To help children succeed in schools, we all should do our part to ensure that the children start school with a strong foundation in language and literacy-related skills and a desire to learn to read.
In early elementary years, from the first through third grades, children will continue learning how to read. This is, of course, a complex process that is difficult for some and easy for others. As responsible adults in the family, we need to care during these years by not overemphasising the process of learning to read while encouraging children to practise reading often. I am trying to be simple and discreet and do not wish to run away with imagination.
Reading for pleasure and interest will help children to develop reading skills and will provide them with the opportunity to practise these skills in meaningful ways.
Walk into any book store or library, and you will find shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for children. Research, however, shows that as young readers get older, they do not move to more complex books. High-schoolers read books written for younger children and teachers, in the United States, do not assign difficult classics as much as they once did.
At Woodrow Wilson High School in Miramar, Florida the 11th-grade honours English students read The Kite Runner. And students like Megan Bell read some heavy-duty books in their spare time. ‘I like a lot of like old-fashioned historical dramas,’ Bell says. ‘Like I just read Anna Karenina… I ploughed through it and it was a really good book.’
But most teens do not forge their way through the Russian literature, says Walter Dean Myers, who now serves as the national ambassador for young people’s literature.
A popular author of young-adult novels that are often set in the inner city, Myers wants his readers to see themselves in his books. But sometimes, he is surprised by his own fan mail.
‘I’m glad they wrote’, he says, ‘but it is not very heartening to see what they are reading as juniors and seniors.’ Asked what exactly is discouraging, Myers says that these juniors and seniors read books that he wrote with fifth- and sixth-graders.
And a lot of the children who like to read in their spare time are more likely to read the latest vampire novels than the classics, says Anita Silvey, author of 500 Great Books for Teens. Silvey teaches graduate students in a children’s literature programme and at the beginning of the class, she asked her students, who grew up in the age of Harry Potter, about the books they like.
‘Every single person in the class said, “I don’t like realism, I don’t like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales”.’
Those anecdotal observations are reflected in a study of children’s reading habits by Renaissance Learning. For the fifth year in a row, the educational company used its accelerated reader programme to track what children are reading in grade 1 through 12.
‘Last year, we had more than 8.6 million students from across the country who read a total of 283 million books,’ says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning. Students participate in the accelerated reader programme through their schools. When they read a book, they take a brief comprehension quiz and the book is then recorded in the system.
The books are assigned a grade level based on vocabulary and sentence complexity.
And Stickney says that after the late part of middle school, students generally do not continue to increase the difficulty levels of the books they read.
Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grade 9 through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level.
Again in the previous year, for the first time, Renaissance did a separate study to find out what books were assigned to high school students. ‘The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read,’ Stickney says, ‘has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the 9th- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the 6th-grade level.’
Most of the assigned books are novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm. Students even read recent works like The Help and The Notebook. But in 1989, high-school students were assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Brontë and Edith Wharton.
Now, with the exception of Shakespeare, most classics have dropped off the list.
Back at Woodrow Wilson High School, in a grade 10 English class, regular, not honours, students say that they do not read much outside the school. But Tyler Jefferson and Adriel Miller are eager to talk. Adriel likes books about sports; Tyler likes history. Both say their teachers have assigned books they would not have chosen on their own.
‘I read the Odyssey,’ Tyler says. ‘I read Romeo and Juliet. I didn’t read Hamlet.’ Asked what he thought of the books, Tyler acknowledges some challenges. ‘It was very different, because how the language was back then, the dialogue that they had.’
Adriel agrees that books like that are tougher to read. ‘That’s why we have great teachers that actually make us understand’, he says. ‘It’s a harder challenge of our brain, you know; it’s a challenge.’
However, there does exist a challenge with its rewards, as Tyler says. ‘It gives us a new view on things.’
Sandra Stotsky would be heartened to hear that professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky, firmly believes that high school students should be reading challenging fictions to get ready for the reading they will do in college. ‘You wouldn’t find words like “malevolent”, “malicious” or “incorrigible” in science or history materials’, she says, stressing the importance of literature.
Stotsky says in the 1960s and 1970s, schools began introducing more accessible books in order to motivate kids to read. That trend has continued, and the result is that kids get stuck at a low level of reading. ‘Kids were never pulled out of that particular mode in order to realise that in order to read more difficult works, you really have to work at it a little bit more’, she says. ‘You’ve got to broaden your vocabulary. You may have to use a dictionary occasionally. You’ve got to do a lot more reading altogether.’
‘There’s something wonderful about the language, the thinking, the intelligence of the classics’, says Anita Silvey. She acknowledges that schools and parents may need to work a little harder to get children to read the classics these days, but that does not mean children should npt continue to read the popular contemporary novels they love. Both have value: ‘There’s an emotional, psychological attraction to books for readers. And I think some of, particularly, these dark, dystopic novels that predict a future where in fact the teenager is going to have to find the answers, I think these are very compelling reads for these young people right now.’
Reading leads to reading, says Silvey. It is when children stop reading, or never get started in the first place, that there is no chance of ever getting them hooked on more complex books.
Once your children begin nursery school, pre-school, or elementary school, you should work with their teacher to improve their reading skills. Many teachers now send home practical ideas for parents to use with their school-age children to help them develop skills and to encourage good reading habits. Ask your children’s teacher for these practice activities. By reinforcing the skills, your children’s teacher emphasises, you will be supplementing what they have learnt about reading throughout the school day.