Focus on Education

Cultivating Lifelong Readers

There is a wealth of evidence that links reading to academic success and emotional wellbeing but how can we help young people develop into lifelong readers? Dan Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, suggests that there are three factors that influence a student’s engagement with reading:

1) A student needs to be a fluent decoder i.e. they are able to take print from the page to words in the mind.

2) A student needs to have a wide-ranging background knowledge about the world. The more a student has, the more likely they are to be able to understand any text they are reading.

3) A student needs the motivation which comes from a positive attitude towards reading and a positive self-image as a reader.

You can read more about this and further ideas to foster good reading habits in this recent article from The Atlantic magazine. Do make good use of the Book Fair in school at the moment and purchase some good books and enjoy reading for fun!