I work for an education company, although I am not an educator myself, and this was my first thought as well. It's less and less about reading a whole book and more about teaching concepts and standards from specific excerpts of books removed from the larger context of the complete story and the experience of actually reading a whole book.
This is awful, and sounds like what I was experiencing at 7th form (last year of high school) 20 years ago has crept all the way down to where school used to be fun 😭
I think reading online forums and articles improved my literacy. I would never read books but I read and write at a college level (I think! 😁)
My eldest is 9, and she's definitely facing this problem. Her assessments involve parsing and analysing short extracts from books like "The Secret Garden" that I remember reading in full, and then moving on to the next extract.
This isn't even anything new, it was around back when I was in elementary school. It was why I often loathed reading on my own because it just felt like work. Probably my ADHD wasn't helping matters either, but still.
When I was in elementary school we had this program called "Accelerated Reader," and there were different grades of books in the library. First grade books give the lowest points, and books for fifth graders gave the highest. To get the points, you had to read the book (only select books were part of this program) and then take a test on the school computer. The better you did on the test, the more points you got, and you could get more points if you read harder books. You could do as many as you wanted in the semester/year, and you'd get rewards for having tons of points, like pizza, stuffed toys etc.
Ive read so many anecdotes over the years on social media about people who stopped reading for fun and the things that most of them have in common has to do with testing. They come to associate books with tests. Or they will revisit a book later on in life, fall in love with it, and say "I probably would have loved this book back then if I hadn't had to analyze it according to my teacher's whims and take tests on it."
Oh yeah me too, complaining about this in some sense makes me a hypocrite. But, I read heaps when I was a kid, and it changed who I was, and I hate the idea that kids are being denied or moved away from that.
I thought that the previous threads about that were about not being able to read, as in physically not being able to sound out and pronounce words, not about actual literacy?
Gotta get them AR points.
Even as an adult every time I try to read fiction I get into the fucking make sure I think way too much about this paragraph, it might be on the essay later headspace even though there's no essay and it's supposed to be for leisure.
This has been something I've noticed among fellow English teachers. They claim it takes too long to read a novel, so they just do excerpts from it to focus on skills. I think it's absolutely stupid, as it loses so much context and you can easily practice and incorporate skills in addition to analyzing novels. I include reading at least one novel per a quarter and still manage to hit all of the mandated skills standards. More often than not, students will find themselves eventually enjoying the novel because I've "forced" them to read it in class. But assigning reading homework, like I had in school? Good luck. Students refuse to read at home. Enforcing a summer reading program like I had in school? That's a non-starter from the beginning. So I have to do all of my reading IN CLASS, which certainly bogs down the pacing of the year way more than it should.
So what do you suggest for teachers to do? If I tell a student to read a book, more than likely they won't read it unless I give some sort of assessment to ensure that they read it. Frankly, I've found students' lack of interest in reading to be pure laziness because they won't even give books a chance that are in line with their interests. They see a book and see how thick it is -- even if it's a fairly short YA novel or something like Goosebumps or Animorphs -- and nope right out without trying. Students have told both my wife and I that books take too much time to read, so why bother? Even when I encourage listening to audiobooks or graphic novel adaptations, they refuse.
Funny because my 5 y/o nephew is on YouTube all the time, but is able to read whole paragraphs. I don't think I was able to do that at his age.
I dont know if theres anything that teachers can do. I feel like it would have to be something fostered at home, right? The parents would have to create a culture at home of enjoying reading as a form of entertainment, and not just text to be studied.
As a counterpoint to that, I honestly was bummed out that we didn't have that kind of program after elementary school. Having the rewards was nice and obviously the big incentive, but it also meant that our school was encouraging us to read and was actively giving time for students to just...read. By fifth grade, a buddy and I were constantly being given time to just go to the library to pick out books and read them because, as long as it didn't cut into our learning, we were encouraged to read. That also ties into dedicated library time being a part of elementary school.
