Promoting reading 1
have shown that summer reading programmes help to
increase reading, and in view of the fact that such programmes are often designed in such a way as to require participants to read a considerable number of books during the summer break, any other result would of course be surprising. Incentive programmes may markedly increase the quantity of children’s reading, but does increased reading lead to a positive attitude to reading? According to researcher Michael C. McKenna (2001), a number of more fundamental questions need to be answered first. Firstly: Has increasing the amount of reading helped the child to achieve greater fluency in his/her reading? If so, can one expect that the reader’s ideas about what reading can offer them will be changed in a positive direction? Secondly: Has increasing the amount of reading resulted in the child being offered a body of reading material that he/she finds important and interesting? The reader’s positive expectations of what reading can offer them is enhanced when the reading and the reader connect in such a way that the reading experience acquires a personal significance. Whether or not external rewards can generate reading motivation in children or, on the contrary, undermine their motivation is one of the many controversies of reading research. There has been criticism that rewards risk becoming the sole reason for children to read, with the result that reading motivation ceases the moment the reward is no longer present. There are studies that indicate that rewards do not appreciably affect reading motivation. There are also investigations where rewards have proven to have a negative impact on intrinsic reading motivation (Clark & Rumbold 2006). However, these studies have involved the children receiving reading tasks that they found interesting even before the reward was introduced, and the results would probably be different if this was not the case. Several researchers have found that rewards related to reading such as books affect intrinsic motivation in a positive direction (see for example Gambrell 2011). Researchers who have investigated the effects of rewards on attitudes to reading have similarly advocated reading related rewards (McKenna 2001). The effects of summer reading programmes A number of primarily Canadian, US and UK studies have reported the positive effects of summer reading programmes on students’ reading abilities, reading habits, reading enjoyment, self-confidence, and library use. Some of this research has been compiled in a report from Library and Archives Canada (2006). This report deals with programmes implemented in Canada, the USA and the UK. For example, a study of the Summer Reading Challenge conducted by the University of Leicester in 2003 was based on 380 interviews with children who participated. This study found that 78 per cent of participants felt that they had improved their reading ability through their participation in the programme. The reading abilities of students with similar social backgrounds who did and did not participate in the programme, respectively, have also been compared and significant differences were noted. One of these studies found that children who participated in a summer reading programme for only a short period read at a higher level than children who did not participate at all (Celano & Neuman 2001). Is this higher level of reading ability due to the programme or, on the contrary, have students participated in the programme because of it? Questions of this kind are scrupulously avoided throughout the report. 80