A few months ago, reported that an Oxford professor of English, Shakespearean scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, warned that his present-day students had trouble reading long books. A Kiwi perspective was added a few weeks later, when a sociologist at the University of Canterbury, Mike Grimshaw, told that many university students were “functionally illiterate”. The NCEA 2024 literacy and numeracy online benchmark tests, released in December by the Qualifications Authority, show only about half of teenagers who sat the tests passed, with lower pass rates at a third of the schools with more socioeconomic barriers to achievement.
As a teacher of English, both literature and writing, my students’ ability to write and to read is central to my professional life, and these issues are now never far from my mind. Of course, we didn’t need to teach writing at university until about 25 years ago. I never studied it.
I didn’t need to, because – encouraged at school – I read myself into a discourse and a culture. Teaching writing has been a nice little earner for university English departments and it fills the gap in our curriculum left by the decline of interest in literary reading, but it’s a pity it’s now necessary. However, it is necessary for a number of reasons.
We as a society are reading less – even self-identified readers read less. What we read – much of it on our hand-held satanic rectangles – we are reading less well. Many of us are in fact losing not only the .