Marbles-Essay

STIMULATING CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS TO READ Elisa, Jéssica and Luise

Reading is part of most people’s lives. Every day, hundreds of written material are produced and made available to public. When the author writes a text, he or she is not the only one to construct meaning. The reader is a participant too, for reading is not simply a decodification of what is written; it is an active procedure that involves processing information. Furthermore, reading helps broadening intellectual capacities by improving writing and achieving knowledge. It can also be a pleasant activity; however, not many people in Brazil cultivate reading habits. Family and school can change this situation so that children become assiduous readers.

Since family is the first reference in children’s life, there are several things that can be done to encourage them to read. Parents should be aware that the earlier the habit is acquired, the more beneficial it is for the reader. Moreover, childhood is the ideal moment for that due to children’s natural curiosity. However, if this interest in new information and experiences is not stimulated, a potential reader may be lost. According to Marques (1995) apud Gouveia (2009), children who interact with written material learn intuitively to operate with language. Therefore, if they develop linguistic knowledge and reading comprehension earlier, their performance in school tends to be better, for they had so many experiences with reading that it became part of their lives before even initiating formal education. Children’s reading achievements are influenced, mostly, by five things in the household: regular engagement in early pre-school literacy activities; speaking in the home, the language used in the tests to assess the child’s reading; having a greater number of books in the home; the amount of time parents spent reading with their child; the parents’ and child’s attitude towards reading (HAY, 2007). Based on this information, it is clear that parents and the home environment play a great role on the development of a child’s reading habits.

In order to motivate children to read, it is essential that parents themselves also read to set a good example. In addition, parents ought to tell their children stories and take them to libraries, always considering their preferences. As a result, they will get familiarized with reading and soon will start looking for new books by themselves. In case they are reluctant to read, they should not be coerced, as this is supposed to be a spontaneous process. An approach to initiate children’s’ reading interest mentioned by Hay (2007) is an interventional program called dialogic reading. This program instructs parents to read picture books with their kids, instead of to them or correcting the children as they read. They are also encouraged to engage in a dialog about both the content and the context of the story, therefore expanding the child’s language abilities, such as vocabulary, semantic, syntactic and semantic knowledge as well as the social skills related to public speaking.

The dialogic reading technique has proved to be very successful on preschool aged infants, improving their language development. This happens since reading and oral discussions aligned help prepare the child to classroom interactions about the books they read, which can decrease their fright of talking about books in front of the class, thus removing one of the obstacles that stand in the way of their appreciation for reading. Otherwise, going through school may be more difficult for them.

There are also things that school can do to foster reading. Even though it is usually successful in educating, the time spent at school often results in students' lack of interest in reading. The reason is that reading becomes an oppressing obligation and the texts are too distant from students’ experiences and tastes. This is especially harmful for young learners, since the first years in school are decisive for the following ones. Coelho (1980) apud Gouveia (2009) affirms that this occurs also because the activities elaborated by educators usually favor more the erudite and analytical aspect of reading than its esthetical and pleasant value.

To change this tendency, teachers should revise traditional pedagogic methods and propose activities in which students have more freedom to read something of their interest, instead of imposing it on them. For example, an activity consisted in every student choosing a book to read and then writing a review recommending it to the classmates. In this manner, they may be more willing to read it, and the individuality and diversity of preferences of each person is taken into consideration. Thus, if reading is stimulated in a pleasant way, students will be more prepared and less intimidated to do it during their academic and professional life.

Not only children, however, need to be encouraged to read. Adolescents, even more than children, tend to be highly discouraged to read, be it for school activities or for pleasure. This happens due to a variety of factors. First of all, most adolescents have not been stimulated to read since childhood; if the habit of reading is not acquired early in life, it becomes considerably difficult to foster it as times passes. Moreover, in school, adolescents are usually exposed to texts that are thoroughly far from their realities, and do not engage their attentions. On the contrary, the exposure to those texts tends to nourish in them wrong concepts about the reading habit, thus creating a resistance to it that they will probably carry for life. Hence, it is extremely important to find solutions to this resistance to reading in adolescents, so that they do not become adults who do not read. The fact that it is substantially more difficult to encourage the habit of reading in adolescents who did not have this habit as children should not be a reason for parents or school to forsake their responsibility.

The key strategy to make adolescents read is to present them to texts that will make sense to them. First of all, it is necessary that the themes presented to them in reading material will appeal to them. Of course, adolescents are different from each other, just like children or adults, and it is a mistake to generalize. But we know, from our own experiences, that it is difficult to take interest in something that does not have anything to do with your reality. Furthermore, language should be comprehensible. This does not mean texts should have “simplified” language, but that parents and school should have sensibility in choosing a level of language that adolescents will be able to decode.

Creativity and a sense of dynamism are key factors when devising specific strategies to stimulate reading among adolescents. One great idea is to integrate reading to other kinds of medias and arts, as, for example, cinema: a discussion about an adaptation of a book to a movie might be quite stimulating. Book clubs, discussions and debates also tend to be effective, for they give the reading habit a social edge – and socializing is really important for teenagers. Stimulating writing, specially the writing of diaries, also tend to be effective, for the habit of writing will show teenagers the relation between written texts and personal expression – a relation they usually are not able to see, considering they are always presented to texts that do not speak to them.

Encouraging reading habits is a task to be performed by the family complementarily to the school. If that is done, children and adolescents will develop their intellect and become conscious individuals, capable of thinking by themselves, exerting creativity and reflecting about the world we live in.