Why making reading easier may be a bad choice

There are myriad ways to simplify reading, from AI summaries to shortened sentences, but we may be making life hard for pupils in the long run, writes Alex Quigley
16th January 2025, 5:30am
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Why making reading easier may be a bad choice

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/why-making-reading-easier-may-be-bad-choice

In our digital age, reading is being made easier. Sentences are getting shorter. Real books are being supplanted by digital counterparts. What’s more, artificial intelligence (AI) promises a future of simple summaries to shortcut reading challenges entirely.

And yet, at the same time as this widespread simplification, reading habits and reading for pleasure are in steep decline, and reading difficulties are on the rise.

Is this great reading simplification - with the aim of speedy curriculum accessibility - causing more problems than it solves for struggling readers?

It is common to hear that reading standards in England are on a high. In the last Progress in International Reading Literacy Study - the definitive international reading assessment - England ranked 4th in reading outcomes.

However, only 29 per cent of pupils said they enjoyed reading, which was below the global average of 46 per cent. Worryingly, 24 per cent of pupils said they disliked reading, higher than the international average of 18 per cent.

Teachers turning to artificial intelligence

While we should be happy that children are performing well in reading assessments internationally, it also showed a relatively higher proportion of low achievers in reading, compared with an overall strong ranking in average performance.

Weaker readers are being left in the wake of their peers in every measure.

A common solution is to offer the power of technology as a solution. Teachers have been using adapted texts for pupils for years with some success. PowerPoint slides have been used to erase more complex reading from textbooks or worksheets in many subjects.

Increasingly, teachers are turning to AI to produce pupil-friendly alternatives to tricky classroom texts.


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While it has always been common to offer simple summaries, or “Shakespeare made easy” for some, it may just compound the problem for many struggling readers.

Researchers have described the “optimum effort hypothesis”. That is to say, when pupils read an easy text, they can enter automatic reading mode, where they don’t need to think very hard and monitor closely what they read. Their reading becomes forgettable.

The paradox of reading difficulty

So, teachers are faced with a paradox: making reading easy can make long-term learning harder.

Offering pupils easy reading may mean they get through the lesson and speed to the next curriculum assessment, but it is likely to store up future issues.

There is no suggestion that we should set up pupils to fail, but if we remove the challenge from reading, we remove the experience of struggling, persevering, along with the sense of achievement that comes from mastering a hard text.

It is common for teachers to bemoan pupils’ inability to interpret the rare vocabulary of examinations, but it requires sustained attention to complex academic language in the classroom to give pupils the right tools to do the job.

It is helpful to consider the Goldilocks principle when it comes to reading in class. If it is too easy, it is just as likely to bore pupils as it is to make them more engaged.

At the same time, we shouldn’t make reading materials unfeasibly difficult without support.

The Goldilocks principle, then, can help define an approach to reading that is high challenging and high support for every pupil, but especially for weaker readers.

There has been much discussion attending the current curriculum review in England. Calls to make the curriculum engaging or accessible are no doubt well-meaning, but we should be careful that we don’t seek to make reading easy and unwittingly cast struggling readers further adrift from their peers.

Alex Quigley is the author of Why Learning Fails (And What To Do About It)

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