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Teachers and Children as Readers Together: A more complex view of reading

By (author) Lizzie Smart

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A More Complex View of Reading aims to re-establish the importance of becoming a reader rather than just a child who can read. At its heart is the importance of teachers as readers themselves and their role as lead reader in their classrooms. Readers need nurturing and the teacher they share at least a year of their lives with can prove to be an excellent model, who can feed the imaginations and develop an appetite for reading a wide range of material. Children surveyed by the National Literacy Trust noted their teacher as a strong role model, only just behind their mums and dads. Whilst the National Literacy Strategy is said to have increased levels of attainment in reading, when measured through National Curriculum Tests, other research, most notably the PIRLS report (Twist et al 2007), note a decrease in reading for pleasure and compare the progress of British children unfavourably with their international counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. Some teachers have seen the teaching of reading as the need to teach a set narrow skills, based on the model of the Simple View of Reading recommended in Rose's final report (2006). Phonics and word recognition, coupled with language comprehension have been focused on at the expense of the wider view of reading and the skills and attitudes teachers need to become model readers for and with their pupils. This book aims to give that wider view and focus on teachers' personal knowledge and understanding of what it is to be a reader, alongside the professional knowledge they need to teach reading to primary pupils and develop in them a lifelong love of books and reading. The author also considers how to involve the wider community the child lives in through school bookshops and family book groups. It considers the range of texts available to young readers, including digital texts, and how teachers can motivate their pupils by accessing this range and relating it to pupils' real lives. It is designed to be a celebration of what teachers, pupils and their families can achieve when working together as a community of readers.