📖 Reading the dictionary and other lies

Don’t tell them, but I’ve been lying to my Year 11s.

What started as a joke is now well on its way to becoming an essential part of our daily routine. Every morning they push me further into it, and every day I desperately try to bluff my way out of it. In fact, it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to believe it myself.

The lie? That I’ve read and memorised every word in the dictionary.

“How do you spell brainrot?”

Year 11s being Year 11s, they have now made it their unshakeable mission to prove me a liar. Each lesson now begins with a mad scramble for the class dictionaries, with each of them feverishly flicking through to try to find the most obscure word they can to trip up their duplicitous English teacher.

But so far, I’m getting away with it.

Words, words, everywhere🔗

The shocking truth is I have read all the words in the dictionary, just not on those densely-typed, tissue-thin pages. Like any good reader, I’ve picked them up everywhere else.

This is the great miracle of reading: it is a self-reinforcing loop. The more one reads, the better one gets, and the more one can read, ad infinitum, until you find yourself confidently conning 15-year-olds that you definitely know what antidisestablishmentarianism means.

As teachers, we’re pretty good at teaching our students to focus on a text, to read and re-read for additional meaning, inference and connotations. Whether it’s source-work in History, poetic analysis in English, or translation tasks in MFL, students are well-drilled in drilling down.

Millsandboontron hard at work

But in a prolix world, are we doing them a disservice? We’re well and truly into a post-scarcity economy when it comes to writing. When AI can churn out treatises and stories in minutes, the real skill comes from a reader’s ability to quickly and efficiently parse a text for purpose and veracity. The nature of a curriculum means we rarely place our students in a position where they need to make these snap judgments from skimmed content: every word we place in front of them has been pre-filtered by us (or our exam boards) for maximum curriculum effectiveness.

Really, we need our students to build the habit of reading as much as possible, as broadly as possible. They don’t just need to be confident in understanding, but in seeking out and ploughing through texts.

So what should we do to turbo-charge this process?

1) Skate, don’t slog🔗

Reading more, quickly, is sometimes better than reading less, slowly. There’s a time and a place for careful, close analysis of texts. But it’s easy to get bogged down in detail and miss the benefits that accrue for reading briskly and widely. The evidence is clear that readers get better the more reading they’re exposed to, even with tricky texts:

“Simply reading challenging, complex novels aloud and at a fast pace in each lesson repositioned ‘poorer readers’ as ‘good’ readers, giving them a more engaged uninterrupted reading experience over a sustained period.”

UKLA 2018

Let students skate along the surface. With practice, they’ll learn what they can and should skip over for the sake of fluency. Just be ready to dive in to rescue them if they slip through the thin ice into confusion.

2) Location, Location, Location🔗

Give students trusted sources they can draw from for their texts, and signpost them well. Libraries are the natural source for this in the physical realm, but it’s the digital that is the first port of call for most of our students. Train students early on about the sites they can trust - not just for their content but also the quality of their writing.

One of the best things I ever did as a trainee was start saving down digital versions of classic texts in a Google Drive. Now it functions as a one-stop-shop for my students (or, more often, their parents) looking for something to load up on the Kindle or tablet. Feel free to use it yourself - no library card required.

3) If it reads, it leads🔗

Expose students to as many types of text as you can find. The primacy of The Book in schools - particularly the novel - is easy to understand. It’s a discrete object, adaptable to a teaching unit, requiring little to no secondary sources to access and often following structures even the least confident of readers can innately understand. But it’s only one of a myriad of different text types that students will encounter in their lives (and one that many adults happily ignore).

Wherever you can, experiment with different text types. Articles, ad campaigns, tweets: if it’s got words, give it a go. Our introduction to Macbeth has everything from cartoons, to private letters, to Guy Fawkes’s tortured signature, all before they read a word of Shakespeare’s folio.

This medium-agnostic approach not only builds students’ confidence and fluency, but also breaks down the notion that Reading-with-a-capital-R is something confined to the English classroom, between the A5 covers of a Book.

If students can learn that ‘to read’ is as much a passive skill as an active one, they’ll be well equipped to face the word-flood of the modern world.

And - much more importantly - they might even learn the word that catches me out.

Until then, the dictionary duel continues.

---