Developing Readers

Reader development means active intervention to:

• increase people's confidence and enjoyment of reading
• open up reading choices
• offer opportunities for people to share their reading experience
• raise the status of reading as a creative activity

Reader development is audience development for literature

Reader development sells the reading experience and what it can do for you, rather than selling individual books or writers. It builds the audience for literature by moving readers beyond brand loyalty to individual writers, helping them develop the confidence to try something new.

A mission statement for reader development

The best book in the world is quite simply the one you like best and that is something you can discover for yourself, but we are here to help you find it.
© Opening the Book Ltd

This definition is freely available for anyone to use but please credit Opening the Book if you quote us directly.

"Opening the Book was founded by Rachel Van Riel in 1991. Rachel invented the term reader development and the company led the growth of the reader-centred ideas now embedded in UK library practice."

Opening the Book also run reader development training, now available online - see Library Training on the website.

Here's a great way to gather all the ingredients you'll need to write a tasty book report. With each sandwich layer, you'll enter a different piece of important information. Once you've made a sandwich, creating your book report will be a snap!

First, you'll need to enter some basic information.

This is a cute site from Scholastic which takes kids through a formula for writing a book report using a sandwich metaphor. It doesn't provide much help with vocabulary, but does give a succinct explanation of each step - plot summary, plot high point, main characters, setting, personal opinion. The information is typed into a form then sandwiched together as a text page to be printed, saved or copied.

The beauty of this tool is in helping to structure the writer's ideas about a book. It is also something you could customise for local use - Google Forms would do this nicely. This way the teacher or individual writers could vary the ingredients to suit the book. For instance, I used Veronica Roth's Divergent to trial this and was not comfortable with the description of the plot high point as I thought it gave away too much about a book which relies on suspense. More relevant may have been outlining the major conceit of the world of the novel, without giving away what our heroine decides.

Certainly worth playing with with the goal of developing more depth, and restraint, in student book reviews.

Video: Rick Riordan and James Patterson on "Inspiring Reluctant Readers".

If we’re to ... encourage reading among boys who may collectively resist it, boys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships — the kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives. This is what turns boys into readers...

But I think it’s also about the books being published. Michael Cart, a past president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, agrees. “We need more good works of realistic fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, on- or ­offline, that invite boys to reflect on what kinds of men they want to become...”

This video accompanies an essay by American young adult author Robert Lipsyte which makes more sense than most about boys and reading. Along with the quote above, I really agree with Lipsyte's comments about the publishing industry marketing to a burgeoning female readership. It's a complex problem but not a hopeless one. But my favourite line from this essay bears repeating:

"...boys need to be approached individually..."

For the record, it's not just boys who need this individual attention.

The ReadPlus book review blog is a rich source of excellent reviews across the child and young adult world. It is great to have such a resource in Australia reviewing new titles from local and overseas authors. The link above goes to the free blog, but for a very affordable subscription you can search the complete database, customise theme and age lists, and access teacher resources.

Here is the full description from the web page:

Inspire a love of reading with ReadPlus, a collection of over 10,000 selected books and films arranged under themes for librarians, teachers and parents about books for young people aged 5 to 18.

Lists of books and films under subject headings can be generated. The books range from picture books to adult fiction and are organised into different age categories. You can search for books using theme, author, title, genre and age-range.

There are reviews and links to teacher resources, reading group guides and author sites. Bookmarks of Read Similar Authors can be printed out. There are also lists of Read Similar Books for popular books. Subscribers can request lists on any topic.

Pat Pledger and Fran Knight provide the very strong backbone of the review database, but there are many other reviewers, including some in the target age range, who present different voices. 

As they would say: highly recommended!

There are lots of good reasons to dip into LibraryThing.

Here's what they say:

• Join the world’s largest book club. 
• Catalog your books from Amazon, the Library of Congress and 690 other world libraries. Import from anywhere. 
• Find people with eerily similar tastes. 
• Find new books to read. 
• Free Early Reviewer books from publishers and authors 
• Enter 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life). 
• Available in many languages.

Here's what I would add:

• Get recommendations from the crowd. 
• Put tags together in a tagmash to find books with specific appeal factors.
• Embed a widget in your blog which displays your books - either a random, changing, sample or those with a specific tag (example above).

In the detail of a book entry you will find recommendations, or you can click on one of the tags for that book, or search for self chosen tags together - creating a tagmash. A great readers' advisory tool.

Donalyn Miller is the real deal. Her book, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child, is essential reading. What you'll get from this book is a picture of classroom reading culture at its best. Miller teaches 6th grade language arts but offers much that is useful for all ages. Her philosophy and practice is inspiring, and she really knows her books.

In a nutshell:

Her approach is simple yet provocative: affirm the reader in every student, allow students to choose their own books, carve out extra reading time, model authentic reading behaviors, discard timeworn reading assignments such as book reports and comprehension worksheets, and develop a classroom library filled with high-interest books. Her students regularly read more than 40 books in a school year and leave her classroom with an appreciation and love of books and reading. (Mark Bay, Univ. of the Cumberlands Lib., Williamsburg, KY (Library Journal, March 15, 2009; quoted at bookwhisperer.com )

Miller also ensures her students get regular access to the school library. Her program builds sustainability by developing a strong classroom library as well as using the school library.

You can follow Donalyn Miller in various places - she's a powerhouse:
Her own website The Book Whisperer
Blogging for Education Week
On Twitter @donalynbooks
And Facebook

The NoveList suite from Ebsco pulls together excellent resources for developing readers at all levels, as well as an ongoing database of annotated and classified listings of books. For schools NoveList K-8, or the K-8 Plus version that includes non-fiction, is best. Books listed cover age recommendations to 18. Public libraries would usually go for NoveList Plus which includes adult reading.

The link to NoveList above has much more than information on and sales of the products (although it has that). Reader's Advisory Corner has some introductory training covering the philosophy and scope of RA. There is also a section on working with young people which includes presentations and webinars of interest. You can also subscribe to newsletters.

You can trial NoveList of course, but may also find that your local public library or state library subscribes and you can access it that way to see what you think.

The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference blog covers some excellent sessions, allowing the world to share gems delivered in Los Angeles last weekend (and we picked it up from Aussie author Tristan Bancks on Twitter - thanks @tristanbancks !)

The wonderful Bruce Coville gave the opening keynote, in which he talked, amongst other things, about the importance of plot and character:

"You need to discuss them both interweaving with each other," he said.

There is a literary divide between plot writing and character writing, and Bruce has a theory of male and female storytelling energy. Male energy is about action, adventure, incident. "You blow stuff up and boys love it." Female storytelling energy is about character, relationship and beauty of language. "Many girls will sit still for a story with that kind of energy."

The best stories partake equally of both male and female energy, he said, "in that sweet spot in the center where you have incredible characters engaged in fascinating situations."

Lots more worth reading in this post, and many others on the blog, but what a good place to start talking about books and gender.

To see how this story from School Library Journal (July, 2010) develops you'll have to click on the first half of the cartoon - but don't worry, it has a happy ending!

A great example of lateral thinking.

BookMatch is a service of the Skokie Public Library which offers personal reading recommendations for library clients. The online Reading Preference Questionnaire goes to the readers advisory team who develop an annotated list of suggestions. The folk at Skokie developed BookMatch from a similar service at Williamsburg Regional Library called Looking For A Good Book (http://www.wrl.org/books-and-reading/adults/looking-good-book ).

You can find out how BookMatch works in a staff presentation here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6711557.html?industryid=47123

One of the things that surprised the Skokie RA staff was the number of teens who use BookMatch, sowing the seed in my mind for a secondary school version using something as simple as Google forms.

Watch this space!

"It’s All About Text Appeal: Want readers’ advisory to make a difference? Teach your kids how to speak intelligently about books." Olga Nesi, School Library Journal, August, 2010.

Nesi discusses the problem of getting kids to report on what they liked about a book. She makes reference to the work of Joyce Saricks in the area of readers advisory. Saricks concentrates on appeal factors - storyline, characterisation, tone, pacing - and Nesi works from this to improve the vocabulary of her students so they can express their preferences explicitly.

But it is not just kids who can benefit from this vocabulary development. Once you start thinking about the books in your collection in this way you will see new conections and understand the idiosyncrasies of your young readers.

Learn to ask the right questions:

"Are the characters and plot quickly revealed or slowly unveiled? Is there more dialogue or more description? Is the story’s focus on a single character or on several whose lives are intertwined? And, is the focus of the story more interior and psychological or exterior and action oriented?"

Think of a few creative ways to teach kids and staff this special vocabulary and begin to ask the right questions. You might even like to add an appeal rating to the inside cover or cataogue record of a book.

This is a great starter article for developing good readers advisory skills to use with students.

Quoted below is Olga Nesi's description from the article of how she and her colleagues set up Book Hooks - student written hooks for the books they have read - based on Joyce Saricks' appeal terms:

'To encourage our students to move away from summarizing plots, I and Kyra Blair, the literacy coach, asked them to start filling out a form called a Book Hook. The first section of the form asks for a brief description—or “hook”—of a book they’ve enjoyed. Take seventh-grader Gabriella’s Book Hook for Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly (Putnam, 1998). “Elisha and Jeremiah are two very different people, on the outside. Ellie is Jewish, while Miah is black. But what does the color of your skin have to do with love?” Now that’s gripping stuff.

'Another section asks students to consider three appeal terms that best describe the book. Gabriella learned to use the phrases “engrossing pace,” “gentle story line,” “bittersweet tone,” and “detailed characters.” Thanks to the work of all our language arts teachers, our students can now identify the pace, characterization, story line, and tone of a book. How’d we do it? We taught them to use an abbreviated list of Saricks’s adjectives, or appeal terms, that fall into each of the four categories. For example, for pacing, kids now often use words like “breakneck,” “engrossing,” “fast,” “relaxed,” and “unhurried.” For characterization, their go-to words include “familiar,” “multiple points of view,” “quirky,” “realistic,” and “well developed.” For story line, they take advantage of descriptions like “action oriented,” “character centered,” “violent,” “gentle,” “open-ended,” “thought provoking,” and “tragic.” And for tone, they might say “dark,” “edgy,” “hard edged,” “humorous,” “magical,” “romantic,” and “suspenseful.”

'I’ve found that using picture books to teach the value of appeal terms is a great way to model how to describe the primary elements of a story. With Melanie Watt’s Scaredy Squirrel (Kids Can, 2006), for instance, kids easily learn the concept of a character-driven plot because the entire story centers on the main character, Scaredy Squirrel, and his thoughts and feelings. The book also has a quirky hero, is fast paced, and has a humorous tone.'