Reading offers a rich, immersive experience that feeds our brains and widens our experiences. You could argue that the prime purpose of a literacy education is to teach students to read, but as teachers, we set ourselves a higher goal as we want students not only to be able to read but also to enjoy reading. 

Students find reading difficult and struggle for different reasons, for example: 

• Difficulties with blending and segmenting phonemes  
• Poor short-term memory, so words taught in a coaching session are quickly forgotten 
• Slow decoding of the text means comprehension slips through the long pauses
• Unable to pick up the clues which are key to inferential comprehension

There is, however, one thing struggling readers all have in common - they rarely find any pleasure in reading – they do not see themselves as readers.

Consequently, they do as little reading as they can get away with, so their opportunity to develop as readers is severely limited. They do not (in the words of the DfE The Reading Framework 2023) put in ‘the reading miles’. 

So, what can be done to engage students in an activity they see as pretty much irrelevant to their lives? The Reading Framework places a heavy emphasis on struggling readers with a Reading Age of below 8 reading ‘decodable’ texts i.e. texts exclusively with words at the stage of phonic development which matches the student’s phonic knowledge. 

The trouble is, those texts use very stilted language and generally they don’t appeal to the older struggling reader, so they are not motivated to read them. The Reading Framework does acknowledge that schools will need to find ‘alternative ways of teaching’ phonics with these older students, and I would argue that getting them interested in reading has to be the priority. 

Developing reading for pleasure

The guiding principle behind all Rapid Plus texts is that the texts are both accessible and appealing. But how have we done this?

By using a range of subtle features that reduce many of the barriers to reading usually experienced by struggling readers e.g.

• Meticulous choice of familiar vocabulary
• The layout of the text avoids any confusing line-breaks
• Use of a dyslexia-friendly font
• The text is printed on a pale cream background to avoid visual stress
• Enough small illustrations to break up any longer chunks of text but not too many to make the texts look babyish
• The trademark Rapid Plus Before Reading page tunes the student into the text and boosts their confidence in their own ability before they actually start reading  
• All Rapid Plus texts end with a Quiz page where students’ comprehension of the text is explored through literal and inferential comprehension questions as well as questions requiring students to make a personal response. These questions remind students that the purpose of reading is to extract meaning from a text. 

Rapid Plus does everything possible to enable struggling readers to access the text, but if they are not rewarded with a positive reading experience, they are not going to persevere. 

The Reading Framework has a whole section on the links between fluency, comprehension and reading enjoyment. We are all familiar with the student who has made progress at word reading but their slow pace of decoding inhibits understanding.

If students in Secondary Schools are not enjoying reading and only read under duress their progress will be limited. If teachers are of the opinion that students can only experience pleasure in reading once they have acquired more sophisticated reading skills, then too many students will have given up the struggle before they get there. Enjoying reading shouldn’t just be a reward for skilled readers. It should be our goal to make reading enjoyable for all students.