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METHOD Guide ON BOOKS. 2012 - 2013.doc
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Section 2. Books and children

Task 1

1.1. You will read an article written by a mother whose child started reading later than others. Before you read, in groups discuss the following.

1. How important do you think it is for children to start reading early?

2. Generally speaking, at what age do children in your country learn to read?

3. What should be the role of the parents in a child’s early education?

1.2. The following words and phrases appear in the passage. Look at the title, then in pairs discuss how they might be connected with the subject of children learning to read.

• coaxed, pressed and, if required, bribed

• consequences

• coaching

• cooperate with others

• pleasure

1.3. Read the first and the last sentence of each paragraph. Can you guess what each paragraph is about? Now, read quickly and check. You can make me do it, but you can’t make me like it

We force children into reading far too early. Today Einstein, who learnt to read at 10, would be in remedial class, argues Anne Karpf.

A good news story about education? It sounds like an oxymoron, but blazoned on Monday’s front pages was the finding of a major new international survey that ‘UK pupils move close to top of world class’, especially in reading. This will have been gratifying to a government for whom ‘education, education, education’ increasingly seems to be a euphemism for ‘reading, reading, reading’. But such singlemindedness has had other, unacknowledged consequences.

1

Traditionalists, however, maintain that you’re never too young to learn to read: on the contrary, the earlier the better. Reading, and especially early reading, is considered so self-evidently good that children are coaxed, pressed and, if required, bribed into submission.

2

My own position has changed radically between my first and second children. The first taught herself to read at the age of four. Thereafter she secreted books around her bed like contraband, and had to be physically prised from them at the dinner table. When her younger sister started school last year, I expected a repeat performance.

3

“Should I be vacuuming away her words, and pumping in someone else’s? Should I have been coercing her to try to read when she was plainly unwilling? I can coerce when it’s necessary, but the thought of becoming a dictator in the matter of when she learned to read seemed so awful that I decided to stop meddling altogether.

4

But in other schools there’s no shortage of horror stories, like the parents of four-year-olds paying for coaching to help them keep up with the fast readers. The mother of a four-and-a-half-year-old was told that her son had to apply himself to reading because the school didn’t want him to end up at the bottom of the pile. Einstein may have learned to read only at 10, but today he’d be stigmatised and in remedial class.

5

Other parents are more successful in their efforts, yet all children get there in the end. What counts, surely, is how they do so, since this is paramount for future pleasure. You can, just about, drill children into learning to read, but you can’t compel them to enjoy it. In a culture increasingly obsessed with what is measurable, what a pity reading pleasure can’t be tested?

6

I think my own now almost-six-year-old would have preferred this approach. However, something has recently clicked in the reading part of her brain, and she is on the way to becoming a voracious reader. It’s probably sheer coincidence that this transformation was over exactly the same period that she started learning the violin.

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