Learning to read or learning to enjoy reading?

There continues to be an enormous push on raising the levels of phonic awareness amongst children in Key Stage 1, but how is this impacting on our children and on their enjoyment of reading? writes education blogger Mat Smith.

In my capacity as Literacy Co-ordinator, I recently organised a Festival of Literature at the University of Wolverhampton for all of our final year undergraduate and postgraduate primary trainee teachers. During the day we were fortunate to have sessions on poetry-writing, inspiring children to read more using reading journals, valuing children's literature, the Schools Library Service, real children from Parkfield Primary in Wolverhampton speaking to us about their experience of literature in schools… and phonics.

Phonics remains one of the Education Secretary's top priorities. It is right at the top of the national agenda in education, and if you have had young children in the last few years you cannot help but know all about phonemic awareness and 'sounding words out'. We had a great session, led by Leading Partners in Literacy colleagues from Gorsemoor Junior and Infants in Staffordshire, and it came at just the right time for our trainees as they head out onto their final placements before qualifying.

However, our keynote speaker raised some issues. Many of you will have heard of Pie Corbett. He has worked with both the previous and current governments on aspects of English, written over 250 books, and is currently acknowledged as one of the finest educational speakers. He certainly inspired our trainees: the feedback was entirely positive, and many have professed their eagerness to take his words and his ideas into their final school experiences.

Of course Phonics is important. We have to understand how words work – if you cannot work out what a word says then you cannot read anything, let alone with any pleasure. But reading is not merely picking apart a word into its constituent parts, ensuring you can say each part then putting them back together and saying the whole. This is a useful strategy, but not the only one. Faced with a word such as "Honorificabilitudinitatibus" (as spoken by Costard in Love's Labour's Lost), we would all break it down into parts and try and run it together. But to keep doing this word after word would lose all the power and majesty of language. As Pie explained, we need to read the whole for its coherent meaning, not merely create the individual units that make up the whole.

It is in this reading for the meaning of the whole that we find enjoyment in books. This is what we want our trainees to take with them as they go to inspire children. We want children to run to books, to engage with them, to be annoyed when they are told to stop reading. This will only be possible if they learn to love the whole – and that is only possible if the whole is worth reading. One key aspect of a teacher's job is to put the right books in front of children. If they can do this, then the technical aspects of phonics will be worked at harder as the children will want to read the story.

And in learning to love reading, rather than merely becoming competent at the necessary skills, we will open children up to the magic of literature instead of burdening them with the never-ending chore of having to read.

*For those who are interested, Costard's tongue-twister is the ablative plural of the Latin-contrived honorificabilitudinitas, which is an extension of honorificabilis meaning "honorableness."