As a high school English teacher, I have the incredibly challenging role to attempt breaking many students' lack of motivation with reading. In elementary, most younger readers are excited with the opportunity to learn something new. However, by the time these excited children make it to high school, that passion has dwindled for the large majority of readers.
According to the results of the White Team's CLC survey, there are many reasons why students do not like to read. Oftentimes, males are hit with this lack of interest even more so, but this may partly be due to the definition of reading. Males read more online, magazine, and sports-related texts, while females tend to read more traditional texts. Also, these studies showed the importance of parental support in the reading process, where over 95% of children -- with reading-centered parents -- also read.
One important factor with reading is having books that connect with their audience. Personally, I would much rather read a book "for fun" than one that was forced and dull. For this reason, when motivating high school students, there are some important elements when selecting novels to recommend. First, you must know the student's reading level and not get something too difficult as Vygotsky theorized in his Zone of Proximal Development. Then, find some good books.
For high school students, I strangely have found that true, sad stories are sometimes the best stories to recommend. David Pezler's autobiography, A Child Called it, is exceptionally popular for students. They engage in the story, questioning how his mother could be so horrible and how his father did not do anything about it. Elie Weisel's autobiography, Night, gets many students interested at a personal level with the Holocaust and what a prisoner in the concentration camps encountered. Also, Piers Paul Read's biography, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, Richard Preston's thriller, Hot Zone, and Flora Rheta Schriber's biography, Sybil, have such surreal stories that teenagers are drawn to them. Respectively, these three titles are about plane-wrecked rugby players who had to resort to cannibalism to survive, a deadly virus that made it into the United States, and a woman who dealt with multiple personalities. As long as the language is not too difficult for a student to read, action, drama, and tragedy (mainly in a true setting) tends to grab most readers who have lost the motivation to read. Finding a good book and recommending it often is an important role of teaching English in middle and high school.
Sounds like you know the students you teach. Even as an adult it is hard to read something you cannot relate to. Motivation and interest are the key to having students that read.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine how difficult your job is as a high school teacher. I was a good reader in high school. I took Honors and AP English. I hated the books we had to read. I have read some of the books you have suggested to motivate students to read. I am with you, tragic stories really seem to draw students to read.
ReplyDeleteI often wonder why older students are more interested in stories that have so much tragedy. Whatever the reason, at least they are reading. Seems as though you do an excellent job in getting them into the stories and motivating them to want to read.
ReplyDelete