Michael Rosen: 'Children are no longer encouraged to read for pleasure

Michael Rosen: 'Children are no longer encouraged to read for pleasure'

Former Children's Laureate criticises the Government's fixation with teaching the mechanics of reading rather than the enjoyment of it

Telegraph: 5.23.2014 by Anita Singh

The "brain-expanding" practice of reading for pleasure is being lost in the Government's fixation on phonics, spelling and grammar, according to the former Children's Laureate Michael Rosen.

Schoolchildren are taught to decode text, retrieve information and write grammatically correct sentences but they are no longer encouraged to lose themselves in a good story, Rosen said.

As a result, they read books without asking questions or relating the stories to their own feelings.

"We constantly live with governments who concentrate on all these narrow aspects of reading, and not of interpretation and understanding," Rosen told the Hay Festival.

"We know the arguments about why choosing books, looking at them, reading some and maybe not others, is so important. And yet there is this strange inertia about encouraging reading for pleasure."  READ MORE !