Revelations on Reluctant Readers
My sons couldn’t be more different from one another. At age 7 one was a reluctant reader, the other a voracious reader. The reluctant reader would relinquish responsibility for reading anything to others. Even the jokes on the cheese string packaging were too much for him. He rarely picked up a book for fun, and if he could shirk the task of reading and let me do it, he would.
My voracious reader always had his nose in a book. He devoured books in a single sitting. He read so quickly we would frequently challenge his understanding, unable to believe he could have absorbed the contents at such speed. Scarily he managed to pass all our spontaneous quizzes (we opened the book at a random page and asked him about the plot).
It is fascinating (to me at least) that they also have some striking similarities. As toddlers, they were both obsessed by the book corner at nursery – and both enjoyed having stories read to them. And, as we found out around age 7 in each case, they both have dyslexia.
Whilst getting my head around my voracious reader having dyslexia was one thing, trying to engage my reluctant reader was more of a puzzle. How do you convert a child who doesn’t want to read?
Reading is such a fundamental skill. A 2017 study found that only 35% of 10-year-olds in England report that they like reading 'very much', 1 whilst a DfE study in 2014 found that 1 in 5 (20%) of 11-year-olds in England cannot read well.2 Reading is a core skill enabling children to do well in other subjects, and the benefits of reading for pleasure include improved financial and employment outcomes, improved mental health outcomes and improved cognitive development outcomes.
Understanding why your reluctant reader is choosing not to engage is crucial to finding a way to work around the problem. We found the first step was to take the pressure off reading. One of the benefits of reading is exposing children to imaginative stories, wider vocabulary and a range of prose. All of this can be achieved through audiobooks, without the effort of holding a book and decoding the written word. When we downloaded our first audiobook for my son, he spent the entire weekend lying on his bedroom floor listening to the story from cover to cover so to speak. His reluctance to read wasn’t a lack of interest it seemed.
Knowing he had dyslexia helped, and I’d read that some dyslexic people find the physical layout of text on a page part of the problem. I borrowed a Kindle eBook from a friend and gave it to him as an experiment. He played for a while with the settings. Once he’d found the double spacing, narrow margins, large font size and a sans serif font (a font without the twirly bits) he got stuck in and read the loaded book really quickly. Aha – I thought, perhaps we are on to something here.
I have since experimented in a similar way with a number of other children, and it does seem that being able to make the text look right, and engaging with it on a digital device, has helped a number of reluctant boys to become enthusiastic readers.
The ability to read is a core skill, and I worry we put so much pressure on our reluctant readers to read in the way we expect, we lose sight of the objective. Rather than focusing on the act of reading, if we empower them to access literature through a range of platforms and methods of distribution, we might be more successful in igniting the spark that helps to enthuse them.
The metaphor of a square peg being squeezed into a round hole is a common way to demonstrate that one approach doesn’t fit all. When it comes to reluctant readers, we might need to consider triangular, star, hexagonal and oval-shaped pegs, and adjust accordingly.
