Reality Check – Reading For Information Is As Important As Reading For Pleasure
Students need to know how to read for purpose as well as pleasure, says Catharine Driver – and it's the job of every teacher to help make it happen…
Think about what you read in a week. How much of it is non fiction?
I’d guess most of it. The news, a report from your line manager, the weather forecast, a literacy survey, an article about the impact of pupil premium…
Maybe you’re lucky enough to get half an hour to enjoy that new novel in bed – but realistically, for most of us it’s non-fiction that makes up the bulk of our reading time. Our most recent National Literacy Trust survey of teachers found that nearly 70% of respondents read for information and 77% read for work, while only 39% read for enjoyment every day.
Secondary pupils read a lot for pleasure outside school, increasingly online or via electronic devices. 98% of KS3 and KS4 pupils have access to the internet at home – as such, websites, social media and emails featured strongly in our latest annual literacy survey of pupils aged 8 to 18.
Reading fiction remains much more popular than non-fiction, with young people reading for enjoyment more frequently than they do for information outside school.
Need to know
Our literacy survey also suggests that young people below the expected attainment level are less likely to be reading non-fiction or newspapers in their own time – yet in school, most subjects require close, critical or reflective reading of non-fiction texts.
Many subjects expect learners to carry out their own research at home, and most teachers will be familiar with receiving homework that has been cut and pasted from Wikipedia.
Why does this happen? Many pupils do not know how to read for information effectively, or how to summarise and take notes from a longer text. Reading for learning is a different skill from reading for pleasure that needs to be specifically taught in school – especially to pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds or minority ethnic groups, whose parents may not have had the educational or cultural experiences to enable them to help.
Above all, young people need to be equipped with the tools they need to continue reading beyond GCSE. A significant number will remain in education for a number of years, during which they will be required to read ever more complex non-fiction and information texts as they develop subject-specific interests and eventually move into the world of work. We owe it to them to teach them how to read history books, scientific articles, photography manuals, websites, the rules of cricket and the many types of academic and daily instructional writing that are out there.
Teachers are already encouraged to promote wider reading in their subjects. Not only does this develop wider knowledge and vocabulary, but it can also provide a more coherent view of a subject and build ‘cultural capital’. For teachers looking to recommend or display subject-related books for wider reading, the website www.goodreads.com is a good source of recommendations.
The science bit
This coming year, the National Literacy Trust Network is focusing on developing literacy skills for specific subject areas, providing time-pressed teachers and literacy co-ordinators with resources and training materials.
We’ve made a start by looking at teaching strategies and resources for modelling how texts work in science. Science texts are usually written with dense information packed into every sentence, and humanities and science subjects tend to vary considerably in the grammar used to link ideas within paragraphs.
For example, science writing makes frequent use of causal conjunctions such as ‘if’, ‘then’ and ‘therefore’, and passive verbs (‘X is made by Y’). Above all, there tends to be lots of technical vocabulary derived from Latin and Greek ‘terrestrial’, ‘photosynthesis’). Science textbooks are furthermore multimodal, in that they link pictures, diagrams and writing together on a single page. Teachers need to model these features to help students read longer explanation paragraphs or science articles.
To read dense texts and textbooks, students must call upon a range of strategies. They have be able to skim for the gist, scan for specific information and then do closer reading to grasp the meaning. They should also be able to use contents pages, indexes and glossaries to find things.
Developing stamina
Many younger learners will need to develop the stamina required to read longer non-fiction texts and summarise information. A group of science teachers and writers have recently collaborated to produce a series of resources that aim to teach reading in science.
In common with other subject teachers, they’ve found that co-operative reading strategies can be really useful in practising extended non-fiction reading. An example of this is ‘jigsaw’ reading – students are assigned to four specialist groups (AAA, BBB, CCC, DDD etc.), which each begin tackling a different piece of text. They are then re-grouped (ABCD etc.) and tasked with sharing the information they have acquired while collaborating with the rest of the group to complete a task or answer a set of questions.
Being literate reaches far beyond classrooms. Non-fiction reading will be as much a part of your students’ future lives as reading for pleasure. Teachers need to equip young people with the knowledge they’ll need for their working lives, as well as what they’ll require passing exams. The National Literacy Trust’s new Language and Literacy Within the Curriculum CPD training will support teachers in doing exactly that – helping to develop their skills for teaching literacy within their subject, while drawing on expertise from a wide range of schools.
Catharine Driver is secondary schools adviser at the National Literacy Trust; for more information, visit literacytrust.org.uk/cpd or follow @literacy_trust
