Reading for pleasure still matters. Research indicates that reading for pleasure has the following advantages: it supports literacy and learning in school; it enables young people to develop their own, informed perspective on life; it is a safe and inexpensive way to spend time; it allows young people to understand and empathise with those in different situations, times and cultures; and it improves outcomes within and across the personal, educational, social and cultural dimensions of young people’s lives. 

Unfortunately, reading for pleasure tends to decline as students move through adolescence. The challenge for teachers is to redress this trend through specific attention to ways in which reading and specifically reading for pleasure can occupy a more prominent and valid place in the curriculum. The needs, interests, and capacities of our students need to be prioritised here.

Many years ago, I taught a particular Year 8 student who found school to be an alienating place and reading to be extremely unappealing. In one of my playground chats with Paul – usually very one-sided encounters – I asked if he had any hobbies. After a long silence, and with absolutely no eye contact or expression, he answered, ‘Ferrets.’ This response certainly caught me by surprise. With this information, I searched far and wide for reading material on this rather unusual animal. Did you know that ferrets need several hours of supervised exercise and play outside of their cage each day and can be quite mischievous and destructive? I was on a steep learning curve in my pursuit of facts about ferrets. Texts were located and Paul was ‘hooked’. He talked about ferrets, wrote about ferrets and read as much as he could find about ferrets. This ferret focus eventually branched off into a reading of books about animals in general. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows – a story with rats, moles, toads, badgers, and weasels – was a winner, as were All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot, Watership Down by Richard Adams, and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. 

Paul’s situation highlights the fact that students who struggle with reading are far more likely to progress in situations where teachers build on the constructive interests and strategies they do possess – and which they are shown they possess – rather than in ‘remedial’ situations which emphasise their inadequacies and draw their attention to them. Most reluctant readers find how possible it is to enjoy reading and to learn new reading strategies when they start to believe in their own abilities and concentrate on meaning and topics of interest to them.

Clare Murphy
English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach