Learning to read & reading to learn

By Dr. Kevin Haugh, (PhD)

Teachers have been challenged for many years with prospect of finding the best strategies to motivate children to read for pleasure. Poor literacy skills, cultural factors, peer influence, inadequate supplies of suitable reading material, an overloaded curriculum and the constant competition from multi-channel television and the world wide web site are only a few of the many factors that mitigated against the ideal of children reading for pleasure.

There have been many attempts by teachers to combat the aforementioned because it is an axiom in education that such mitigating factors only serve to offset against the outcomes of reading for pleasure.

Why bother to teach reading?

In 1996, I noted the following outcomes from involving parents in the Shared Reading programmes in the classroom
* Improved reading skills among the target group
* Improved social skills among the target group
* Better home-school relationships
* A marked improvement in the target groups school attendance
* Greater parental participation in other school based programmes
* Greater parental participation in school based adult education programmes

The school is challenged with the task of moving the target group from its “stuck” position to an “unstuck” situation in which they are motivated with the prospect of achieving an increased performance, such outcomes are called intrinsic outcomes.

Intrinsic outcomes are those that result directly from the performance of the task. A sense of achievement is an intrinsic outcome; it is generated by the performance itself.

Expectancy Theory suggests that in order to provide the motivation to read and explore the world of books it was important to motivate the target group with the prospect of some extrinsic reward or expected outcome that would be of value to the individual. One strength of expectancy theory is that it makes it clear that any effort at improving motivation is doomed to failure if due attention is not paid to the relationship between effort and performance.

About the author:

Dr Haugh is a retired Principal since August 2010 and he now works as an Educational Consultant with an ongoing interest in education research, especially in the area of combating educational disadvantage. He spent his teaching life in Galvone, Limerick City, Ireland which is a Low Decile inner-city area.

He was Assistant National Co-ordinator on secondment to Leadership Development for Schools from 2005 to 2009 during which time he  was specialising in helping Principals who manage schools in Low Decile urban and rural areas. In 1995-96, he authored a collaborative educational intervention, with parents and pupils - an “Action Research Study” in an Inner-City area of Limerick City, Ireland.