Tomas Nehale
THE week of 25 to September 2023 was designated for a National Readathon activities by the Ministry of Education Arts and Culture in collaboration with Namibia Library Archive Services.
The majority of schools across the country have incredibly unpacked the readathon events in different ways. Therefore, events of this nature are worth embracing and cherishing because they help to cultivate healthy reading habits among pupils.
A reading culture, as we all know, is a thorn in the flesh of many pupils or the general public at large.
Shimutwikeni Abed was not wrong when he opined: “It’s better to inherit a cabinet of books than a wardrobe of clothes”. A healthy reading culture is the cornerstone of learning. Reading is the complex act of dealing with communication in written form, visual, or pictorial illustration.
When pupils read regularly, they get the message in letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs and carefully derive meaning from them in order to understand the world around them. A good habit of reading is that it helps pupils to enrich their vocabularies as they often stumble upon new words and search for their meaning and etymological origin. Their cognitive and understanding develop positively as they feed themselves with a variety of information. This could help them to relate the new information with their background knowledge, as a result, they could eventually reason smartly and navigate things rationally. Furthermore, reading enhances the imagination of pupils, especially when they read for pleasure.
I mean, they spontaneously develop some mental pictures as they read, which enable them to travel around the world while seated at home or school through imagination and fantasy.
Every spoken language is constituted of five skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar. These skills are interwoven and develop each other automatically. Reading and listening are receptive skills, whereas speaking and writing are productive skills.
This is to say, these skills are interdependent. If pupils mastered the receptive skills (reading and listening), it would naturally polish the productive skills (writing and speaking) and vice versa.
How can we go about cultivating a healthy reading culture?
- Well-endowed school libraries with adequate reading facilities and qualified librarians should be established so that school children can develop affection for books at an early age. By doing so, the children will adopt the fundamentals of reading and learning.
- Government and non-governmental organisations should help to promote reading culture by providing mobile library services, increasing reading awareness in public schools; donate books to schools and public libraries in order to encourage reading habits.
- Schools should host readathon events, at least every week. Various reading activities will be conducted to test the pupils’ reading proficiency, whereby prizes will be awarded to the best individuals or groups.
- Reading clinics must be established in order to help pupils with learning difficulties such as dyslexia.
Lastly, after considering the endless advantages of reading, it is wise to draw the conclusion that children without a healthy reading culture are unlikely to find the key to success in life. Parents, teachers, the government, and other stakeholders are all concerned about the youth literacy rate in Namibia, which has been steadily declining.
We are living in an information and knowledge-based world. Reading is, therefore, one of the fundamental building blocks for learning and developing a literate society that can compete with the global world. Remember, a house without books is like a body without a soul. Sasha Salina pointed out: “A child who reads today, will be an adult who thinks tomorrow”. All in all, let’s all embrace and cherish a habit of reading.
*Tomas Nehale is a teacher by profession.