A Happy Ending All Round

Nathan Miller loves Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. “It’s really good,” the eight-year-old pupil whispers. “It’s about how this girl goes on that journey and all the sights she sees”. Miller also confesses a love of ghost stories: his favourites are The Headless Ghost and The Night of the Living Dummy which are “dead interesting and really scary ”.

Not that he has always loved books as much. In the past year Miller has been one of 20 pupils at Stretford High School in Manchester to have benefited from a scheme which matches student volunteer readers with local schoolchildren whose reading and literary skills are below par.

Nationally, the Learning Together Literacy Initiative, run by Community Service Volunteers (CSV), involves 870 students from 33 universities and colleges helping pupils with their reading in 350 schools.

Typically, the students arrive at their chosen schools and, after a brief training session, are allocated a clutch of students. One-on-one for half an hour every week, favourite books are discussed, then tutor and pupil read together; when sufficiently confident and enthusiastic, the school student reads by himself or herself under tutored supervision.

Miller’s tutor was James Gamble, a 23-year-old graduate studying for a Masters in Science at Manchester University’s Institute of Science and Technology. He says he and Miller were like “mates, rather than teacher and pupil”.

“I saw about five children in a typical week,” Gamble says. “I talked to them as an older brother might. It made it easier and helped them learn more because I wasn’t the heavy teacher. They didn’t have to be wary of me ”.

“We’d discuss the kinds of books they’d like, I’d bring in a selection for them to choose something they like and, at convenient points, I’d break off and ask them what they thought of the characters or what the author was doing. If they’d made any mistakes I’d correct them”.

“Nathan was one of the first pupils I met and I got to know him the best. At first he was quite shy and quiet. But as time went on, we’d punch hands in the corridor to say ‘hi’. I bought a copy of Jamaica Inn and he really enjoyed it, so when we’d got a fifth of the way through I told him he could keep it.”

The benefits of the association for the pupil are obvious. Miller says that whereas once he would not make an effort to read, he now goes to his local library to look for titles that interest him. “It was good to be told when I got words wrong,” he says.

Bernard Pollard, head of English as Stretford High, said he had signed up to the scheme because of the success of a parental paired literacy project already under way atthe school. “Having the students here was a success. Most came back on extra occasions to help out and were missed if they couldn’t make it one week,” he says.

Pollard denies that the scheme makes up for the kind of attention no longer available to pupils from teachers because of increasing class sizes. “It’s extra,” he says, “and it’s a scheme we want to expand as part of a long-term strategy”. Student volunteers, he adds, are being encouraged to report any noticeable deficits in readingability that they encounter so the school can develop more specialized reading programmes.

Elaine Slater-Simmonds, the CSV project co-ordinator, says the three-year paired reading scheme, which costs £150,000 a year to run, began in response to the Government placing literacy so squarely at the heart of educational policy.

“We were concerned with the poor level of literacy among many young people leaving school,” she says. “But the students involved in this project are not teachers, they are volunteers. Some are doing this with a view to their future career, others are motivated by altruism. They are there to support teachers and act as role models for the kids. They are not there making up any shortfall or teaching deficit, but to add what’s already being taught in the classroom”.

Slater-Simmonds claims that pupil and tutor benefit socially and academically. It’s quite scary for them both at the beginning, but what we tend to see are some genuine and productive associations coming from it”.

Gamble admits he got involved to stop “wasting time watching TV” in his free time. “ It was good to do something worthwhile and the kids seemed to appreciate it. I’d recommend any university students to get involved. It improved my confidence and it’s going to look good for any future employers on my CV”.

The scheme is certainly bearing fruit. One 11-year-old boy wrote after a term’s work: “I know my partner will help me if I make a mistake. I don’t mind reading out aloud now. I used to think she would laugh at me. Now I know she won’t”.

Tim Teeman

Ex. 34. Explain the underlined words and phrases form the text. Give their Russian/Belarusian equivalents. Use them in the sentences of your own. Write the sentences down.