Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do suggests that the best way to instill a love of reading in kids is to start the child reading now, regardless of his age, and have fun doing it. In his 2015 book, Daniel T. Willingham, University of Virginia Professor of Psychology, offers digestible, practical tips, supported by psychological research about what parents of kids of all ages—newborn through teenagers—as well as K-12 teachers can do to encourage kids to read. Although Willingham mentions positive life outcomes associated with being a devoted reader, the book is premised on the belief that reading is an intrinsically valuable activity for learning about our world and appreciating the magnificence of it and its inhabitants.
Willingham argues that students should be internally motivated to read and eventually be able to decode text easily and understand a work’s meaning. He is troubled by the fact that enjoyment of reading decreases across childhood and that enjoyment is very low among high school students. Students who learn from their parents that “we are a family that reads,” who see themselves as a reader, and who enjoy reading are likely to read more.
The greatest difficulty in learning to decode text is mapping letters with their sounds (e.g., “o” can sound like “oh” or like “uh”). This is a challenging task in English given that the language is an amalgamation of other languages. Predictably then, students in first grade in almost all western continental European countries have twice the reading comprehension scores of first grade students in England. Another challenge—promoting comprehension while reading—can be addressed by increasing learners’ general knowledge as background information is key to comprehension and filling in a text’s implied information.
Willingham provides reading preparation tips for caregivers of infants through preschool age children. Baby talk or “motherese” helps very young infants distinguish sounds as do rhyming and word-play games. As early as nine months babies can recognize some words. Building their vocabulary through constant talking is important. Adults can help children realize that letters have meaning and are ubiquitous by pointing them out in signs and logos. Willingham offers tips for making reading a fun and beneficial part of a family’s regular daily routine, as well as tips for creating an environment in which young children want to read for leisure. More important than the age (within reason) that a child begins reading is indulging the child’s abundant natural curiosity to help them acquire general knowledge.
In kindergarten through second grade students learn the mechanics of reading. After reviewing the debate about teaching reading through phonics or whole-world instruction, Willingham concludes that in both theory and practice teaching phonics is the marginally better way to teach reading to the majority of students. Most U.S. elementary school teachers use a “balanced literacy” approach that draws on both instructional practices. Willingham argues that less time should be spent on non-essential language arts activities for students in K-2 and more time should be spent teaching other subjects (e.g., social studies, science) that increase students’ general knowledge. Adults should model enthusiasm for reading and help the child feels like a skilled reader. Willingham emphasizes the value of parents and children reading together daily for short bursts of time. Parents should ask their children questions, such as “what did you do today?”, so that kids practice telling a coherent story.
Fluent readers in third grade through high school should be able to read with prosody such that they understand how the text might sound if spoken. They should be able to make inferences from texts and reason about an issue based on content they read. Parents of these older children ought to continue encouraging reading and making it part of family-time.
Technology plays a large role in education at older ages. Because of online content people are actually consuming more words today than ever before, but students are not good at discerning credible sources. Some argue that with all of human knowledge so easily “googleable” students do not need to learn as much content. Willingham generally disagrees; background knowledge is key to comprehension.
Although this book is written for the typical reader, Willingham alludes to a mechanism for teaching dyslexic, reading-disabled, or garden-variety poor readers when he says that supporting students who find reading challenging means acknowledging the difficulty that they experience, praising the effort that they exert, and exposing them to enjoyable reading materials. He cautions that many reward schemes (e.g., praising performance) may undermine the intrinsic pleasure of reading.
With an abundance of suggestions, Willingham charts a path for cultivating learners who first and foremost find reading pleasurable and secondarily are stronger students because of it.
Willingham, D. T. (2015). Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do. John Wiley & Sons.
