Children reading for pleasure

Publikácia Metodika na podporu čitateľstva žiakov v mladšom školskom veku je výstupom výskumného projektu VEGA 1/0455/18 Výskum a rozvoj čitateľstva žiakov mladšieho školského veku.
Zámerom projektu bolo objaviť príčiny znižovania čitateľstva žiakov s ich rastúcim vekom a zistiť možnosti stimulácie kognitívnej a receptívno-zážitkovej stránky čitateľstva na primárnom stupni školy a jeho následnej udržateľnosti. Našou ambíciou sa stalo vytvorenie čitateľského programu na podporu čitateľstva detí mladšieho
školského veku „Čítame deťom, čítame s deťmi“, ktorý synergicky spojil dospelých a deti s cieľom nájsť spôsoby, ako čitateľstvo „resuscitovať“ a zároveň inšpirovať k čítaniu.

The challenges of the 21st century enact new demands for contemporary education and literacy. A multimodal, material and posthuman era emphasizes the relational, embedded, embodied, and affective nature of knowledge. Multimodal artworks are not considered as “snapshots” or “depictions”, rather “traces of multiple practices of engagement” (Barad, 2007, p. 53). Drawing on a new materialist approach, this paper focuses on the ongoing engagement when exploring interpersonal relationships with children, multimodal artworks and various materials of choice. For the purposes of this presentation, ‘multimodal artworks’ refers to the popularized notion of ‘wordless picturebooks’ and Artistic creations with various materials. I employ Barad’s (2003; 2007) agential realism and explore the performative material-discursive practice of a reading-Artistic event. Drawing on excerpts from the relevant project, ‘interpersonal relationships’ is explored as emerging from the intra-action of various bodies and forces during a reading-Artistic event. ‘Interpersonal relationships’ emerges as a “multispecies assemblage” (Haraway, 2016) decentring the human towards the ongoing flow of a wide web of connections and relations.

The first comprehensive review of research on children's reading for pleasure in Aotearoa New Zealand. The review is one of three reports commissioned from AUT by the National Library as part of its Pūtoi Rito Communities of Readers initiative. The researchers looked at international and national research on reading for pleasure, finding very little on the topic in New Zealand. What research there has been has had little influence on policy. The review’s main conclusion is that reading for pleasure is a beneficial social activity where everyone has a role to play in distributing those benefits.

¿Cómo promover el acto de leer, en una sociedad que vive y se desarrolla en medio de una realidad de rasgos sociales,
políticos, culturales, económicos y educativos, poco favorables
para adquirir este hábito?
Se plantean a su vez, algunas afirmaciones que se discutirán
a lo largo del documento y que se relacionan con las
posibilidades, factores y obstáculos en este arduo trabajo
de promover la lectura en nuestro país. La primera se encamina a debatir si la lectura es más un reto a la inteligencia que un acto placentero, pues expone al sujeto lector a la crisis personal de descubrirse en sus defectos y la necesidad de hacer algo para modificar dicha condición. La segunda, considera a la lectura como un dispositivo educativo y cultural de la sociedad, mediante el cual se pretende construir mejores generaciones de ciudadanos educados en y para la vida democrática, entendida en su más amplio sentido; y la tercera, si como dispositivo ransformador, la lectura amenaza las estructuras de poder tradicionales y conservadoras que simulan la promoción lectora sin arribar a una verdadera política de Estado de la misma.

Resumen Algunos centros educativos que buscan hacer una mejor animación a la lectura ponen en funcionamiento clubs de lectura escolares, sin embargo, esta práctica sigue siendo minoritaria en el contexto de las acciones que los centros implementan para mejorar la competencia lectora de los alumnos. En este artículo se analiza etnográficamente el aporte que ha hecho un club de lectura escolar a la mejora de la competencia literaria de sus participantes a lo largo del primer curso académico que se pone en funcionamiento. Los resultados muestran que los miembros del club han aumentado la comprensión lectora, la educación en valores y el gusto por la lectura. Es posible concluir que la puesta en marcha de un club de lectura en la escuela permite mejorar la competencia literaria de los niños participantes. Improving literary competence with a school reading club Abstract Some schools that are looking forward to promote a better reading encouragement create scholar-reading clubs. However, this practice is still minority in the context of actions implemented by the centers to improve the students' reading skills. This article analyzes ethnographically the contribution made by a scholar-reading club to improve the literary skills of its participants during the first academic year in that it starts up. The results show that the club members have increased their reading comprehension, values education and the pleasure of reading. It can be conclude that the creation of a reading club at school improves literary competence of participating children.

A multifaceted notion, Reading for Pleasure, highlights readers’ agency, their desire to read, the delight gained through this experience, and a related pedagogy that fertilizes such volitional stance. The journey that emerges under the Reading for Pleasure umbrella highlights various aspects of the reading experience, such as set and setting, approach and activities, reading community, readers’ engagement. The discourse of Reading for Pleasure is most often developed through the sociocultural lens (Chambers, 2011; Cremin et al., 2014; Kucirkova & Cremin, 2020). Recent accounts, though, discussing digital reading (Hollett & Ehret, 2017), makerspace literacies (Lemieux & Rowsell, 2020; Sheridan et al., 2020), and craftivist post-digital approaches (Rowsell & Shillitoe, 2019) consider new materialist relational approaches. For the purposes of this poster, I employ a new materialist approach to reconceptualize Reading for Pleasure. I posit that a relational materialist approach shifts from conventional approaches, such as literature circles, authors’ visits, and book-talks, and opens up possibilities for entwining the reading and the Artistic process and the socially engaged practice. Drawing on new materialist and posthumanist frameworks, I employ Karen Barad’s (2007) agential realism and attend to the entanglement and intra-action of a reading-Artistic event in its ongoing articulation and explore its relational character. I draw on Jane Bennett’s (2001) notion of enchantment to explore the affective flows generated between children, myself, artworks, materials (studio-based and natural), and environment. The entanglement is performed as a complex web of relations where the ongoing engagement is never fixed, rather unstable and perplexed. The artworks and the materials are considered as collaborators; thus, I employ Jane Bennett’s (2010) thing power to attend to the vitality of things to affect and to be affected. Materials and artworks also engage our senses and trigger personal and cultural associations. As such, I draw on haptics (Marks, 2002) to explore the multisensory experience and bodily relationship with the image that extends the limits of visuality beyond the optical. I also draw on Barbara Bolt’s (2010) notion of methexis to explore the material performativity of the Artistic, creative process as a ritual practice. Methexis suggests an embodied theory of the Artistic practice, considering conceptual and material bodily processes as intertwined. It highlights a performance that produces rather than represents. In synthesizing a Reading for Pleasure event, the reading and the Artistic process are ritual practices of equal importance interlaced in a performative production of the work of art, of the poem. Through this presentation, I aim to explicate the implications of a new materialist approach to argue that Reading for Pleasure as an affective event intensifies when transforming traditional approaches to include the reading and the Artistic process as creative and performative practice and the social engagement in responding to matters of concern and care. The focus is on children’s engagement with multimodal artworks; what is most often conceptualized as printed wordless picturebooks and their Artistic creations with various materials. In choosing the vignettes, I utilize Maggie MacLure’s (2010, 2013) notion of data that glow, where glow “seems to invoke something abstract or intangible that exceeds propositional meaning, but also has a decidedly embodied aspect” (2013, p. 661). I zoom on a group of children’ s collaborative choice of artwork. Similarly, I zoom on the emergent reading and Artistic engagement with various materials of choice, where matters of interest triggered during the reading process are further explored. The abstract Artistic creations are approached as “traces of multiple practices of engagements” (Barad, 2007, p. 53). I finally zoom towards a socially engaged practice where relevant matters of concern and care that emerged in the process might be further explored. In so doing, I approach this poster as a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013), where vignettes of material-discursive intra-actions, theory, and media emerge as open-ended practices and highlight complexity and richness devoid of hierarchical order.

A core requirement in our Initial Teacher Education (ITE) English department is that, over their three years, students keep a reading file which catalogues the children’s books they have read. In it, they reflect on the teaching and learning opportunities these texts could provide in the primary classroom. This has been mandatory since I was a student, twenty years ago, and the reason behind its implementation has always been sound: without a core knowledge and understanding of children’s books, you are unable to support pupils’ diverse reading needs and tastes.

This chapter considers the reading experiences of voluntary reading groups in schools, their collaborative interpretation of children’s/young adult literature, and their construction of reader identities. We focus on a study of secondary school reading groups in different parts of the UK as they took part in a scheme to ‘shadow’ the judging of two prestigious children’s book awards: the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. The groups spent part of the summer term reading and discussing books that were short-listed for one or both of these awards. They were then able to compare their views with those of the judges. Our study of this process was carried out in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), who run the awards and the shadowing scheme and wished to evaluate the success of shadowing.  The work was funded by the Carnegie UK Trust.
A strong theme that emerged in the study was that, despite their institutional settings and, to some extent, their alignment with curricular priorities (e.g. many were reported as contributing to their school’s literacy strategy) the groups presented themselves as determinedly extracurricular. While reading for pleasure is part of the curricula for English in the UK, group leaders and members saw English as dominated by objectives-led approaches to reading and by assessment. By contrast, reading group experiences were characterized as being about ‘fun’, ‘enjoyment’ and ‘choice’. Groups were partly defined by their contrast with curricular reading, and considerable work went into creating and sustaining this distinctiveness. But also, in a context in which reading is often regarded as ‘geeky’, an activity for ‘boffins’, groups sought to create reading communities in which the pleasure of reading could be shared.
In the chapter we consider, in turn, evidence from interviews and conversations with reading group members, and observations and audio-recordings of reading group meetings. In combination, these demonstrate how ‘non-school’ reading practices, relationships and identities are worked at and maintained: both accounted for in talk about reading and enacted within reading group practices.

Given the narrow scope of primary teachers' knowledge and use of children's literature identified in Phase I of Teachers as Readers (2006–2007), the core goal of the Phase II project was to improve teachers' knowledge and experience of such literature in order to help them increase children's motivation and enthusiasm for reading, especially those less successful in literacy. The year-long Phase II project, Teachers as Readers: Building Communities of Readers, which was undertaken in five Local Authorities (LAs) in England, also sought to build new relationships with parents and families and to explore the concept of a “Reading Teacher (RT): a teacher who reads and a reader who teaches” (Commeyras and colleagues). The research design was multilayered; involving data collection at individual, school and LA levels, and using a range of quantitative and qualitative data research methods and tools. This paper provides an overview of the Phase II research. It suggests tha...

This is a report on the most recent of three similar studies. We present results on all three here in order to highlight the profound similarities. All three are analyses of the results of the PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), an examination given to 10-year-olds in 2006, 2011, and 2016.

This paper examines the perspectives of Year 5 pupils from a school in East London on reading for pleasure. Sixty children initially completed a questionnaire and their responses were used to identify two groups: children whose responses suggested a positive attitude towards reading for pleasure and those who did not. Two focus group interviews were conducted, and a thematic analysis identified the most prevalent children’s perspectives on reading for pleasure; focusing on ways in which reading for pleasure is obstructed in educational settings and how it could be supported through the actions of educational professionals. Results concluded that, amongst other themes, children’s agency and choice in reading material and setting is a dominant factor in their enjoyment of reading. This paper then suggests practical ways in which engagement in reading for pleasure can be supported, including an example of the creation of a library based on pupil voice suggestions.

This article describes my book, MOTIVATING TEEN AND PRETEEN READERS: HOW TEACHERS AND PARENTS CAN LEAD THE WAY (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011). As the title says, it's all about self-motivation, or motivating adolescent readers from the inside-out. With over 1,000 questions on reading life and reading processes for children to reflect on and write about, you can help develop and expand a growth mindset that would create a lifelong reader.