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Cremin, Teresa
(2023).
Abstract
Compelling international evidence increasingly illustrates the potential of reading for pleasure for enhancing students’ reading achievement along with other learning and wellbeing outcomes (e.g. Sullivan and Brown, 2015; Torppa et al, 2020). At the same time there are profound challenges for nations that seek to develop an agenda that foregrounds students’ volitional reading. An evidence informed reading for pleasure pedagogy is urgently needed, one which includes attention to the power of reading aloud and offers children time to read and talk about texts in a highly social reading environment. In order to operationalise such pedagogy, skilled teachers of reading are needed, teachers who explore the synergies between being a reader in their personal lives and being a teacher of reading in their professional lives. Arguably, these can be called Reading Teachers (capital R , capital T). All teachers are teachers of reading, whether in the context of primary education or in secondary subject disciplines, but only some become Reading Teachers.
Drawing on a decade of research studies, mainly from a qualitative perspective, this chapter explores the concept of being a Reading Teacher, and attends in particular to the consequence of this identity position for the practice of reading aloud in school. Reading Teachers are enhanced professionals, who, research indicates, make more of a difference to children’s reading for pleasure – their desire to read within and beyond school (Cremin et al., 2014, 2022). Reading Teachers have strong knowledge of texts and of their young readers, and through a highly reflective stance, develop an understanding of the nature of reading which prompts them to engage with younger readers somewhat differently. Their knowledge, passion, and recognition of reading as affective, social, agentive, relational and personal enriches their read aloud practice. In addition, these educators responsibly track the consequences of reading aloud on young people as readers and offer strategic and highly nuanced follow through in order to support recreational reading.
In what follows, I set this chapter in context by examining the benefits of reading for pleasure, and the challenges of the global decline in recreational reading across all ages. I then turn to outline the data on which my argument is based and summarise the current policy context in England where the research was undertaken. An exploration of the identity position of a Reading Teacher follows, and consideration of the ramifications of this readerly stance for the practice of reading aloud in school. Reading Teachers are far more than teachers who read.