Transcript

TERESA CREMIN:

Well, I've been involved in several research projects and led some of them that look at Reading for Pleasure in various ways. The two I want to profile here would be interlinked studies. Phase one was about a large national survey of 1,200 teachers in England. And what that explored was what they read for pleasure and what they knew of children's literature. The key finding from that was that their knowledge of children's literature was very scant, very limited, insufficient arguably to develop readers in school and develop children who want to read for pleasure.

So our second study worked alongside teachers-- alongside 45 teachers from 27 schools and we explored what difference it makes if a teacher has a wider subject knowledge, a richer repertoire of children's literature and other texts. What difference it makes if those teachers position themselves as reading teachers, teachers who read, and readers who teach and who explore that interplay. What difference it makes when those teachers have a developed knowledge of their children as readers in class.

And the findings also suggested that a significant taking responsibility for a Reading for Pleasure pedagogy was also impactful on young people's attainment in reading but also their pleasure in reading. And if those kind of strands of our findings were woven together, we found that in those classrooms teachers developed richly reciprocal communities of readers where there was give and take, conversation around reading, sharing of texts, and pleasure in it. We summarised it in this book around reading for pleasure and tried to articulate the key findings from that work in here.