How to help your reluctant readers to read

‘Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.’ – Frederick Douglas

Nobody likes having to do things that they’re not good at – and students who say they hate reading usually struggle with it, and may have done so since primary school. Demoralising, to say the least! Injecting fun will go a long way towards alleviating stress, anxiety, and frustration, and will help give students the courage just to give it a bash.

This blog is for teachers faced with coaxing, encouraging, and persuading their students to read.

Here are nine tried-and-tested ways of encouraging your reluctant readers to read in any subject:

1. Familiarise yourself with what your students are capable of reading by cross-referencing their reading ages with the reading ages of the texts. More on this in a future blog if you’d like to know how to do it.

2. Allow your students to experience fun reading so that they connect reading with fun. This will, in turn, boost their motivation and willingness to give reading a go. For example, turn reading into a detective/treasure hunt. Get students to look for clues and information around the classroom or school. Students will get excited, so try it with a class you feel comfortable with the first time you do it. To make the experience even more fun, have your students read off unusual objects placed in unexpected places.

3. Allow your students to experience success; this will boost their confidence and motivation. For example, break up text into manageable chunks on say postcards, PowerPoint slides or storyboards.

4. Don’t dumb down. Reluctant readers can be (quite rightly) sensitive to this. Far better to prepare your students for reading a text by doing some of the following:

– visit or re-visit essential vocabulary and concepts

– help them create connections between themselves and the text so that they want to read it, for example, students make montages or mood boards conveying what the topic means to them

– introduce the topic or themes through appropriate film and documentary excerpts

5. Make reading active and visual. For example, have a giant graph on your classroom wall (or use a roll of wallpaper if you don’t have your own classroom), with the ‘y’ axis representing usefulness, tension, level of challenge, and the ‘x’ axis representing topics, chapters or whole texts.

6. Create safe spaces for your students to read to avoid the embarrassment of failure. Read in teams, and connect the reading activities with games and activities (see the earlier blog on How to improve boys’ motivation, literacy, learning and achievement).

7. Read to your students in the first 5 minutes of your lesson. Students love it, and it’s a fantastic way to settle a lively class. There will always be fiction and non-fiction books that link to your subject, learning or life in general—for example, a biography of a sportsperson to explore the importance of tenacity, hard work etc.

8. Share your enjoyment of reading with students by talking about what you read, even if (or especially if) you teach a non-bookish subject.

9. Whenever possible, praise your students’ approach to reading.