Turning boys into bookworms

A story in The Independent by Warwick Mansell, Power of words: How a children's writer is turning boys into bookworms, tells how writer GP Taylor is making pupils read by telling them stories, with some remarkable results.

Which comes as a bit of surprise. It should be expected, one would have thought. Common sense. But when bureaucratic educationists get into the act, I should think they'd be able to committee anything to death, including common sense. I started reading because it was fun, because I could go places I never could in real life. My memory of childhood is all about story-telling by my parents, my uncles, aunts and older cousins.

Graham Taylor is an ex-vicar, ex-policeman, and exorcist turned multi-million selling author of fantasy novels who has visited more than 150 primary schools this year to tell children stories, for which he does not charge. His object is to get students, especially boys, reading for pleasure.

The British Government's national literacy strategy has been accused of focusing on teaching reading mainly through extracts of books, and drilling pupils to pass tests. " ... the literacy strategy, introduced in 1998, which emphasized the teaching of reading and writing as the acquisition of discrete skills -- such as word decoding, analysing sentence structure, spelling and grammar -- without actually getting pupils wanting to read in the first place."

Professor Teresa Cremin, president of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, says: "Children were shown a text and asked to find the adverbial clause, or asked what complex sentences they could find in a paragraph. This approach can get a bit farcical."

You bet. Who cares what part of speech a word is, or how a sentence is structured. What's important are the stories they tell and the joy a child gets when he reads them. Reading is entertainment, but if there is one thing the school system does well it to take all the joy out of it, and make it  a chore.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, says: "There was an overemphasis on skills and an underemphasis on the reason why you would read. Reading for pleasure suffered."

Professor Cremin agrees: "The pressure to achieve the level fours and level fives in tests is so great that teachers have felt that there is not the time to engage in reading for pleasure".

Which is kind of funny because children who read for pleasure will surely do better in tests, as results show at St Peter's Church of England primary school in Ashton-under-Lyne, outside Manchester. Last year 83 per cent of pupils gained their expected level, well ahead of the school's 43 per cent target.

The Independent