The Art of Reading

One question we often receive when parents are considering enrolling their children at ISSPb is, which textbook do you use when teaching English?

Could you imagine one textbook each school year that had the scope to successfully cover the finite intricacies of spelling, grammar, comprehension and writing, alongside igniting a passion of linguistics and literature? The teachers, let alone the students, wouldn’t be able to lift such a tome.

As we are not an English language acquisition school, but an international school, the only school in St Petersburg that enables students to sit external IGCSE and A-level exams in the city, we have to teach to enable students to study and sit examinations they would as a native English speaker. As such, much of our English curriculum is centred around a focal text, which we closely explore and examine to cover a range of genres, conventions and contexts.  Simultaneously, this engages the students in reading for both knowledge and pleasure.

There is no need for me here to regurgitate research that evidences the importance of reading in developing understanding, writing skills, building general knowledge and expanding vocabulary. What I want to focus on, and celebrate, is the collective interest students take in the characters and events that unfold as we read during our English lessons. Be it during Dickens’ Victorian era or Bram Stoker’s Transylvanian castle, students become genuinely and emotionally invested in the books we study.

So why else should we read, if not to reap the academic benefits alone? In addition to improving concentration skills and building confidence, the art of reading helps with empathy and emotional intelligence. It drives imagination and creativity, as well as reducing stress. It’s not just the independent process of reading itself that fosters this and that’s why English lessons are so engaging. It’s the joint discussions, a collective giggle and audible gasps of surprise when we are reading aloud. It’s the why, how and for whom? It’s the enthusiasm to turn the next page, reach the next chapter and overhear snippets of follow up conversations of what could happen next in the hallway. As with anything we do in life, we have to have a genuine passion for it, that’s our aim with English and reading – so no, this cannot be achieved by one, or even a million, textbooks alone.

As Dickens himself states, ‘No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.’

Miss Herman, English KS3-5