As reading
should be a-must in all countries and cultures, there are certain cultures, as Latin-American, where reading is
taken as a “hobby”, which means that there is a big percentage of the population
who read as an obligation more than as a necessity or opportunity to learn.
The act of
reading is implicit in many dimensions (academic, personal, job-related), so
people need to read as a way to communicate. However, this communication is developed in
basic levels, basic commands and basic instructions, without taken it further. For
academic purposes, reading performance needs to be higher. The development of
assessing strategies for reading skills has achieved many outcomes: visuals
aids, interactional activities, etc; the real problem for teachers is how to
encourage students to read.
Although
there are people who are curious and more interested into acquire new knowledge
and information, there are many others who are not. Students perceive reading
as a boring and tiring activity. Actually, teacher’s struggle along the years
has not been to design strategies to assess reading, but to encourage students
to perform the act of reading itself. The challenge is still there, perhaps, parents
should get involved and embrace a new attitude towards their children’s skills
development, and teach them at home to love reading and become this in a habit
more than an obligation.
The huge problem we have with this skill is simple, we do not worry about improving it. In our country for example, teachers (or at least the ones who do read) have to struggle every single class when there is time to the daily reading passage: CHILDREN OR EVEN ADULTS DO NOT LIKE READING... And I ask myself why? I understand that sometimes, reading for academic purposes is not the best hobbie, but that apathy towards academic reading, starts with the massive disinterest towards Literature or any other kind of books. This worrying problem comes from your home education: If our parents would have read something to us when we were children, if the primary school Spanish teacher would have motivated ud to read at least those boring books abour overcoming things, we would have become familiar with a book to then in a more autonomus way, start seeking for the ones we'd really like to read. We are in a society where television is the most interesting set of stories, cellphones the greatest adventures and people tanned automatons that rarely read the menu for the day.
ResponderEliminarSadly, as you already mentioned, reading is regarding as a boring activity. I consider that one of the reasons for this is that parents or even teacher do not encourage students specially teenagers to enjoy reading. I mean, I´ve seen cases where parents suggest their kids to read where there is nothing else to do so somehow reading is synonym of a desperate and extreme activity when there is nothing BETTER than that, and also because sometimes reading is conducted without taking into account students interests. As a teacher I know that there are some classic books that are worth to be read, however, my teens are not that keen on that, What I do for my reading plan is that i let them pick a book thay want to read and after they read it and we discuss it, they read the book I suggest and so on, that way both teens are teacher read what they desired.
ResponderEliminarGiving those little steps to approach reading is useful because little by little they start to become more aware readers. The goal is that they can do academic reading once they are ready.