World Book Day

Is there sound if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it?  Do colors exist if there are no eyes to perceive them?  Of course there are sound waves, but many would argue that the sound is not the wave, but rather the effect those waves have on an ear.  Likewise, certain frequencies of light waves determine color only once they come in contact with an eye.  I wonder if the same could be said for a book, or perhaps more precisely for literature.  If a book is written but never read, is it literature?  Is it the reader who breathes life into a piece of writing?  I would argue that this is exactly what happens.

Despite my somewhat sarcastic take on International Days in my Days’d and Confused post, World Book Day might be the most apropos time for this blog to dedicate some time and thought to reading and writing.  After all, I began this blog with the purpose of encouraging my students to read more and take the step (or gigantic leap) to start writing.  Literature, and art in general, is sometimes described as being a conversation.  When I first heard this as a child at school, I didn’t really understand how or why my teacher talked about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or In Cold Blood as being part of a conversation.  Of course, when he claimed that they were part of the same, ongoing, never-ending conversation, I thought he had finally gone certifiably bonkers.  When he added that we could get in on the conversation, I was expecting the men in white robes to come bursting through the door with a straight jacket at any minute.  Now, it is hard for me to imagine why I didn’t grasp the idea right away.  Everything that has been written is a response to what had been written before and an antecedent to what will be written after.  The most exhilarating part is that by allowing ourselves to experience and share what we read, we become participants in the conversation.

Considering that I am an English teacher in Spain, one of my goals is to get non-native English speakers to plunge into the conversation.  I have been teaching for over 20 years now, and in that time there have always been students who were eager to partake in the conversation.  However, by and large most students have been reluctant to make the effort in the first place or they haven’t had what it takes to stick with it after an initial burst of enthusiasm.  So the question nagging at the back of my mind has been how to make reading (in English) more accessible and more appealing to the greatest number of students.  I’ve come up with a double-pronged argument: language learning and human experience.

It has been shown that reading is an effective way to improve one’s language skills.  There are many obvious reasons for this.  Attentive reading can increase and activate vocabulary, heighten awareness of grammatical patterns and structures and improve writing skills.  Beyond these worthwhile advantages, I believe that reading is one of the best motivators to keep us learning.  Recent studies have shown that reading is a much more effective way to learn both vocabulary and grammar than traditional studying based on memorizing.  Some of these studies have emphasized that grammar systems are extremely complex – so complex, in fact, that there is no universal agreement among grammarians as to a unified explanation.  At first glance this assertion would seem to be desperately demotivating for the foreign language student.  The good news is that these same studies conclude that we tend to “absorb” grammar through “comprehensible input”.  Basically, this is a student’s dream.  While you can’t expect information to get into your head through osmosis when you sleep with your head on an English textbook, this means that meaningful exposure to a language is a better way to learn than staring at grammar rules for hours on end.  Finally, researchers contend that the best way to get comprehensible input is - you guessed it - reading!

In the previous paragraph I have tried to show you how reading can improve your English.  What I would really love to see, though, is you breathing enriching air into the corpus of literature in English.  That doesn’t mean that you have to become a literary genius. It just means that by reading, thinking, talking, feeling, sharing and maybe even writing about what you have read you will add your own experience to the universal conversation.  That’s pretty exciting.

I would also include socio-cultural factors here.  Reading can help us to reflect on other points of view, different ways of doing things and contrasting cultural perspectives.  This, in turn, can help us become more understanding human beings and potentially more constructive, positive, tolerant citizens.  Literature can help us to gain a wider vision of the human experience.  Despite constant technological developments that supposedly make us better connected, I often notice that everyday life has a tendency to strap blinders on the sides of our eyes. We lose sight of the big picture while we are focused on getting through the day without forgetting to pick up your three-year-old from preschool.  (Uh-oh)

So, to wrap things up, I would like to urge all of you to pick up a book and read it.  You’ll enjoy some, abhor others.  You’ll laugh and cry and get frustrated.  You’ll travel around the world and in someone else’s dreams.  You’ll smile and chuckle and roll your eyes.  Your heart will race and your eyelids will grow heavy.  You'll ponder new ideas and see the world in different ways.  But, most of all, you’ll get in on the conversation.