Books and words.

As I approach the end of yet another book on my faithful travelling companion, my Kindle, I am minded to talk about reading. We’ve finished watching the series of The Wire we brought out to Spain with us, so here we are with reading and listening to music as our main indoor leisure activities.

I am pretty sure I read somewhere that today is National or even World Book Day. Schoolchildren are supposed to dress up as characters from books. Indeed, I know of some primary school teachers, former A-Level students of min, who also enjoy dressing up as characters from books. It may not be today at all as one day last week our daughter sent a picture of her three year old dressed up as a character from a Roald Dahl story. Perhaps it was last Thursday. The exact day is immaterial. 

According to research done by the National Literacy Trust, however, children read less frequently today than any previous generation. And yet the book shops have a wonderful range of story books for small children and an almost equally impressive range of age-categorised books, going right up to young adult. Libraries, where they still exist, have great systems for encouraging small children to borrow books: incentive schemes with stickers to collect and child-friendly areas with toys and colouring tables as well as nicely displayed books.

So what goes wrong?

Some statistics:-

• In 2019 only 26% of under-18s spent some time each day reading, the lowest level recorded since they started surveying children’s reading habits in 2005. 
• Nearly twice as many 5-8 year olds as 14-16 year olds said they took pleasure in reading. 
• Only 53% of children overall said they enjoyed reading “very much” or “quite a lot” – the lowest level since 2013. 
• The survey found a marked gender divide when it comes to reading for pleasure: less than half (47%) of boys were keen readers, compared with 60% of girls. 
• A third of children surveyed reported being unable to find things to read that interested them. 

I don’t think closing a lot of smaller libraries can have helped. As regards our grandchildren, the ones old enough to take a real interest in such matters, the girls read considerably more than their brother, despite all having been encouraged in exactly the same way. The girls when tiny would happily sit on the floor in book shops surrounded by books for hours if you let them. The sixteen year old always has a book on the go. So we just need to work on the grandson.

Michael Rosen says, “We have countless examples of research showing that children who read for pleasure widely and often are best able to benefit from what education offers. Berating parents, children or teachers for ‘failing’ will solve nothing. It [improving reading levels] needs full government backing, with as much money and effort as they put into compulsory phonics teaching, to support schools and communities in this.”

And World Book Day, a charity event held annually in the UK and Ireland, will this year call on readers of all ages to “share a million stories” by reading aloud or listening to a story for at least 10 minutes a day with friends and family. World Book Day chief executive Cassie Chadderton said this activity can turn a reluctant reader into a child who reads for pleasure.

Which has me wondering if the pace of modern life has affected things. Our children enjoyed have a story read to them at bedtime all through their primary school years. We usually read a book in instalments, stopping at a good cliffhanger. Do parents still find time for this nowadays or is it easier to find a tv programme? Similarly, some of my best memories from primary school are of our class teacher reading aloud to us - terrifying moments from “King Solomon’s Mines” stand out. Is there still space for this in the age of SATs?

Okay, now for something about words. More specifically, it’s about a translation problem I keep coming across. When you get off the train from Vigo to Pontevedra you see an escalator. It’s one of those clever ones that doesn’t start moving until someone steps on it. This is confusing for people who want to go down - as you have to do to get from platform to another or even to get to the main station concourse - because this us an up-escalator. So at the top it says NO PASAR. It might even say that twice, once in Castellano and once in Gallego. And then it says in English NO TRESPASSING. Which is a different thing altogether. The same thing can be seen at a set of doors from one of the platforms onto the main station area. The station is not the only place where this mistake occurs. However, someone needs to explain the difference between NO ENTRY and the much more serious and legal sounding NO TRESPASSING.

 Full marks for trying though!