Learning to Read: Building a Lifelong Passion

"Learning does not automatically happen; 

Students need expert teaching to develop high levels of reading and writing expertise."

Irene Fountas & Gay Su Pinnell

As children develop skills and strategies to decode and make sense of text, they begin to see themselves as 'readers', a term that denotes not just the capacity to make sense of text but acknowledges also invitations to make text work for them in a multitude of ways - to find out information, pursue questions, play with words, select genres of interest, make connections.  It is access and opportunities to impact the whole world that moves learning to read from a task requiring applied skills to an engaging passion that endures a lifetime.

From a teaching perspective, nudging students past the application of skills and strategies to wholehearted text engagement requires expert understanding of possible 'next steps' in helping readers find multiple ways to explore, understand, manipulate and invest themselves in text. This includes everything from understanding genre, to exercising multiple strategies for researching, verifying and expanding on ideas and events. It includes understanding text features and how they vary from genre to genre, changing text features for emphasis or simplified understanding, manipulating text to pose new questions or understandings and to understanding text structures (story structure, poetry, expository text structures, instructions, etc). Engaging with text will offer students ways to build emotional connections with characters, make connections to previous or desired experiences, push perceptions, thinkings and questions. Students come to see text as not just words on a page but a potential, all-engaging experience that will cause them to think, act or respond differently once they have invested time and energy in the text than they did before encountering a particular book, text or story.

Building personal reflections and responses to text helps children build skills in selecting and evaluating text - often when a student says a text is 'boring', for example, the story will have unfolded without any changes to the character - meaning there was no reason for the reader to feel connected to the character or really even care what happens to them.  A character who faces significant challenges, has to make decisions or solve problems usually changes as a result and the reader develops a great curiosity and often empathy for the character, becoming anxious to see what happens to the character - often so anxious they will become immersed in the text, might lose track of time, choose not to engage in an activity they usually love to finish reading, etc - when this happens, it is an existential experience the reader will want to replicate and is the beginning of building a lifelong passion for reading.

Reading is not always a reflection of a paper-based text - digital texts, e-books, blogs - these are all digital reading materials children are very familiar with and engage with in similar ways to paper-based texts in terms of exploring, understanding and manipulating text. Regardless of the format or genre, children who are developing lifelong passions for reading will engage in multiple text formats throughout their lives and the skills, strategies and approaches they polish and use effectively as children will prove to be a solid foundation for future growth as a passionate reader.

Teachers often see passions for reading become clearly evident in particular children at very early ages - and they also see students whose passion for reading doesn't happen till later in their educational histories when they suddenly find a particular reason to be invested in text. The greatest revelation about teaching reading to emerge in recent years is the need for personalized teaching and learning for each and every child - there are no universal programs or structures that work for every child and what works for one may not be as successful for the next child.  This presents challenges for assessment as well - assessment needs to be about every single child rather than collectively comparing whole groups of children with 'similar' learning needs.

Building a lifelong passion for reading is not a linear, prescriptive process - there are as many nuances and quirks to guiding students towards being passionate readers as there are readers in the world. It is, however, one of the most exciting processes a child can experience and, as the teacher, the most rewarding of all teaching tasks is to foster and watch reading passion develop in students.

What begins as invitations to share texts orally evolves into direct teaching of phonemic/vocabulary/phonetic strategies for decoding and making sense of texts - and these directly taught strategies evolve into passionate engagement with reading texts of any sort. The process unfolds over several years in a multitude of ways, guided by teachers who genuinely love their students and want to celebrate successes.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal