Josh Yargeau

CONT 998
April 7th, 2022
Community of Readers Response

How can you encourage students to develop lifelong reading habits?

The advancements in technology have benefitted education in so many ways. However,

one of the downsides is students are spending less time reading and more time on their
devices. Students are putting books aside to make way for social media apps such as YouTube
and Instagram, or videogames such as Fortnite and Call of Duty. Although it is becoming more
challenging to encourage students to develop lifelong reading habits, there are still a few
methods that work.

In my experience so far with teaching, I find there is always one lesson activity that
students are quiet for no matter what and that is a read-aloud. This was a notion that came up
often in my research to foster students reading habits. The first thing to consider when reading
aloud for students is being interactive. Included in Joseph Sanacore’s article is an example of an
interactive read-aloud lesson. The teacher in the lesson began by engaging students in a fun
discussion related to the topic of the story before beginning to read. Another important
element identified in the teachers’ lesson is that when they were reading, they used nonverbal
communication to portray the events in the story. If the character was sad in the part they were
reading, they acted sad and used a sad tone. This not only helps students enjoy the story more,
but also students understand what is going on in the story, even if they aren’t fully
comprehending what is happening. (Sanacore 36). The second consideration for a read aloud is
ensuring to choose a book that students can engage with and are interested in. Consider that
the book your students may be most interested in is a non-fiction book. As stated in Steven
Layne’s article titled “Selecting the Appropriate Read-Aloud”, “When given the choice, the
children participating in an interesting study by Kletzien and Szabo (1998) chose nonfiction
tides over narrative nearly half the time.” (Layne 62). One of the potential reasons, is that
students get to bring in their own knowledge and feel more included in the book (Stead 89).

A second concept, that was common in the articles I read is setting an example. As
described best in Lesesne’s article, “Students need to see significant adults as active members
of the "literacy club." We need to let our students see us reading.” (Lesesne 62). How can we
convince our students that reading is important, if we don’t participate in the activity ourselves!
Setting an example for students by also grabbing a book during silent reading or free read time
demonstrates that, we as teachers, truly value reading and literacy.

Lastly, in Layne’s other article titled “Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers:
Great Ideas to Put in Place Tomorrow” he discusses a few great activities to engage students in
reading. One of them that stuck out to me was Read Around. The idea is that students get to
preview a variety of texts over a short amount of time to find ones that are exciting to them. If
students find a text they enjoy, they can write down the title to check out later! I have actually
completed an activity very similar to this already with my current Teacher Librarian. We called it
a ’book tasting’. This encourages students to read as they were able to find a book or topic or
genre that is interesting to them. This is also very important! Students, or anyone for that
matter, won’t read if they don’t find something they enjoy to read.

Leading Question: Does the current curriculum in BC allow enough time in the school day for
students to find texts and books they enjoy reading to develop positive reading habits?

Citations:

Layne, Steven L. “Selecting the Appropriate Read-Aloud.” In Defense of Read-Aloud: Sustaining

Best Practice, Stenhouse Publishers, Portland, Me., 2015, pp. 54–66.

Layne, Steven L. “Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers: Great Ideas to Put in Place
Tomorrow.” Childhood Education, vol. 87, no. 1, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2010 pp.70-

Lesesne, Teri S. “Developing Lifetime Readers: Suggestions from Fifty Years of Research.”
English Journal, High school edition, vol. 80, no. 6, National Council of Teachers of
English, 1991, pp. 61–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/818581.

Sanacore, Joseph. “Nurturing Lifetime Readers.” Childhood Education, vol. 83, no. 1, Taylor &
Francis Group, 2006, pp. 33–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/00094056.2006.10522874.

Stead, Tony. “Nurturing the Inquiring Mind Through the Nonfiction Read-Aloud.” The Reading
Teacher, vol. 67, no. 7, 27 Apr. 2014, pp. 488–495., doi:10.1002/trtr.1254.