The Joy of Reading

Roberta King, Mexico

After nearly 30 years in the business world, Roberta King decided to fulfil a dream and pursue teaching English as a second language, living and working in Mexico since 2001. She holds an MBA and a Master's degree in TESOL. She has worked as a teacher, teacher trainer and academic coordinator for Harmon Hall in Sahagún, as a teacher at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo in the Language Self-Learning Centre, and is an associate of Bridges. It is her firm belief that for Mexico to realize its economic potential in the world both today and in the foreseeable future, every effort must be made to ensure that English becomes a second language not only as wishful thinking, but also as wish fulfillment.

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Introduction
Background
Examples
Conclusions

Introduction

With the title of this article being "The Joy of Reading", many of us will look at this as an oxymoron - JOY?!? READING?!? - an impossible combination! If you've ever spent time lost in a book, then you know the joy of reading. A wealth of human thought and experience awaits us, each time we open a book. A book is our magic carpet at our beck and call. It knows no limits in the time-space continuum. We can be whoever we want, wherever, whenever and with whomever we want. We just need to pick it up and begin to read.

Background

Not only is reading a joy, but it is also an important facet in education. There are more than 51,500,000 articles on the Web if you Google "the importance of reading". Despite this being the age of technology, according to the United Nations, there are 1,000,000,000 illiterate people worldwide. In Mexico, the rate of illiteracy is approximately 10%, the majority of whom are indigenous people, with indigenous women having the highest illiteracy rate. Apart from these scary statistics, we know that the majority of our students who are literate don't like to read. In fact, many teachers don't like to read either, unless they have to.

Netscape had an article last year that stated the most important determiner of a student's success in college or university is his or her ability to read critically. This means that he or she must be able to absorb the meaning of what they read and reduce it to its key points. If a student is unable to do this, it is unlikely he or she will complete his or her education.

What does this mean to us?

Well, as educators, we must find ways of making reading interesting initially for ourselves and then for our students. Once we discover the pleasure to be had in reading a book, it is much easier to believe in what we tell our students. After all, our students know if we are sincere. Unfortunately, Mexico has not had a culture of reading. Inculcating the desire to read usually starts in the home from early childhood. The majority of our students did not have parents who read widely as an example.

It is important to note that even highly developed countries are losing much of their reading culture to television and other forms of visual entertainment. We have an important role to play in changing attitudes, but what? As English teachers, we have an even greater challenge. If our students do not read in their native language, how can we expect them to read in a foreign one?

Most of us learn best by example and a teacher's behaviour is one of the most important after family and friends. Let us look at ourselves and what motivates us. As hard as it may be to believe sometimes, our students are human beings, too, and have motivations similar to our own.
If we use this information, we can create situations where our students want to read.

If we teach our students reading strategies as part of their regular lessons, they will learn to make the most of their reading experience.

To start, it will be slow, but if we choose material in which they are interested, it will make things easier. We need to ensure that the material is at a level our students can understand and is age appropriate.

Examples

Where do we get such material? The Internet has literally millions of websites that offer free books. These books range from children's books to fiction to specialized knowledge. There's bound to be something our students will find attractive at only the cost of the paper and ink to print them. When we Google for free e-books, there are over forty-three million websites. Here are just a few:

www.gutenberg.org
www.free-ebooks.net
www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm
www.ebookdirectory.com

From there, we can design activities that will employ different reading strategies and allow our students the opportunity to practice while reading something that interests them.

Conclusions

To recap, we need:

• to get the reading habit ourselves
• to teach reading strategies
• to discover our personal motivations and those of our students
• to know our students well enough to know what books will interest them
• to search the Internet for free reading material that is both age and level appropriate
• to design activities that allow our students to use different reading strategies

When we begin to read with joy, we give ourselves a gift to share with others -- a gift of knowledge and imagination, a perpetually useful gift whose value increases with time. As teachers, our actions guide our students to prepare themselves for what lies ahead. We have a tremendous challenge and responsibility to assist in shaping our nation's future through our students. Let us meet and surpass the challenge. Let us help Mexico claim its rightful place in the international forum by preparing the next generations to be the best they can be. That will prove to be the true joy of reading.

Please check the Secondary Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.