A Yorkshire Post posting says that, "One-in-eight teachers has never read a book to their class ..." according to a research. (From some of the horror stories I hear of Malaysian schools, a local research might indicate that only one-in-eight teacher actually read.) The gripe is that "almost 600,000 children could be missing out on great stories and failing to develop a love of reading because of the use of 'extracts' in the classroom ..." highlighting fears amongst teachers and parents that this is affecting pupil's academic performance. I guess we have no such worries -- most of our parents and teachers will be quite happy if their children didn't read anything as long as they score 21 As.Not surprisingly, this has spawned a major debate. One favourite view is: "If computers/playstations/DS etc, etc, didn't exist, children would spend more time reading. This generation has much more distractions than we had as kids - there was nothing much on the tv when I was little ..." Of course, it is fashionable to blame it all on the techno distractions of the day. When I was a kid, we had none of those either -- we did all our gaming outdoors. But that didn't stop teachers from reading to us, or for us to read on our own.
Basically, what we are looking at is the failure of the education system (despite, or because of, new fangled ideas) and teachers. (Actually, we had very few good teachers in those days either -- however much we like to romanticise the past. So, basically, nothing much has changed.)
The study was commissioned Heinemann.
Yorkshire Post
Yes, Most pupils are not read to in class. I have experienced this trend because I teach English once a week to Yr 4 pupils from our Teaching School.
ReplyDeleteAs a teacher trainer, I expose the pupils to new and fun strategies in the learning of English.
Thus, once when I brought a box of story books to the class, they ran up to grab a book each to read.
After I told them of my plan to read some stories, they immediately settled down quietly and listened.
They were so engrossed and responded very well in the Q & A session at the end. They also urged me to read more but as time was closing in, I had to stop. But not before promising for more to come the following week.
So teachers, immerse your kids in the world of fantasy and imagination. We need more story books in the future.Writers are former readers.