Classroom Reading for Enjoyment: Bestowing the Beauty of Book Blether (2024)

By: Mellie Green

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Synopsis: This book provides guidance for improving primary classroom reading instruction. As education stakeholders now recognise, there is an urgent need for policy and practice beyond phonics and for improved reading outcomes. This timely text supports a well-balanced, effective and affective classroom reading programme. The author describes the co-generative work of Belinda, a Brisbane based primary teacher and her Year Three class. In a sequence of 24 descriptive vignettes, she provides details of the activities in which Belinda engages her students, in weekly sessions dedicated entirely to literary appreciation and educative reading for enjoyment. The project illuminates the beauty of book blether – the significance of students’ literary talk. The author applies John Dewey’s philosophy on aesthetic experience in explanatory responses to Belinda’s teaching, and demonstrates how this work might be replicated in the primary classroom. The book will appeal to pre-service teachers and educators, academics in the field of reading instruction, dialogic pedagogy and literacy improvement, as well as primary school practitioners.