Guiding children towards a love of reading

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Why do Indonesian children dislike reading? Why do they prefer excessive and aimless talk (ngobrol) to reading? Why can't they find enjoyment in books?

This is an old complaint in Indonesia. To improve this situation, every year a national book month is held. The occasion is used to urge society, especially the young, to read books. Yet there is still no evidence that this scheme works. Every Indonesian publisher knows how hard it is to sell books, especially what they consider good books.

In my opinion, a love of reading rests on two foundations, psychological and technical. The psychological foundation is curiosity, an eagerness to know, a constant thirst for information and knowledge.

The technical foundation is reading ability, which comprises the ability to catch the meaning of written material and progressive competence in language. Reading ability and language competence cannot possibly be separated.

Progress in one's reading ability is accompanied by or presupposes similar progress in language competence. If your progress in language is stunted, so too will your progress in reading be.

You cannot really read a book without having a language competence which is at par with the level of difficulty of the book. This is true whether the book is in Indonesian, English, Arabic or another language, or whether it is about physics or history.

How do we cultivate curiosity among children?

Let me first tell you a real story. This is about how to kill curiosity. My grandson is seven years old. He recently moved to Bogor with his parents and enrolled in a local school, where the Sundanese language is compulsory and English is not spoken. For a child who was born in the States, brought up there until the age of five, and then lived in Jakarta for two years, the school is thus a completely new environment.

It contains so many new things that he does not understand or has not known before. Naturally he asks questions. He wants to understand things which look strange to him. The teacher, however, is a very traditional teacher, who is accustomed to complete silence and complete obedience.

Naturally she finds my grandson annoying and irritating. One day she just snapped: "Why don't you just shut up, and listen like your friends!" My grandson was shocked, and went home crying. He told his mother what happened. My daughter, by the way, has always encouraged him to ask questions whenever there is something he does not understand or wants to know.

I suspect that my grandson's teacher is no exception. Rather, she is the typical teacher within our society. Our teachers urge our children to listen, to obey, and to memorize things. Repeating and imitating standard, official sentences and phrases is encouraged. Original mode of expression is discouraged. Is it any wonder our children lack curiosity? Or that most of our children think and talk alike?

Ideally, cultivating curiosity must start at home. The traditional way to do this is to provide information and urge children to find further information. Story telling is one way of providing information.

Taking the children out for a walk in the neighborhood, and explaining anything that is considered new is another way. Reading books to them, and asking them to watch selected television programs is still another way of providing information. In short, there are a multitude of ways through which children can be taught to find information.

The hardest part is answering their questions once they start asking them. It is very hard to answer each question in a consciously educative way. It requires patience, time, and most of all attention. A mistake many parents make is brushing aside a child's question without even understanding what is being asked. This is another sure way of killing curiosity.

Reading ability is a much misunderstood concept. Most Indonesian teachers think that reading ability is a simple affair. Once you master the skill of deciphering letters, and reading the contents out loud, then there is nothing more to be learned about reading.

If you can read a page or a number of paragraphs fluently, correctly, and beautifully, without the slightest hesitance when confronted with a difficult or sophisticated word, without getting confused in the face of a long compound sentence, then you are okay. You can read!

Only a small number of our teachers realize that beyond that simple skill there are still other, more important skills to teach. The ability to capture the meaning of a sentence quickly, to capture the essence of a chapter and a book quickly are skills that are hard to teach and hard to acquire.

Our children have also never been told that to read information printed on the flap of book jacket is an important step. They are also not told that to read the preface and the introductory chapter of a book is another important step. They are never instructed to read the table of contents in order to have an idea of how a book is organized.

They are drilled to jump right into the first chapter, and continue reading until they reach the final chapter, and read every word in every chapter! They are accustomed to reading a book without having any idea what the book is about.

Speed reading or rapid reading is a skill that is essential in this modern time. Unfortunately, many of our teachers do not know how to teach speed reading to children. I am afraid that most of our teachers do not even realize that such a skill exists and that it is the quintessence of reading skill.

One painful fact for Indonesian children about reading ability is that reading English material will become a necessity if they plan to live and work in the modern sector.

For Indonesian children to acquire sufficient reading ability in English, the ability to use dictionaries, from a general dictionary to a dictionary of synonyms and on to an etymological dictionary is very important.

How many of our teachers teach our children how to use dictionaries in a systematic way? I still remember how frightened I was when for the first time I was shown a shelf of English dictionaries, and told that I would have to consult all these thick and awesome books. How should I go about it? When to consult a lexicon, and to use a thesaurus?

Overcoming this fear, and overcoming a reluctance to dig deeper into references to find the precise meaning of a word or an expression is part of the job in teaching how to read.

Guessing the meaning of an English word is a natural tendency among most of our children. Whenever they meet a new word in their reading, they just continue on and make a guess regarding the meaning of the word. This is all right if the purpose is only to capture the meaning of a sentence, and if the guess is a correct one. But for the purpose of vocabulary building this is not a recommended habit.

In short, I do not think that we will be able to generate a genuine love of reading among our children if we do not improve our methods of teaching our children how to read, both at school and at home.

And the most critical element in this regard is, in my opinion, the presence of reading environments. If we want our children to develop a genuine love of reading and learning, we have to create reading environments for them, at home, at school, and at other places well. Thus only those who really love reading can make children love reading.

It is well to note in this regard that the present condition in most of our schools does not even satisfy the minimum requirements for the cultivation of a genuine love of reading.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.