Teach your child to love reading
London – It’s estimated that only 30 percent of children and teenagers read books daily in their own time.
Children who read a lot of books fast, ably and with high levels of comprehension achieve more in every area of school curriculum than those who don’t.
It is all too easy to blame TV, computer games and other distractions. Actually, the root cause lies in the failure to develop them as readers.
In Britain, children are taught the basics of reading in school using a c-a-t phonics programme. The operative word is “basics”. It’s what happens next that is crucial. Phonics teaches children decoding skills. No one can read unless they can decode, so this is an essential first stage, but that is all it is.
Nearly all children eventually learn to turn the squiggles on the page into words. They may not be fluent, but when they see “Danger!” or “menu”, they know what it means. And, by the age of seven, most can stumble through a passage from some sort of book while an adult listens.
But that is not reading. Real reading comes next and parents can do a lot to help.
Reading is like swimming. Learning to float is not the end of your swimming career – it’s the beginning. To become confident deep-end readers, children have to practise all the time. Otherwise they will slip backwards and even the decoding skills will dull. Real readers go on getting better at it throughout their lives.
It is also important that children learn not to subvocalise because it holds them up. Subvocalisers painstakingly read every word aloud to themselves in their heads, as we all do at the beginning. It’s a slow process.
A skilled reader reads for meaning without having to “translate” each word into a sound. The brain learns to convert signs seen by the eye into meaning without consciously passing though the medium of spoken or heard words.
The best place for a child to do that essential daily practice – which should quickly become a pleasure rather than a chore – is at home. That means taking children to libraries and/or buying them books.
It means turning off (most) screens and certainly getting television sets, laptops, phones, games consoles and the like out of children’s bedrooms – or, better still, don’t put them in there in the first place.
The only screen that should be permitted in a child’s bedroom, once he or she can decode, is an e-book reader – preferably one of the simple ones that allows the user to read books but not to access other distractions.
They are fairly cheap. Hundreds of books can be accommodated in one small unit and many books can be downloaded free or at low cost.
Most importantly, you can adjust the font size. Beginner readers can often manage quite complex text if they don’t have to grapple with tiny print.
Similarly, if there’s only a paragraph or two to view on a page and the child isn’t holding a daunting “big” book, he or she is more likely to sail on with it.
The most useful thing parents can do to encourage children to read is to be seen reading a lot themselves. Parents who say they are “too busy to read” simply convey the message that reading is beneath the attention of important grown-ups. “Do as I say but not as I do” cuts no ice with children. They will quickly stop reading because not reading will be seen as “cool” and “adult”. – The Independent
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