Vision

It is unfortunate that millions of children learn reading every year but a large number of them fail to achieve lasting reading skills. Failure in achieving sound reading skills may be a factor for a child to drop out of school and thus stand as a barrier in the way of Universalization of Elementary Education. It is an establishedfact that children belonging to marginalized groups face numerous discouraging factors inherent in the ethos in which they grow up and in the system of education itself. The curriculum and language they face at school are often of the kind they cannot identify with. Most of our primary schools do not encourage reading for different purposes -reading is limited to textbooks and preparation for examinations. Reading to exploreinformation, developing a personal interest in reading and reading for pleasure often get neglected and the child fails to become a reader. Although a great deal of research and experience-based insight is available for developing a sound pedagogy of reading, organized efforts in this direction are yet to be taken. Frank Smith’s Understanding Reading establishes the role that a print-rich environment and opportunities to read can play in enabling the child to become a competent reader.Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s classic, Teacher, underlines the role of an emotionally significant or ‘organic’ vocabulary in early reading material. Any major initiative to promote reading as a foundational skill must build on such insights. Our aim here is
to successfully inculcate reading habits in children.

The National Curriculum Framework 2005 states – While reading is readily accepted as a focus area for language education, school syllabi are burdened with  information-absorbing and memorizing tasks, so much so that the pleasure ofreading for its own sake is missed out. Opportunities for individualized reading need to be built at all stages in order to promote a culture of reading, and teachers mustset the example of being members of such a culture. This requires major means of encouraging reading. The development and supply of a range of supplementary reading material relevant to all school subjects and across the grades require urgentattention. A great deal of such material, though of varying quality, is available in the market, and could be utilized in a methodical manner to expand the scope of classroom teaching of a subject. Teacher training programmes need to familiarize teachers with such material, and to give them yardsticks by which to select and use it effectively.

As an area of Primary Level Curriculum, reading as such has remained neglected in our system and whatever attention it receives comes under the general teaching of a particular language. This practice is inconsistent with current pedagogic theory and international practices. For several decades now, reading has been recognised in pedagogic literature as a distinct developmental area in the formative years of schooling. In the early days of NCERT, reading received some attention of this kind, but subsequently this effort gradually dissipated. It is high time that the effort is renewed and reading is brought directly under focus in the context of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. We need to plan strategies for promoting good practices in inculcating reading skills at the elementary levels and for the assessment of reading capability acquisition by children.