Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2022

Family literacy programs aim at supporting parents in stimulating their young children’s emergent literacy development. Reviews of effect studies in general show positive outcomes, while the effects on children from low socioeconomic families are mixed. The literacy level of parents, however, is mostly not taken into account in effect studies and therefore it is unclear what types of activities might work in families where parents have limited reading skills. For non-literate or low-literate parents traditional family literacy programs might create several barriers, due to the fact that these programs often assume a certain level of reading skill in parents and require them to initiate cognitively challenging interactions around sometimes difficult texts. In this contribution, we analyse the main barriers such programs might create for these parents and we offer suggestions how to overcome these barriers. Promising approaches can be found in empowering parents by personalizing and tailoring the program activities, by offering interesting materials that are not dependent on advanced reading skills and trigger children and parents to interact, and by making use of the technological innovations in new media, such as digital, animated picture books.

International research indicates that the number of adults with very low literacy levels is rising in the Netherlands. Illiterate adults may feel the instrumental need to develop their reading proficiency. However, for them reading is associated with negative feelings such as shame and frustration. Additionally, they do not have the motivation, knowledge or skills to find an interesting book or paper and, furthermore, they often lack social support to start reading and to persist in a reading habit. This suggests that reading interventions should be designed along the lines of social processes of reading; to support people in finding interesting books, reading and talking about them. This paper illustrates, by means of the ‘read-along club for adults’, what such an intervention could look like. The paper elaborates on four topics. Firstly, how read-along clubs for adults can reduce reluctance in reading. Secondly, how reading-along clubs for adults could mediate all social processes, such as seeking information, deciding on a book, reading and discussing the book, so illiterate adults know what to do when they want to read. Thirdly, how reading-along clubs can support building a reading habit. And finally, it illustrates the importance of a social support network of all readers.

In 2020, Stichting Lezen (a Dutch institution aimed at reading promotion amongst youngsters) announced that three Dutch celebrities would star in its campaign De Weddenschap (The Bet): rapper DIO, singer/vlogger/model Famke Louise, and singer-songwriter Jeangu Macrooy. This article examines how teachers and pupils in preparatory secondary vocational education evaluate this campaign. First, the results of a questionnaire amongst L1-teachers of Dutch are reported. According to this survey, teachers have little trust in the campaign’s efficacy, but they still seem to believe that pupils might achieve reading satisfaction once they are seduced to read. However, the survey amongst pupils indicates that even a campaign starring celebrities does not convince youngsters in preparatory secondary vocational education to pick up a book. While they responded generally positively towards the efforts of one of the celebrities (Jeangu Macrooy), the large majority nevertheless did not consider participating in the campaign.

Current Dutch reading education does not suffice for deep understanding of texts. This problem calls for a solution that (re)combines literary education and reading comprehension –the two pillars on which Dutch reading education is built. The goal is to introduce a way of reading that requires a different set of skills from students as active ‘meaning makers’, thus putting interpretation back on the map. In this article, we first discuss how the current linkage between reading enjoyment, reading promotion, and literature education sends students the misleading message that reading literature would produce (primarily) reading enjoyment. We argue that this linkage ensures that reading motivation problems related to comprehension of non-literary texts – as reported by students and their teachers – remain underexposed and virtually unaddressed. We then propose a repositioning of both forms of reading instruction that makes reading comprehension more ‘comprehensible’, that is, resulting in a deeper understanding of texts and positioning students in the more motivating role of meaning maker. This can be achieved with a didactic approach that approaches texts (literary as well as non-literary) as sources of – and for – linguistic and philosophical reflections, for example on one’s self, on the Other, or on the Netherlands and the world. Finally, as reading motivation is augmented when texts are read that relate to a specific context, we suggest focusing on ‘Dutch discourses’ as a productive context for the Dutch class at secondary schools. We provide examples of how such an ‘inquisitive reading’ could be didacticized and set a research agenda that could further explore this direction.

This study investigated secondary-school pupil responses to modern adaptations of a historical literary text. In an experiment, 167 Dutch pupils each evaluated one of five versions of a fragment of the canonical Dutch nineteenth-century novel Max Havelaar (1860): original, modern Dutch translation, simplified modern Dutch version, Spike and Suzy comic strip, and graphic novel. Pupils first expressed their opinion about the fragment. They subsequently rated the fragment on four dimensions of narrative engagement (narrative understanding, attentional focus, narrative presence, and emotional engagement) as well as reading enjoyment, and intention to continue reading. Results showed no differences between the text versions in narrative presence, emotional engagement, reading enjoyment, and intention to continue reading. However, the original version was considered more difficult to understand than the simplified modern Dutch and Spike and Suzy comic strip versions. It also led to less attention than the simplified modern Dutch version. Reading enjoyment was relatively high for all versions. Pupils’ opinions reflected different aspects of their reading experience, including narrative engagement, reading enjoyment, language use, content, and the historical reality of the story. Although the quantitative findings suggest that pupils respond in similar ways to different versions of Max Havelaar, the qualitative findings indicate that individual reading experiences can differ.

Dutch youth have been hard to enthuse for literature and reading in recent years, both in private and educational settings. At the same time, however, they are highly attracted to (primarily Dutch-spoken) rap, an originally US-American music genre with literary features. In the US, elements of rap and its accompanying hip-hop culture are fruitfully integrated into literature classes to enthuse youth for reading. The combination of hip-hop’s popularity and its intercultural, literary, and educative potential opens up possibilities for a similar implementation of hip-hop in a Dutch context. However, although many teachers are open to trying this, they often lack the prior knowledge to get started. In this article, I present four preparatory ‘lessons to learn’ to help teachers use hip-hop in the literary classroom. These lessons concern hip-hop’s literary qualities, hip-hop-inspired teaching attitudes, and new perspectives on the challenging language and topics of the genre.