Can learning to read be enjoyable?

This collection provides parents with ideas to stimulate the reading pleasure of their children. A booklet full of tips in connection with starting literacy and reading pleasure.

Flemish and Dutch children read well, but against their will. This is evident from recent international research. The Flemish and Dutch fifteen-year-olds dangle far below the list of the 65 participating countries. This while they are at the top when it comes to mastering the reading technique. This lack of reading pleasure is not a good thing. Unfortunately, the research does not provide any explanation here. Only you can deduce from these results that Flanders and the Netherlands are strongly committed to the technical aspect of reading and much less to the pleasant and effective of it. Because that is the essence: we do not read for reading, we always read with a specific goal in mind. From the classic shopping list about the daily newspaper to De Vliegeraar.

Technical reading is a prerequisite for effective reading. You can do what you do well. So you have to bet on that. Not only at school, but also at home. Not only in elementary school, but also in pre-school education. In the kindergarten you can work very well on a number of conditions to learn to read. Very important conditions include:

• the realization that our language is made up of sounds: the phonological consciousness;
• the realization that words consist of separate sounds: the phonemic consciousness;
• the realization that you can link sounds (phonemes) to signs (graphemen): the alphabetic principle;
• a rich vocabulary.

In addition, children must experience from an early age that reading is part of daily life and is enjoyable. Parents play a very important role in this: by reading by themselves, by reading aloud, by giving their child adapted booklets, by showing that they also enjoy reading, they help their child more than on their way.

Reading pleasure therefore has nothing to do with the hunt for an ever higher AVI level . With the introduction of the new AVI procedure , you can hardly talk about 'levels' anyway. After all, the keys and cards have been standardized for a specific purchase time. For each take-off moment you have a spread of the results over five zones that runs from very weak to very strong. By changing the terminology and no longer speaking of levels we can give the reading pleasure a helping hand. After all, you are always inclined to want to reach a higher level. While it is more important that the reading development continues to evolve positively, even if it goes faster for one child than the other. By mapping the reading skills of a child with the skill scores, you can monitor this. Let us not forget that the AVI system itself is a good set of instruments with a good intention: to identify the risk readers and to remedy them in a timely and targeted manner. The criticism that people have on the system today is actually critical of the way people use the system. The instrument itself is not to blame for that.

However, AVI reading and reading pleasure can go hand in hand. Many Flemish schools do level reading. This happens in homogeneous groups: pupils with the same reading level are placed in the same group. The AVI procedure is an excellent opportunity to stop with the homogeneous level groups and switch to heterogeneous level groups. It seems to me desirable not to make the differences between the pupils extremely large. For the weak readers, the reading level of the stronger readers must be accessible. If this is not the case, then they experience the stated goal as unfeasible. The stronger readers, however, should not be discouraged because they get the feeling of being stopped. The flexible composition of level groups can certainly meet the latter: in this way a weak reader is not always the weakest and the strong reader is not always the strongest of his group. Here it is no problem that groups overlap. On the contrary. This overlap can ensure that the reading groups do not become too large and that for each child more effective reading time remains. To such a flexible layout there are still a few additional advantages:

• within this classification, a strong reader is not always the strongest: one can make sure that he is the 'strongest' reader on which the other group members move, and then again the 'weakest' reader who focuses on and goes to the reading level. from the 'strongest' reader in the group;
• working with flexible heterogeneous groups can be used to work on the reading pleasure and reading motivation of the pupils, by replacing the 'reading to read' with the 'reading to know'. Since a reading level occurs in different groups (see diagram above), students can be chosen for a group that reads about a particular theme.

In summary: by working with flexible thematic and heterogeneous groups, several birds are killed in one fell swoop. They work at the same time on:

• the reading technique;
• the reading pleasure and the reading motivation;
• the self-esteem of the pupil;
• the self-confidence of the student.

Working with flexible, thematic and heterogeneous groups places a lot more demands on the school organization than working with the classic homogeneous level groups. Nevertheless, there are many opportunities in this to make our reading instruction much more challenging and effective for the students.