Literacy Decade that began in 2003. With its slogan, Literacy as Freedom<\/em>, UNESCO\u2019s aim has been to provide a framework for literacy in a world where it is estimated that one in five adults cannot read or write, at all.\u00a0 Literacy is a basic human right, which is why the goals of UNESCO have been coupled with strategies such as the Education for All campaign and the Millennium Development Goals.<\/p>\n

According to the United Nations Development Programme report, 2011<\/em>, our literacy rate in South Africa is 88 per cent and we are 113 out of a possible 183 countries, ranked number 58 in the world. But in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, 2006<\/em>, which compared ten-year-olds from 35 different countries, South Africa was bottom of the pile, despite the fact that the South African students tested were older, at 11.9 years, than the average, a concession made due to \u2018the challenge of multiple native languages and the language of instruction\u2019<\/em> (Mullis et al, 2007).<\/p>\n

Illiteracy \u2013 or even low literacy \u2013 is an expensive problem. The World Literacy Foundation estimates that the world-wide lack of literacy skills costs the global economy US$1.19 trillion each year. Individual countries, both developing and developed, have explored the cost of literacy challenges within their borders and the figures are frightening: inadequate literacy or a lack of literacy is not only ruinously expensive for the individual but for the society within which that individual resides.<\/p>\n

Most of what I have read around the topic of literacy pertains to basic literacy skills. The definition of literacy<\/em> as a concept is also under review. In a 2005 UNESCO report, the following, much lengthier and more sophisticated description (UNESCO is adamant that this is not a definition) of literacy caught my attention:<\/p>\n

Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, develop their knowledge and potential and participate fully in community and wider society.<\/em>(UNESCO 2005:21)<\/p>\n

This description is exciting but also divisive. How many young people and adults, currently considered literate in the more accepted sense of the word, would still be labelled literate<\/em> based on this?<\/p>\n

But the truth is if our students are to succeed in the twenty-first century world, we do need a broader, more enhancing vision of literacy. Recently I browsed through Future Work Skills 2020<\/em>, published by the Institute for the Future, part of the University of Phoenix Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. Many of these sorts of reports and investigations are floating about at the moment and most of them, certainly the ones I have read, draw more or less the same sorts of conclusions about how we will work in the next few decades and what skills we will need in order to navigate these new worlds filled with new information. But what strikes me about the predictions these publications make is that they all r<\/em>equire the same, basic skill.<\/p>\n

Future Work Skills 2020<\/em> names concepts for the future work force such as Sense-making, Social Intelligence, Novel and Adaptive Thinking, Cross-cultural Competency, Computational Thinking, New-Media Literacy, Transdisiplinarity, Design Mind-set, Cognitive Load Management and Virtual Collaboration.\u00a0 These are smart, exciting new labels designed to incorporate what is new and developing in our evolving world. But all of them, at their heart, have the ability to read<\/em> \u2013 to predict, skim, scan, identify, infer, distinguish, evaluate, explain, interpret, motivate, analyse, respond, to consider socio-cultural and political values, attitudes and beliefs, and to evaluate how language may reflect and shape those values and attitudes. I am sure by now you are mouthing along with me as you recognise that I am quoting the key verbs from Learning Outcome 2, Reading and Viewing, in the IEB Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement. If our students are encouraged to read, not only for education, but for enrichment and enjoyment, of course they will (and I am quoting) be \u2018able to express their identity, feelings and ideas, interact with others and manage their world\u2019. Reading is not a future-anything skill \u2013 it is, it has and it always will be the single most important and life-enhancing ability we can offer our students anywhere in the world, at any time and in any environment.<\/p>\n

Here is my concern, however, and it lies buried in the National CAPS document:<\/p>\n

\u2018By the final phase of schooling, however, many of these activities [referring to reading] should need little emphasis: they have been part of the learner\u2019s progress through preceding phases<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

This is where things could go horribly wrong. That assumption cannot be made. English teachers desperately need to engage with our students at every phase, urging them, motivating them and encouraging them to read for enjoyment by making reading accessible to them and by modelling the value and delight of reading through our own, personal reading habits. Reading will always need emphasis<\/em> \u2013 teachers of senior phase students know that as well as teachers of foundation phase or primary phase. And often, for whatever reason, reading might not <\/em>have been part of the learner\u2019s progress through preceding phases.<\/p>\n

In a Monitoring Learning Achievement <\/strong>surveyconducted in 25\u00a0145 South African schools in 1999, 22\u00a0101 schools had no space for a library, 3\u00a0388 had dedicated library spaces but not one book and only 1\u00a0817 schools had libraries with books. In other words, for the mathematically challenged of us, only 7 per cent of the schools surveyed had libraries.\u00a0 A way around the absence of libraries is for teachers, especially in the primary phase, to have classroom collections for students to use \u2013 sadly, only 25 per cent of the schools offered this alternative.<\/p>\n

Our government is very aware of the shockingly low literacy levels in this country and has devised a National Reading Strategy for South Africa; its vision reads: Every South African learner will be a fluent reader who reads to learn, and reads for enjoyment and enrichment. <\/em>We must ensure that our students leave school as readers, preferably who read for pleasure, because the benefits of such an activity for the individual student and the society he or she will inhabit are almost immeasurable. \u00a0English teachers cannot assume that because a student can read, or has been a reader, he or she will continue to read without our support.<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, as well as the heated debate around the words \u2018literacy\u2019, \u2018illiteracy\u2019, \u2018low literacy\u2019 and \u2018adequate literacy\u2019, there is academic debate around what we mean when we say \u2018reading for pleasure\u2019.\u00a0 Other ways of putting this are \u2018leisure reading\u2019 (Greaney, 1980), \u2018recreational reading\u2019 (Manzo & Manzo, 1995), \u2018voluntary reading\u2019 (Krashen, 2004), \u2018independent reading\u2019 (Cullinan, 2000) and my personal favourite, \u2018ludic reading\u2019 (Nell, 1988) \u2013 I had to look up \u2018ludic\u2019: It means \u2018spontaneous and playful\u2019, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English!<\/p>\n

Whatever we want to call it, reading for enjoyment is the reading we do of our own accord, because we want to. It can also refer to reading that we began at someone else\u2019s behest, such as a teacher, but continued with because we became \u2018hooked\u2019 and wanted to carry on. Typically, reading for enjoyment will reflect our own choice of reading material \u2013 and this is a thorny area for English teachers because we need to allow choice (which has been proven to be a very important issue for teenage and senior primary readers) but within the confines of what we believe to be best for growing our readers.<\/p>\n

Wanting our students to enjoy reading is not simply because we are passionate about the heart of our language, its literature, but because it has real, measurable benefits: in 2002 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development stated that \u2018reading enjoyment is more important for children\u2019s educational success than their family\u2019s socio-economic status\u2019<\/em>. And Krashen adds, \u2018When children read for pleasure, when they get \u2018hooked on books\u2019, they acquire, involuntarily and without conscious effort, nearly all of the so-called \u2018language skills\u2019 many people are so concerned about: they will become adequate readers, acquire a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical constructions, develop good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect) spellers. Although free voluntary reading alone will not ensure attainment of the highest levels of literacy, it will at least ensure an acceptable level. Without it, I suspect that children simply do not have a chance.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

But sadly, and this will not be a surprise, a lot of evidence is accumulating that a growing number of young people, especially between the ages of ten and fourteen, are not reading books for pleasure any more. They are<\/em> reading \u2013 text messages, web pages and so on, but their choice of reading is veering away from fiction, and non-fiction has never really been a very popular genre for younger people anyway.\u00a0 And teachers of boys will equally not be surprised to hear that boys tend to read less than girls and tend to enjoy it less, based on studies such as Clark and Foster\u2019s in 2005.<\/p>\n

As English teachers in well-resourced schools that doubtless have given much thought to our students\u2019 reading, \u00a0we must continue to do everything we can to motivate reading and to encourage our students regardless of phase to embrace intrinsic<\/strong> and extrinsic<\/strong> reasons for reading. \u00a0Intrinsic motivation means that students read because they want to; thus they read more often and more widely; they enjoy it more; they retain more information and they are better able to persist with what they are reading. They see that reading is a valuable, important activity, they are curious to learn about a particular topic and they feel a sense of achievement at what they have mastered.<\/p>\n

Extrinsic motivation to read means that students read because the activity is being imposed upon them, usually by their teachers. Extrinsic motivation is often linked to assessment or a task. Research (Deci et al, 1999, Wigfield and Guthrie, 1997) has discovered that extrinsically motivated students want their reading to be recognised, they want to receive a tangible reward; when reading for assessment, they want to earn good marks and they tend to read competitively \u2013 wanting to outperform other students.<\/p>\n

Intrinsically motivated readers tend to have higher level thinking skills and to understand concepts better than students who read because they are forced to. But extrinsic motivation can be harnessed to bring about intrinsic motivation!<\/p>\n

We must be able to answer the questions, \u2018What should I read next?\u2019 and most importantly, \u2018What should I read?\u2019 (Which usually in my experience, despite a collection of nearly 11\u00a0000 items in our library, follows the statement, \u2018There is nothing to read<\/em>.\u2019) As busy, pressured English teachers trying to squeeze in reading for our own pleasure, never mind reading in order to motivate our students, sounds like an impossibly tall order. But there are ways of coping with the volume of new publications and authors that seem to come at us in a tsunami of texts. However we try to motivate our students to read for enjoyment, it is essential that they know we read for pleasure and that we share what we have read with them.<\/p>\n

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader<\/em>, also by C S Lewis, Lucy opens a magical book and we are told, \u2018The longer she read the more wonderful and more real the pictures became<\/em> \u2026\u2019.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s cast a spell on our students\u2026 These are some suggestions of various ways to motivate our students to read (without trying to read every book that is published and managing to get 8 hours sleep a night). Modern life is certainly not all about Facebook and Twitter, but we need to accept that our students, especially our teenage students, are going to be using social networks and technology. This means we must try to meet them where they are and make their interests work for us. It is helpful if we can embrace some degree of technological savvy, without having to morph into Bill Gates\u2026<\/p>\n