I often ask participants on training courses what characterises a good reader. It’s not at all an easy question, and there many possible answers.
At a conference recently Ofsted defined good readers as children who can:
• see images
• hear a reading voice
• speculate and predict what happens next
• ask questions and pass comments
• empathise and relate what they read to their own experience
• read and re-read sentences, searching for meaning
• continually re-interpret as they read
• enjoy multiple meanings and ambiguity
• notice and interpret patterns (visual, verbal, aural, thematic, figurative)
• relate what they have read to their own experience
• relation their reading to their previous reading experience
• have a range of reading strategies they can draw on
• analyse and articulate their own reading processes
• pass judgments on likes and dislikes
• take time to think about a text, rather than rushing to judgment
• read texts in different ways for different purposes
The Ofsted list is useful and thought-provoking. The absence of any reference to enjoyment concerns me deeply though. As you can probably tell from my choice of photo to accompany this, I think children can be good readers even before they have learnt to read.
I found children’s author Piers Torday’s Twitter response to the Ofsted definition inspiring. Alternatively, he wrote, a good reader is also someone who can
• laugh
• cry
• sit on edge of seat
• wonder
• think about the world
• throw the book across the room in rage
• feel inspired
• escape reality
• imagine other lives and experiences
• close the book and still be somewhere else for a brief moment
Yes, yes, yes!
