Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 10

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Making readers
Aidan Chambers

I have been invited to speak about the promotion of reading among children and young adults. When I asked one of the valiant organisers of our congress, my colleague Rindert Kromhout, for clarification of what the committee wanted me to do, he said, This is it in one sentence: Here is a wonderful book, there is a group of children, what next? To be honest, at first my heart sank. During the forty years of my career as an author and teacher I've spoken and written about this subject so many times, I have the awful feeling that I must by now have said everything I want to say to everyone in the world. But with stoic patience, Rindert encouraged me to do it once more.

Let me begin, then, by saying that I think of myself today as a remembrancer, someone who performs that service the old have always provided when the family gathers for one of its celebratory rituals, as we are gathered here: the service of reminding the family of the old stories and the simple truths it is easy for us all, but easiest for the young especially, to forget in the strenuous bustle of everyday life. For one of the things I have learned in my work with people of all ages is that the ways readers are made, the things that adults must do to help children grow up as thoughtful literary readers who enjoy reading, are well understood. There is no magic formulae. There is no one inevitably successful method or technique. There is no secret. What there is is a recipe, a list of ingredients, a few basic instructions which, if followed day after day, tends to produce the desired result. Or, to change the metaphor, there is an environment, a cultural ecology, in which people tend to grow up as healthy, committed readers. Only ‘tend to’, because we are dealing with human beings and nothing to do with human beings is infallible.

What the recipe is, what the ecological conditions are I'll come to in a moment. But first I want to make some general points that seem to me to be often overlooked when this subject is discussed.

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Value judgements

First: Everything to do with the promotion of reading involves making value judgements. Take, for example, Rindert's helpful triadic sentence: Here is a wonderful book, there is a group of children, what next?

Look at the first part: Here is a wonderful book.

•	Who says it is wonderful, and how do they know?
•	On what basis is this judgement of value made?
•	And why should this wonderful book be revealed to that group of children rather than some other wonderful book?

Look at the second part: Here is a group of children.

•	Why should this particular group of children be introduced to the wonderful book?
•	And why is persuading them to read this book such a valuable use of their time that it is a better thing for them to do than some other activity?

Now look at the third part: What next?

•	How do we decide what to do next? Whatever we decide to do, we make a value judgement that this approach is better, more likely to be beneficial, than another.

I'm making choppy weather of this point for two reasons. To begin with, for the last thirty years or so we have been caught in the trap of the cultural aberration that goes by the name of post-modernism. Thank heaven, there are signs we are escaping from it now, but the wound has cut deep. One of its crudest manifestations, a promulgation imposed by its more fanatical and less thoughtful adherents, is that questions of value have no meaning in relation to literature. Indeed, we are told, there is no such thing as literature, but only texts, all of which have merely neutral status, at least when detached from specific readers.

Of course, that false logic contains a half-truth which was the host that carried the infection into university faculties and school classrooms where education was studied and practised. Teachers and librarians were indoctrinated into the belief that it was quite wrong of them to make value judgements about what children ought and ought not to read. To do so was, horror of horrors, the arrogant and elitist behaviour of middle-class, petty-bourgeois paternalists. Than which, it goes without saying, it was better to be dead.

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In fact we all make value judgements every day. Why do we choose most of the books we read for our own pleasure? Research shows that far and way the most important reason is that our friends have told us about them. Every time we encourage a friend to read a book because we think he or she will enjoy it, we make a value judgement about how our friend should spend his or her time, and a value judgement about this particular book being worth our friend spending that amount of his/her life on it. Reading is a function of time. Once we have spent, say, eight hours reading a book, we cannot have the eight hours back again so we can do something else with them. And once we have spent eight hours reading this book, we cannot use that same time to read another book. No one can read everything. The library we have time to put into our minds is limited. Every choice is therefore of a high order of value. And if, as someone once said, we are what we read, then we had better be careful about what we choose to read.

The truth is that adults who care for and educate children cannot avoid making value judgements on behalf of the children for whom they are responsible. It is part of their job. Why is it, then, we all agree that we should be careful - that is, make value judgements - about what children eat, about their hygiene, about what is done to their bodies, but do not agree that we should be careful about what we put into children's minds, feed into their imaginations, and stir into their emotions through the medium we call reading? Frankly, I believe what we put into our minds and imaginations is more important than what we do to our bodies. For I also believe that what is in our minds has a determining influence on what we do to our own and other people's bodies.

For their part, children expect their teachers to know more than they do, and to know how to help them get to know more for themselves. They expect librarians to know about books and to know which books it might be worthwhile reading now, today. They expect the adults who are responsible for them to know how to help them go where they cannot go on their own. Children know what they want to read for themselves. They tell each other about those books. It hardly needs a paid professional adult to help them do that. What they want from professional adults is guidance about reading they would not have thought of, do not hear about from each other: books,

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in fact, they are likely to avoid because they are not instantly attractive.

Making value judgements on behalf of children is an essential, skilled, and unavoidable part of the work of every adult who is responsible for the growth and education of the young. We should therefore be sure what it is we value and why. So much for the first general point I want to make. Here is the second.

What is reading good for?

The promotion of reading is not the same under all circumstances. To put it into political terms: those of us involved in the promotion of reading do not all belong to the same party. For example, when crudely commercial publishers promote reading their aim is to sell more of the books that make the most profit. That's why they spend a great deal of time and money publicising books and authors that are already bestsellers and spend as little as possible on books and authors who, whatever their merits, do not sell well. What they promote is the reading of books which people already know they like. Teachers, on the other hand, promote the reading of books on which the curriculum places importance. And when adults want children to go to bed, they promote the reading of the kind of story that comforts the mind, settles the spirit, dampens energy and ends up putting the child to sleep. In each case, the value judgement being made has more to do with something other than the book itself or than the act of reading for its own sake: in one case the making of money, in another the achievement of academic success, and in the third the use of reading as a soporific.

What you think reading is good for will determine which books you choose to promote and which methods you use to promote them. That being so, let me make it clear that I am not in the slightest interested in the business of making money out of books. I do not think of readers as customers. Nor am I interested in reading as merely a skill needed to achieve academic success. And though I sympathize with adults who have to put children to sleep every night, I am not interested in reading as a soporific. Quite the opposite. I'm only interested in reading that wakes us up, that opens

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our eyes, that activates the world, stimulates our minds and imaginations, enlarges our vision, and above all, for it is the first of all, reading that generates, elaborates, refines and fructifies our encounter with language. And not just language in any shape or form. But language that requires from us the employment of the most complex skill known to human beings: the interpretation of those abstract signs we call written language when it is employed in the kinds of text we call literature.

Involved in that potent activity is an ethics, a flux of freedoms and responsibilities, that we now need to teach in a way we have never had to before. Partly this is so because of the damage wrecked by that aberration I spoke of earlier. But mainly it has to do with the new cultural conditions brought about by the electronic revolution. I mean, for example, that as a reader you cannot make a text mean anything you want it to mean. Texts do have implanted in them meanings which it is a reader's responsibility to discover and attend to. I mean that writers have responsibilities to readers. I mean that both the writer and the reader have responsibilities to the text. I mean that a book is a particular kind of object that manifests particular defining features.

What, after all, is a book?

Here is my definition:

A book is a sequence of pages on which appear meaning-communicating marks, all of which are bound together in an authorised order.

In other words, by the nature of its being, a book is the focus of two kinds of authority. One is the authority of the writer who arranged the words on pages, arranged the pages in a given order, and indicated his intention by binding this sequence of words and pages together. The other is the co-equal authority of the reader. S/he may do whatever s/he wants with the text, for who is to stop him/her? S/he can read it backwards if s/he likes, can dip and delve, can read for a while and break off for a while, can read some and never read the rest. In that sense, the reader is in charge and the writer is powerless. But educated readers know that the ethical nature of the unwritten contract between writer and reader is that the reader will respect what the writer has made, will not alter or rearrange it, but at some

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point, and earlier rather than later in the reading experience, will attend to the text in the order of its bound-together sequence. Respect for the writer, and respect for the form of communication we call a book, tells us that the good reader will pay the writer the compliment of reading the text in the bound sequence and will read all of it, the boring passages as well as those that are immediately engaging. And, when a first reading proves the text is worthwhile, good readers know that rereading is as important as first-time reading. In fact, with the best and greatest texts, rereading is essential: you can't get what matters till you read again.

I wish I had time to explore all this in detail, but that is not my commission today. Another time, perhaps. All I need to say here is that nowadays, if the promotion of book-reading is to be worthwhile, it must attend to the ethics of the activity. The children of the new electronic age do not know about the ethics of book-reading, for the electronic means of communication are contrary, are different from, even opposed to, them.

Here is a wonderful book, there is a group of children, what next?

Talk is next. If you don't know the children, you can't know how best to promote their reading of this wonderful book. So we will have to get to know each other first. And what I particularly want to know is what these children have read recently, what they like to read for themselves, which books they would tell their friends are the best books they have ever read, which book is the most difficult book they have ever read. When I know these things I will have some idea whether this wonderful book I want them to read is likely to have an immediate appeal, or will be regarded as difficult, strange, boring, or any of those other catch-all words children use when they mean they'd rather not be bothered with this wonderful book, thank you.

Of this I'm certain: if every child from his/her first day in school until the day it left were required to keep a Reading Diary, in which is recorded the title, author and date when the book was finished of everything the child read or had read to him/her, then the business of knowing which wonderful book to persuade that child to read next would be a far easier task and much more often successful than it is.

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This simple device would also influence the child's view of him/herself as a reader.

I also know that reading aloud is the most successful and enjoyable way of introducing almost any literary text to any group of people, whatever their age. We should never forget that reading silently to oneself is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Wasn't it Saint Augustine who recorded with astonishment that his master, Ambrose, was a man able to read without moving his lips? That must have been around the year 370 by the Christian calendar. In other words, for those who formed our Western book-reading culture - the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, the Christians - reading was a social, communal and listening activity.

It still is when we are learning how to do it for ourselves. We learn how a text goes, how the drama plays, how the language is orchestrated, when the text is fast and furious, when it is slow and contemplative, funny or solemn, what it is we must attend to, by listening to someone who knows how to interpret it on the tongue. Reading aloud is an essential activity in the promotion of reading. So essential that were I Minister of Education, I would make it a law that every teacher in every classroom at every level of education must every day read aloud a significant piece of literature to the students. By ‘significant’, I do not mean lengthy. Five lines of worthwhile poetry is more significant than five pages of modest prose. And after the reading s/he would have to explain briefly, why s/he considers those few lines of print worthy of the students' attention. In my experience, no other method of book promotion has ever been so productive as reading aloud a sample of a text I wanted children to read for themselves.

Now for my third ‘what next?’ Every would-be reader's question when you mention a wonderful book is What's it about? Sometimes it is said that people read for the pleasure of finding out what happens next. Another half-truth. If it is entirely true, why do we reread the books we like the most? Why do we watch films and go to see plays that we have seen before, when we already know what happens next? We do it because we love to experience again that which we know we will enjoy. And because we know that this book, this film, this play is so rich it will yield something new each time. Teachers of

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young children who are learning to read testify to the fact that when you are learning to read, the books you most want to try to read for yourself are the ones that the teacher has already read aloud to you. The ones in which you already know what happens next.

What is true of young children learning to read turns out to be true of us all, for we are all learning how to read all the time. Every book which we have never read before is a book we have to learn how to read. When our best friend tells us she has read a wonderful book and she thinks we ought to read it too, what she does to help us get started is tell us what she has found in it. She makes this new, and therefore threatening book familiar to us. She tells us something of the story. She indicates what the excitements are. She tells us which other books it is like, books she knows we've read. And she compares and differentiates them. They are alike in these ways, she says, and different in these other ways. She also prepares us for difficulties. Keep going to the third chapter, she might say, it's hard going till then, but after that, I couldn't put it down. In other words, she takes us into reading the book for ourselves. That is exactly what the best promoters of reading always do: talk us into reading.

Talk is what makes readers and keeps books alive

That's why writers and artists visiting schools and libraries to talk to children is so successful. Seeing them, hearing them, being with them, talking to them, helps to make their books more familiar, easier to get into and enjoy. But that isn't the only reason why it helps make readers. A moment ago I observed that it isn't quite true that we read for the simple pleasure of finding out what happens next. Why, then, do we read for its own sake? Let me approach the question personally. I have a prejudice against historical fiction. It seems to me an irritating and spurious genre. Yet I greatly admire William Golding's trilogy of novels set on a ship sailing to Australia in the nineteenth century. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles is one of my favourite books. And I regard Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island as a masterpiece of children's literature. Yet these are all examples of the historical novel. So why do I like them so much? What is it about them that overrides my ingrained prejudice? The magic is the author in the book. (Not the same being, let me add, as

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the author in the flesh.) I greatly enjoy keeping company with the consciousness that inhabits the books of William Golding, John Fowles and R.L. Stevenson. Keeping company with an authorial personality that fascinates us, that enlivens our minds and imaginations, that speaks to us more intimately and more revealingly than even our closest friends and lovers ever can is what makes reading so absorbing and makes us want to keep on doing it.

So: One of the best ways to promote reading is to let would-be readers hear people who are good at it talking about the books, the authors, they love the best. And to make sure that the people who do this for children are of many different kinds, come from many walks of life, and include children as well as adults. In the end, talk is what makes readers and what keeps books alive.

But all the talk in the world is useless if we never read any of the books being talked about. Reading, I reminded us earlier, is a function of time. You can't do it unless you do it. You can't read unless you spend the time needed to read this wonderful book someone has persuaded you is worthwhile. When our politicians, who it goes without saying are noted for their sophistication as literary readers, complain about a decline in what they like to call ‘reading standards’, and impose on us this latest fashion or that to put matters right, what they always ignore is a simple truth. Unless every child has time to read for its own sake every day, then no publicity, no teaching method, no modish technique for raising standards, will have any lasting effect.

The best thing any government can do if it seriously wants to help improve the reading competencies of its nation is pass legislation which not only encourages but requires schools to provide an appropriate amount of time each school day when everyone - students, teachers, ancillary staff - reads for its own sake. The books read by the students would be their own choice but decided in consultation with their teachers. And by ‘appropriate time’, I mean the time it takes students to achieve a sense of pleasure from what they are reading. In real terms that means about twenty minutes uninterrupted reading time for children aged eight and nine, about twenty-five to thirty minutes for children aged ten and eleven, and more for students older than that.

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Those who say that schools can't afford so much time every day for reading because there is too much else to do are merely saying that they do not believe that reading matters very much, that it is only a functional business, a mere tool to be used in other important fields of study. I dispute that with the utmost vigour. The ability to interpret all manner of texts with sophisticated subtlety is the essential basis of our everyday life, whatever we do for a living. Literary reading is about that. It should therefore be at the heart of education. It is prior and should take priority. If we want to promote reading then we will have to promote as vigorously as we can the importance, the necessity of time to read.

Speaking of time, I've not had enough in these few minutes to justify the broad generalisations I've made about the nature and importance of literary reading, or to say anything about many aspects of promotion. Nothing, for example, about the influence on readers of film, TV and stage adaptations of books. Nothing about awards and prizes. Nothing about the relationship of reading to the availability of books. Nothing about the part that reviews play. Nothing about the way the making of pictures and the acting out of stories help younger children especially to become readers. Nothing about children themselves promoting books to other children. Were there time I'd have a lot to say about all of these. And I'm sure they will be talked about in the panel discussion for which I am the provocateur. Besides, I've written about them in detail in The Reading Environment and Tell me: Reading, Children & Talk.¹

1 In het Nederlands verschenen als De leesomgeving en Vertel eens: Kinderen, lezen en praten (vert. Joke Linders). Amsterdam: Querido, 1995.

Readers are made by readers

In everything I've said so far I've been making two assumptions: first, that the adults who educate and care for the young are themselves readers who read for the sake of it; and second, that they have a useful working knowledge of the range of books available for children and teenagers. I know of course that it is unwise of me to make such utopian assumptions.

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Since 1982 I have been trying to discover how many, and which, books for children a student teacher needs to have read if she is to be competent as a promoter of reading from her very first day in her first teaching job. I think I have the answer. It is about 500. About 150 are picturebooks, about 150 are novels. About 75 are poetry books. Another 75 or so are books of folk and fairy stories. 100 or so are illustrated texts of the kind that children need when they are just able to read for themselves. The rest, about 50, are representative of the kind of books that are unclassifiable. And of course the 500 are selected because they represent the best of their kind that has been produced in the past and is being produced now.

It takes about three years for a student to read that basic library if it is to be acquired with enjoyment and with time to think about what has been read and talk about it with others, and if the best ways of introducing books to children are to be explored and practised in company with experienced teachers who can guide and inform the student all the while.

I emphasize that this is a minimum requirement. But I know how few student teachers receive anywhere near it. In other words, the majority of newly qualified teachers are badly prepared as teachers of reading. I am speaking of the way things are in my own country, Britain. I invite you to reflect on the state of things in your own country and would be interested to learn if your teachers are better trained.

The same question might be asked of librarians. Years ago, we used to train specialist children's librarians. Not so now. What we train now are information system managers, a few of whom have taken a very short optional course in children's books just for the fun of it. Teachers in Britain used to know they could rely on the local children's librarians to keep them informed of the new children's books, and to deal skilfully with their pupils. Though that service hasn't disappeared completely yet, it cannot be relied on any longer.

In our societies it is true that the place where the vast majority of our children become readers, where every child should be in a reading environment, and where they should find adults capable of helping them to grow into thoughtful and life-long literary readers, is in the

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schools. So my final point is this. If we really want to do something that has a far-reaching and permanent effect on the promotion of reading for its own sake we should concentrate on the proper training and retraining of teachers and librarians, and the creation of a reading environment in every school, supported by a sumptuous provision of books. Without that everything else we do is good for some but not for the many, is patchy and ephemeral in its results. So, you see, I cannot help ending where I began: Everything about the promotion of reading depends on what we judge to be of value.