Commentary: How parents, schools can help kids in Singapore derive joy from reading

The recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results reported that Singapore primary school students are top in reading and comprehension skills when compared to the other 56 education systems that took part in the study. 

Their stellar achievements were only eclipsed by a report on the decline in the number of Primary 4 students’ who enjoy “reading a lot”. 

While the waning interest amongst students in reading books is likely to be a global phenomenon, the literacy educators amongst us wonder whether this development is cause for concern, and more importantly, what we can do to address this trend.

The Singapore Ministry of Education has pointed to the “rapid proliferation of other forms of entertainment and content formats like social media over the last decade” as partly responsible for the students’ decline in interest in reading books. They are not wrong. 

While many of us turned to reading books during our leisure time in days gone by, our students growing up today have access to a smorgasbord of options, many of them right at their fingertips, on their mobile devices. 

Scrolling social feeds — reading bite-size posts and viewing multimedia content, present keen competition to the physical long-form books for our students’ limited attention. 

BROADEN DEFINITION 

In the contemporary communication environment, we need to broaden our definition of reading beyond reading printed books to include reading of digital multimodal texts. 

Adopting this expanded definition of reading, John Potter, Professor of Media in Education, Institute of Education at University College London, has described this generation of students as “reading more than ever”. 

This includes the repertoire of texts which our students access on their mobile devices and their exposure to language and multimedia across digital formats. 

Perhaps this familiarity with digital networked sources could have resulted in their stronger performance in navigating digital texts and evaluating online information in the PIRLS study. 

Perceptions amongst parents on their child’s use of digital devices in Singapore appeared to have changed in recent years as well. 

In our study funded by the Temasek Foundation Innovates, we surveyed more than 1,500 parents with young children on their child’s use of digital devices, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Based on preliminary results, we found, unsurprisingly, that the use of digital media increased during the pandemic, likely because of the circuit breaker when many of the parents were working from home and needed a way to engage their children. 

What was noteworthy, however, was that the child’s use of digital devices, which dipped slightly, remained higher than pre-pandemic levels. 

PARENTS PLAY A KEY ROLE 

This suggests that the parental mindset towards their child’s use of digital devices has shifted towards being more accepting and open since the pandemic. 

This is not to say we should leave digital devices in the hands of the child completely. 

In a subsequent phase of the study, we conducted an online language assessment with more than 120 children and examined the results in relation to their parents’ survey responses on their involvement with their child’s use of digital devices. 

Our findings suggest that parents play a key role in mediating the child’s digital media and that simply participating in co-use with them can make a difference. 

Even as our students will grow up immersed in digital texts on social media, is there value in reading physical long-form books? 

In her seminal book, Reader Come Home, Maryanne Wolf, Professor of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, certainly thinks so. 

She argues that reading-brain circuits are shaped by both natural and environmental actors, including the medium of reading.

Print and digital mediums have advantages in specific cognitive processes over others.

Likewise, reading digital texts develops in students the ability to process complex, networked, and multimodal information efficiently. 

While reading long-form books in digital formats can develop deep reading and sustained focus as well, studies have shown that the medium, be it print or digital, makes a difference to the ways we read. 

In today’s age of social media and generative artificial intelligence, best represented by the recent attention on ChatGPT, digital texts offer easy content presented in neat packages with a seductive bow-tie for us. 

The danger is that our students may now have less motivation to build their own storehouse of knowledge, evaluate the information presented, and think critically for themselves. 

Just as watching a film is not the same as reading a book; listening to a podcast is different from reading a book due to the different skills involved and the distinctive experience each brings. 

There will always be a place for reading. Printed books will remain with us for quite a while more. 

Perhaps in the more distant future, paper may eventually and sadly be displaced by the screen. 

Regardless, the reading of long-form books, albeit digitally, will endure given its unique role in communicating stories, ideas, and experiences. 

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE? 

To arrest the decline in our students’ enjoyment of reading books, it is imperative that schools continue to promote the importance of reading books and invest in the upkeep of their libraries. 

Teachers can promote the reading of books in their classes by putting time aside for sustained reading and having students take turns to talk about the books they are reading. 

Parents can also role-model the reading of physical books at home and organise trips to the libraries where a treasure trove of free books await. 

The future of reading is likely to be the blend of physical books and digital texts, both sharing similar language knowledge and skills foundations, but each with its own unique literacy demands and conferring specific cognitive advantages for our students. 

Reading digital texts can activate the reader’s scanning and skimming skills to make meaning across networked information efficiently. 

Reading physical long-form books can train focus by having the reader follow through a sustained narrative or argument. Both forms of reading are necessary today. 

It is not productive to argue which is better by pitting physical books against digital texts. Rather, our students need to develop a suite of complementary competencies in reading, both in deep reading and in navigating online information. 

Parents and educators must create opportunities for students to read in both the print and digital mediums. 

More crucially, we need to understand the unique knowledge and skills students require when reading physical books and digital texts so as to nurture these competencies in students with intentionality. 

For now, Singapore has done immensely well in international reading tests over the years and credit must go to our teachers for their hard work in the classrooms. 

While acknowledging our success, it can also be opportune for us to look beyond the mirror and towards the horizon in preparing our students to be future-ready in the digital age.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Victor Lim Fei is Associate Professor, Loh Chin Ee is Associate Professor and Deputy Head (Research) in the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, while Sun He is a Senior Education Research Scientist and Assistant Centre Director at the Centre for Research in Child Development. They are investigators of “A Study on Children's Home ICT Use on their Language and Development (CHILD)”, a research project funded by Temasek Foundation Innovates.

Read the original article here. 

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