Our Reading Teachers = Reading Pupils book this time was The Phanthom Tollbooth by Norton Juster – a celebration of the absurd with a lot of word play and cleverness. It was a bit of a marmite book (see the attached notes from our reading group discussion) but even those who were not so keen enjoyed the fact that this was reading for the sheer fun of it with an Alice in Wonderland style journey through strange landscapes and stranger characters.
In ‘The Power of Pleasure Reading: What We Can Learn from the Secret Reading Lives of Teens.’ (Wilhelm, Jeffrey D., and Michael W. Smith, The English Journal, vol. 105, no. 6, 2016) Wilhelm and Smith decided to talk to teenagers about the things they read ‘secretly’ because adults did not value them. Wilhelm and Smith’s research found that, for a keen reader, what they call ‘the immersive play pleasure’ is a key motivation for reading. But this pleasure may not be as obvious as we think to those who haven’t yet discovered it for themselves. So what can we do to help young readers to discover and relish this aspect of reading?
Download the group's notes here.
Choice of books
As English teachers our radar is highly tuned to books that offer interesting material for discussion and analysis-worthy language, character and plot development. This tends to put a lot of issue-heavy, challenging books on our recommended reads lists. There is a lot of satisfaction to be had from reading these novels. But we should remember to make sure that our recommendations for reading for pleasure include light and shade with humour, escapism, magic and immersive world-building.
Graphic novels and genre books, perhaps especially fantasy, offer the most obvious opportunities for ‘immersive play’, but it can be just as enjoyable to step into more realistic worlds when they are very different from our own, or portray characters we’d love to meet, or events we would like to be wrapped up in. What was the fictional world you most wanted to step into as a child?
Responding to texts
At EMC we do a lot of advocating for creative responses to texts. Sometimes these approaches are designed to develop students’ personal and critical response. However, there are other activities that encourage immersive play, or have a strong immersive play aspect. These activities help students to: get more pleasure from reading (which will lead to them reading more); engage emotionally with texts; enter the world of the text; make connections with their real-life experiences and their experiences of other written or media texts. You will see from the book group notes on The Phantom Tollbooth some of the ideas we had for this novel. A few more ideas are given below and this aspect of reading will also be explored in my workshop at EMC’s forthcoming Reading and Writing for Pleasure Conference on Friday 7th June.
Media approaches to encourage immersive play
- Adapting a scene for another medium
- Planning the Netflix series
- Storyboarding an important moment
Art approaches to encourage immersive play
- Found image collage, for example to represent a character at a particular moment
- Taking your own photos – a photo story or collage
- Making a map of the territory of the book
Writing activities to encourage immersive play
- Write something that happens ‘off screen’. For example before the beginning, after the ending, between two chapters, an incident which is mentioned but not seen.
- Re-write a scene from the point of view of a different character
- Putting yourself in the book – re-imagine a scene with you in it.
Let us know your favourite ‘immersive play’ approaches and book recommendations!