Katz – reading skill and disposition

I often talk to teachers about the distinction between having a skill and having the disposition to use it, and the best example I can think of is that you want children to have the complicated skills of reading, but you want at the same time, that they have the disposition to be readers.  It is possible to find learning to read, especially in the English language, which is one of the worst, so painful that you’ll never read when you leave the school building.  In which case you’ve got the skills but not the disposition, but of course it wouldn’t be much use to have the disposition to be a reader if you haven’t got the skills.   

So the important thing for us, as teachers, is to say, to ask ourselves, “How do I help children so that they acquire both together.” the skills and the disposition to use them, and by the way there is some evidence that children who are around adults that they see reading frequently, doesn’t matter what they read, the point is young children who are around people whom they observe reading tend to learn to read more quickly or more easily, or with more enthusiasm, shall we say. 

So the question is how do we help children to acquire the skills and, at the same time, the disposition to use them, and that’s true of all skills, it’s having the disposition to use them. And a lot of that depends on whether they’re reading something that’s interesting, not necessarily something that’s easy to read.