Unlocking the Power of Reading for Pleasure

Research Question

Why is it important for children to read for pleasure?

What are the positive benefits for children when they read for pleasure?

What changes are required in the national curriculum to promote the practice of reading for pleasure by children?

Introduction

Recreational reading in children can contribute to a variety of literacy outcomes, as well as promoting learning in other fields, improving cognition, and possibly cultivating empathy. As an outcome, once independent reading skills have been achieved, increasing the level of recreational reading participation will play an important role in addressing inequality in literacy outcomes. Hence, reading for pleasure in children is an important development skill which needs to be developed by both the educational institute and the home (Merga, 2017).

The purpose of this report is to look at the importance and the impact of reading for pleasure on school children and understand why pleasure reading for children is an important skill. It will also try to understand how reading for pleasure by children improves cognitive functions. The research and conclusions will be based on literature review on various groups of children and will also concentrate on national curriculum to understand how much scope the curriculum of a nation allows for pleasure reading and how it is profitable for children.

Why Reading for Pleasure is Important

When children have mastered the ability to read independently, they should also be encouraged and supported to read beyond their required reading requirements for their academic endeavours.

Maintaining the desire to cultivate a lifelong reading habit is critical to their growth across the literacy spectrum, which isn’t over with the learning of independent reading skills. Daily reading encourages the development of important literacy skills such as comprehension and vocabulary (OECD, 2010; Cunningham and Stanovich, 2001).

English Language Curriculum in the UK

According to the official educational website of the UK, the role of spoken language in pupils' growth through the curriculum embodies cognitive, social, and linguistic goals and is reflected in the national English curriculum. The production of reading and writing is based on spoken language. The curriculum of reading in the UK is mainly concentrated on readings and writing of the language that the material is being taught in. Skilful reading entails efficiently figuring out how to pronounce new printed words (decoding) as well as efficiently recognising familiar printed words and the understanding that the letters on the page reflect the sounds in spoken words underpins both. Efficient transcription, or the ability to write down ideas quickly and accurately, is dependent on understanding the relationship between sounds and letters (phonics) as well as the morphology, which is understood as the word structure and the orthography, which is the spelling structure of words (assests.publishing.co.uk). These are the curriculum objectives that the English education system has, with respect to reading skills of the children.

Current Position of Reading in the UK’s National Curriculum

According to the National Curriculum agenda in the UK, which elucidates the stage 2 and 3, the aim for reading and for teaching languages includes reading for both study and pleasure. Students should be taught to read fluently, comprehend lengthy prose, which includes both fiction and non-fiction material and need to be encouraged to read for enjoyment. Schools should promote learning more widely by the students and for that, they should provide library services and set high standards for home reading. Pupils can learn the stamina and skills necessary to write for extended periods of time with correct spelling and punctuation (assets.publishing.co.uk).

Reading for Pleasure: A Critical Review of Literature

In 2006, the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, a report revealed that synthetic phonics has a good effect on influencing good reading habits in children. Synthetic phonics is taught to children first, and it also places phonics instruction within a language-rich framework that promotes favourable perceptions toward learning and a love of books (Rose, 2006). Hence, reading has an impact on not just the educational qualifications of a child, but also on the overall development of the individual, which forms the basis for the understanding of other languages as well. The following sections will look into the important of reading for pleasure, but first, look at the reading patterns of young individuals across the UK.

Reading and Children: A Case of the UK

In a survey of schoolchildren conducted for World Book Day in 2002, 15 to 16 year old boys reported spending 2.3 hours per week reading for fun, in comparison to 9 hours per week playing video games or 11 hours per week watching television. On the other hand, girls spent 4.5 hours per week reading, which is significantly more than boys. However, it was seen that reading for pleasure was higher among the boys; reading for pleasure was registered by 81 percent of 11 to 12 year olds and 76 percent of 14 to 16 year olds. Hence, it is clear that children have different needs when it comes to reading needs and objectives, and they need to be understood as such .

A similar form of result was found by Clark and Foster (2005) who elucidated the results from a survey which was done to 8000 students from both primary and secondary schools.

In this survey, half of the participants said they enjoyed reading a lot or significantly. The majority of participants also mentioned that they read every day or once or twice a week outside of school. Girls enjoyed reading more than boys and were more likely to do so on a regular basis. Primary students enjoyed reading more and read outside of the school curriculum more than the secondary students.

The Importance of Reading: A Theoretical Perspective

The importance of reading can be understood from broadly two perspectives; from the perspective of the benefits perceived by the reader themselves and from the perspective of the educational and cognitive effects that reading has. The Nestle Family Monitor (2003) asked 11-18 year-olds why they learn. Books helped 55 percent of these young people understand different people from different cultures, 40 percent desired to know more about new topics, and 33 percent were inspired to pursue new hobbies because of books. When asked how they would characterise reading, half said it was calming, while a third said it was stimulating. According to Sellgren (2013), the Institute for Education found that reading for fun had a greater impact than having a parent with a university education. According to Allington and McGill-Franzen (2016), student achievement was influenced by their ability to access and use books rather than their socioeconomic status. However, it could be possible that one of the main factors why economically disadvantaged students struggle is because of their family's financial situation.

Sullivan (2015, 2014) examined the effects of reading for pleasure on children of and below the age of 16. She made a comparison between children from similar socioeconomic backgrounds who scored similarly on cognitive tests between the ages of 5 to 10. She found that those who read books often when they were 10 years old and more than once a week if they were 16 years old had better test results than those who read infrequently. Hence, they discovered reading for fun was related to greater academic development in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension. Hence, there was a clear indication that there was a positive correlation between reading for pleasure in children and greater learning abilities in children in later life.

Whitten et al (2019), while interviewing teachers from particular schools, discovered that those who read for pleasure get receive higher grades in their classes, and additionally they are also better qualified to express their opinions in writing. Teachers also acknowledged that student writing has suffered over time as a result of the shorthand form of writing used in texting, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. Although pleasure reading isn't a miracle cure for all learning related issues, teachers agreed that it can help. As a result of being introduced to higher-level vocabulary, proper sentence structure, and grammar through the practice of pleasure reading, pleasure readers often wrote at a higher level than their peers.

Reading for children themselves are important in improving literacy levels, but it has been discovered that reading to very young children and/or infants. Saracho and Spodek (2010) when reading to children who are pre-school or not admitted to school yet will make entering school easier for them and also offer a head start in literacy. Another study by the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) discovered that as part a good signifier of the child’s early communication skills was knowing the number of books owned at 6 months and it was successfully able to predict whether they possessed expressive language and how well they performed at school entry assessment when they were 24 months old.

Several studies have found a connection between reading achievement and the amount of recreational reading done during the early elementary school years. per Reading for just 10 minutes a day had a extremely positive effect on reading test scores, according to the report. Students who were in the 90th percentile of their educational institute read five times longer than children in the 50th percentile and 200 times longer than children in the lowest percentile (Fielding et al, 1986). Free voluntary reading can improve students' grades on standardised reading comprehension, understanding of subject matter, vocabulary, overall grammar, and writing in exams, according to a meta-analysis of in-school free voluntary reading programmes. These studies show that students get better at what they practise: daily readers have improved vocabularies, reading and comprehension, and greater amounts of verbal fluency than non-readers (Krashen, 2004).

The skill of reading is a skill which is sought after in not just the academic setting, but also the professional setting later in the individual’s life. Professional hiring managers consider reading and writing to be the most important skills in new hires: while 63 percent of employers consider reading comprehension to be extremely important, 38 percent consider high school graduates to be "lacking" in this field (NEA, 2007). Dedicated readers are more likely, specifically three times as likely as non-readers to go to museums, enjoy plays or performances, or make their own works of art. They're much more likely to participate in athletics and be athletic in disposition, go to sporting events, and engage in other outdoor activities. Adolescents aged 18–24 have the lowest reading rates of any adult age group, and their cultural and political engagement is also declining (NEA, 2007; Faulkner, 2003; Eyre, 2003).

Reading and Schools: The Reading Wars

Horning (2007) understands reading is a cognitive and metacognitive method in which readers' thoughts communicate with the text's language. It must entail not only obtaining meaning, but also going beyond meaning to interpretation, reflection, and assessment. She understands reading, as a number of other academics have argued, must be a component of critical literacy. Ultimately, she describes reading as getting meaning from print and using it to make interpretations.

The role of incorporating reading in the curriculum of students is enormous, and research has successfully backed up that particular viewpoint. Warner and Buschman (2006) argue that the kind of essential reflexivity that comes from education in a print setting is important for knowledge literacy. They build on the work of research scholars such as Brian Street, Jack Goody, and Ian Watt, in addition to the Association of College and Research Libraries and the American Library Association's knowledge literacy requirements. In doing so, they discover that in order for pupils or users of school libraries to acquire knowledge and skills, they must first develop critical language development and educational skills which need to be derived from working with written texts.

The practice of reading in an educational setting’s curriculum has been studied over the years, in an attempt to understand what kind of reading and to what capacity does it positively effect the learning and cognition abilities of children. Wallace et al (2007), investigate on the phenomenon of reading aloud. The first method attempted to explain the relationship between reading aloud and reading comprehension by exploring the theoretical underpinnings of the relationship between reading out loud and reading proficiency and by suggesting alternative interventions that could be more closely related to reading comprehension. The second approach was based on Curriculum Based Measurement, which is a method used by teachers to measure the progress of their pupils across subjects like languages, reading and writing. The approach which was secondly examined was the relationship between Curriculum Based Measurement reading out loud and the understanding that the student derives from the reading comprehension, with the focus being on the individual student. Even when correlations were measured within grade, findings for the reading-aloud measure generally mirrored earlier research indicating a clear association between Curriculum Based Measurement reading out loud and reading abilities, answering a question raised about the early Curriculum Based Measurement research. Hence, the role of the curriculum in understanding and affecting the readings proficiency of the student is enormous.

The content of curriculum is an important factor to be considered when looking at the importance of reading for pleasure on children and young adults. Various themes have been identified in this inquiry in literature so far; in terms of the first theme, discrepancies in overall performance, the findings clearly demonstrate average level differences in scores on extracts from various curricula. Academic inquiries into this particular field have shown that materials based on instruction perform better than conventional materials, literary and theory-based materials perform better than authentic teaching materials, and primitive materials perform better than literature-based materials. Furthermore, maze tests derived from resources that were monitored for complexity yielded higher performance levels than literature-based materials (Shapiro and Hintze, 1997; Deno et al, 1982, Lutz et al, 1998; Bradley-Klug and Powell-Smith, 2001).

The Position of Reading in Policy of the UK

The main information about the national curriculum of the UK and the place of reading in the curriculum can mostly be found in the educational reports which are published by the government. The national curriculum’s aims of the UK government, with regards to reading is for the pupils to develop a broad vocabulary, an understanding of grammar, and knowledge of linguistic norms for reading, writing, and the spoken languages, and additionally to appreciate the rich and varied literary heritage of the UK while writing simply, properly, and succinctly, adapting the language and tone of the nation. In addition to that, the curriculum dictates that they must be able to clarify and clearly illustrate their interpretation and theories through discussion; they ought to be proficient in the arts of speaking and listening, making presentations, explaining to others, and engaging in debate (www.gov.uk).

The reading and learning aspect is elucidated in four key stages in the UK curriculum; key stages 1 and 2 and key stages 3 and 4. In the first two stages, the national curriculum sets out specific aims for children at a more primary level, where listening and answering appropriately to peers and teachers and asking pertinent questions are mechanisms which children will use to expand their comprehension. The pupils also need to employ effective vocabulary-building strategies, whereby answers, claims, and viewpoints must be articulated and justified. These need to be done keeping in mind various purposes like communicating their emotions in an articulate fashion and including well-structured definitions, explanations, and narratives of their feelings. The topic of pleasure reading has been included in the agenda, whereby the national curriculum dictates that they should be learning to read quietly and improving their comprehension and enjoyment of novels, poetry, plays, and also books which are nonfiction. They should always be expanding their awareness and expertise in both fiction and nonfiction reading on a variety of topics. Ideally, the pupils should be learning to defend their opinions based on what they've read: with assistance at the beginning of year 3 and then gradually become more independent (Department for Education, 2014).

However, there are several fallacies and loopholes to this understanding of the curriculum. The agenda for education in the curriculum of schools across the UK specifically dictates that the exercise of reading for pleasure needs to be developed in the pupils at the early stages itself. An obsession with only phonological awareness and an exclusive emphasis on it is not the way to create confident and knowledgeable readers. Sustainable pleasure in reading both fiction and non-fiction, which in the new orders is limited to comprehension, must be applied equally to all levels of text encounter, which would encompass word recognition. When phonics is used solely, however, it fails to recognise the central value of acquiring meaning in reading from the very beginning, regardless of a child's current degree of fluency as a reader. The need to find sense is even more pressing for children who enter Key Stage 2 as inexperienced readers. They must be exposed to the full range of options (Richmond et al, 2017).

Recent studies have revealed the importance of reading not only in the reading sections of the syllabi, but also the entire syllabi, spanning across all the subject matters. Although there is a correlation between reading ability and performance in all GCSE subjects, the connection between improved reading and better grades is actually stronger in math than in other subjects like the arts subjects which could be English, history or philosophy, per the findings. 15% of 15-year-olds have a reading level age of 11 or less, and 10% have a reading level age of 9 or less. Despite the value of literacy in the entire school curriculum, the writers of the study conclude that students who are struggling with reading would possess a significant limitations across all of their GCSE exams. The same issue is faced when these students are appearing for the GCSE math exams, as they are unable to comprehend the math problems and language which is used in the exam papers (Read all about it: Why reading is the key to GCSE success | GL Assessment, 2021). Hence, research has been done to establish the positive linkages between readings and overall good grades in the student’s performance, but there needs to be more concrete evidence with respect to the implementation programmes in the curriculum in the UK curriculums across schools.

The issue of developing reading in the school curriculum in the UK is also related to the issue of accessing language by the school children in the UK. The English as an additional language or EAL learners are the learners who learn English (as a language) and to learn by means of English. As a result, EAL instruction attempts to teach English in the sense of the standard curriculum. The graphic depicts these interactions. As a consequence to this, specific teaching methods and tools are needed to make the curriculum's vocabulary available to the EAL learners (bell-foundation.org.uk). According to research, children studying EAL lag behind their monolingual counterparts on listening and reading proficiency tests. On tests of reading comprehension, children studying EAL in the UK perform one year behind their monolingual counterparts or peers. This evident trend of relative underperformance could indicate that the educational needs of children who are learning EAL are overlooked and/or are not being met (McKendy and Murphy, 2011; Hutchinson et al, 2003). There is a need for the curriculums of the UK to explore that and to ensure that there is no gap in understanding, which would lead to a gap in the educational opportunities of children across the nation. In the light of this, there needs to be an inclusion of better aims in the national curriculum of the Uk to include these students whose educational patterns and academic performance clearly shows that there needs to be greater efforts in that area and the national curriculum needs to reflect that as well (Smith, 2016).

An important aspect of reading for pleasure depends on the resources which are available to the students and their parents, both at home and in the educational institute. Unfortunately, there is no unified literature which looks at the policies undertaken by schools in the UK to achieve that end, but this report will look at some of the measures which have been put forward by select educational institutes. The Brookside Primary School in the UK. The agenda put forward by the school encourages the airy stories, myths and legends, and biographies are examples of stories and narrative accounts. Picture books which have thought-provoking drawings and creative talent. Books that provide information magazines, journals, catalogues, recipe books, encyclopaedias, geographical maps, captioned photos, banners, journals, and letters, among other reading materials Books of jokes, comics, and word puzzles (brooksideprimary.co.uk). The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) in the UK lays down certain guidelines for the practice for pleasure reading in schools. Although the organisation has no specific ground rules set for educational institutes, it has instituted certain guidelines with respect to the rules it expects educational institutes to follow. From an inspection point of view, inspectors must concentrate on how well students are trained to read as a key inspection task during all evaluations of infant, junior, primary, and lower-middle schools. They'll focus on students who are reading below age-related standards (the bottom 20%) and see how well the school teaches phonics and assisting all students in being positive, fluent learners (educationinspection.blog.gov.uk).The phonics course at the school meets or enhances the national curriculum's and early learning goals' standards. From Reception through Year 2, the school has reasonable standards for pupils' phonics development period by term. The progression of reading literature indicates a cumulative improvement of phonics comprehension that is strongly linked to the school's phonics curriculum (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/).

However the organisation’s inspection and methods in improving school curriculums to include greater measures in pleasure reading, it still lacks some functions which would drive home the objectives. A librarian at a technology school in London postulates that during an OFSTED inspection, every school must have a School Reading for Pleasure Policy: it's a basic functionality and step, but with massive implications for the teaching profession and enormous potential that educators can't afford to overlook (dawnfinch.co.uk).

Research Reading for Pleasure: Scope and Prospectives

Currently, the research into reading for pleasure in the UK by the English children consists of academic inquiries into the curriculum’s importance to reading and reports on reading patterns across the UK. It is important to note that there is no specific document which deals exclusively with the aim of promoting literacy through reading in the UK schools (). However, the findings related to positive correlations between reading and positive literacy levels in students in the UK and literature has also contested the claims which reveal that the students in UK are of the highest groups of pleasure readers in the world, but other reports suggest that they fall well below the mean for attitudes towards reading (Lockwood, 2008; International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2001).

Consequentially, there needs to be better research in areas which have proven to have a positive effect on reading. One of those aspects is oral reading, recent research has found a connection between oral reading in the classroom and student reading achievement. Prosody, a reading fluency framework, tends to play a role in professional reading as well. Native speakers read with proper language and phrasing in addition to reading words rapidly and accurately (Rasinski and Hoffamn, 2003). Hence, there needs to be greater research on methods and strategies of reading and understanding the mechanisms which educational institutes could implement in order to successfully apply them to school curriculums.

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