ABSTRACT
I was fascinated to read my mum’s account of the way in which I became a reader. I still cannot remember learning to read. I think that this is probably because, for me, reading was never a ‘chore’. However, the presence of stories, storytelling, poetry and song are extremely prevalent among my childhood memories. I was lucky enough not to be made to undergo any ‘formulaic’ processes such as reading schemes or phonetics lessons. I was never criticised for getting something wrong. I was never ‘forced’ to read anything I didn’t want to. Instead, it was a cycle of immersion, choice, enjoyment and encouragement, which opened up a new, exciting world of creativity and fun. In this way, I can honestly say that, for me, reading was merely an extension of ‘play’. I can remember a friend of mine telling me, when she was about 8, that she was not a ‘free’ reader. At the time my mother asked her why, and she said that in her school she was not free to choose what she read or how she read. Looking back, this strikes me as a clear contrast between my early experiences of reading, and those of many other children. I have since found out that the (highly prestigious) school, at which this friend was a student, boasted to parents that ‘many of the children had reading ages of 12, by the time they were in Year 2’!
