The Boy Problem in Reading
A talk by Paul Kropp
website: www.paulkropp.com email: paul-kropp@sympatico.ca
Paul Kropp is the author of a new young-adult novel, The Countess and Me; the parent book How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life and many novels in the New Series Canada (High Interest Publishing), including Tag Team, illustrated at the left. He speaks at teacher conferences in various parts of the world and occasionally to schools.
Evidence of the boy problem in reading and language arts is worldwide. Interestingly, we do not believe that boys begin school with any real disadvantage in reading, but by third grade the problem is measurable.
NAEP testing in grade 8 shows an achievement gap between boys and girls that is almost as great as the gap between white and African-American students.
Recent PISA testing indicates boy underachievement is measurable among 15-year-olds in virtually every country that took part.
Even more striking are the significant differences in reading attitude as measured by the PISA study. It's clear that boys, around the world, read more for information and less for enjoyment than do girls. It's also clear that they read fewer books, comprehend less well and write with inferior fluency, complexity and style.
For many years, the advantages given to males in schools and society as a whole managed to disguise their gender disadvantage in literacy skills. That is no longer the case. Paul Kropp maintains that we can, as teachers, work to improve boys literacy in much the same way as teachers worked to overcome girls' disadvantages in science and math back in the 1990s. All students, regardless of gender, deserve learning opportunities and experiences that are appropriate to their needs.
Many of the reasons for the boy disadvantage are outside the school:
-
Not enough dads read aloud to kids
-
Some socio-cultural groups don't value boy literacy
-
Not enough male primary teachers / reader models
-
Absent dads can't model
-
Distractions of "boy culture" : videogames, etc.
However, Kropp feels that teachers must still take some action in their classrooms to help close the boy-girl reading gap. Even at the picture book level, a "boy book" seems to be more aggressive in its characters' stance to parents and social convention, constructed with more frantic activity on each page, and more driven by plot than a "girl book." He offered the BEAR acronym for choosing guy fiction:
-
B - Boys and young men as central characters
-
E - An episodic plot structure with cliff-hanging situations
-
A - Action as the key aspect of the book, not emotional introspection
-
R - Rebellious attitude by the main character
Kropp feels that teachers can begin to address the "boy problem" by ensuring that more material in the classroom and school library actually appeals to boys. He suggests more non-fiction, more magazines and more publications tied into popular culture to keep reading going.
As well, Kropp suggests some possible ways to reconstruct classroom and home reading activities so both boys and girls will achieve greater success:
-
Make sure there are books in your classroom (and in your reading or literature program) that boys will want to read.
-
Ask questions that boys will want to answer: not "how would you feel?" but "what would you do?"
-
Deflect "feelings" questions so that boys will be willing to speak or write about them.
-
Separate literature circle groups by gender for higher level discussions
-
Set up reading and writing contests.
-
Organize drama and "performance reading."
-
Find ways to teach, talk and test non-fiction (Structure, organization, visual support, argument, clarity of writing, factual support, use of authorities, reliability of information, bias, opening hook, conclusion, logical errors, false generalizations, appeals to emotion, use of anecdotes and examples, depth of knowledge, etc.)
-
Use the male role models we have (coaches, young teachers) to push reading
-
Honour "boy" writing even as we nudge the boys to move on.
Some good reading on the issue:
Millard, Elaine, Differently literate, (London, Falmer, 1997); Newkirk, Thomas, Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy and Popular Culture, (Heinemann, 2002); Pirie, Bruce, Teenage Boys and High School English, (Heinemann, 2002); Smith, Michael and Jeffrey Wilhelm, Reading Don't Fix No Chevys, (Heinemann, 2002)
