Inspiring Writing Through Reading

 

 

 

According to the International Reading Association:
 

Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn.

(Clark and Rumbold, 2006)

Although the project focuses on developing the writing attitudes and capabilities within a Year 6 class, as stressed by many experts in the field, reading and writing are intrinsically linked and reliant on each other (Rose 2006, Ofsted, 2011, DfE 2012). It is because of this strong connection we felt it important to engage the children with reading and after the class teacher noted a lack of passion for reading amongst his students, we agreed to incorporate reading within the venture.
 

Clark and Rumbold (2006) discuss that when children get ‘hooked on books’, they involuntarily acquire a wide ranging set of skills that can be transferred into writing. Therefore, we knew that getting children excited by texts was to benefit their writing skills and outlook on literacy. Clark and Rumbold (2006) further note that, defining reading for pleasure as reading that is done of our own free-will involves selecting material of our own choices and interests. It is important that children understand they are able to select what they would like to read. The DfE (2012) reflect this simply by stressing ‘an important factor in developing reading for pleasure is providing choice’(p. 9).
 

We decided early on that the class would benefit from interactions and experiences with a variety of texts, after numerous hours (and squabbles) we selected around 50 texts we anticipated would be of interest to the class and encourage reading. After our first influx of texts and acquisition of reviews of particular favourites from the children, it became apparent that graphic novels specifically were in high demand. Butcher and Manning (2010) champion graphic novels as a textual form that has the ability to interest and excite even the most reluctant of readers. For students who no longer deal with pure word texts in their daily lives, multiple literacies are a necessity, schools must prepare young people to think critically with and about all kinds of texts (Schwartz, 2006) and graphic novels encouraged this. We therefore continued to provide a selection of texts from wide-ranging genres including graphic novels. The children very quickly responded to this by the acquisition of their own graphic novels- some of whom even began writing their own graphic novels in their Magpie Books. This was something which caused great excitement for us as a group, to see the effect of reading upon writing; hopefully this effect grows and continues to create change in the children.