The Role Of School-Family Partnership In Developing Children’s Interest For Reading

Abstract

In the postmodern society, one of the key competences that every student has to develop during his school years is learning to learn. In this context, it is compulsory to develop students’ interest for reading, give them the proper instruments for searching and selecting useful information and teach them how to apply these information’s in every day’s situations. As many Romanian students fail to achieve a level of performance in reading (up to 40%, according to OECD’s reports on illiteracy), we investigate the role of the families and of school-family partnerships in fighting this problem. By using a questionnaire, we identified the role of the family environment in developing children's interest in reading at an early age and the parents’ involvement in developing their children’s reading competencies. Our study shows that: low socio-economic environment determines less interest in acquiring books, so less that 36% of the children living in rural areas have a library at home. However, most of them have access to the Internet through their mobile devices. There’s an increase in interest in using modern technologies, even for leisure activities, to the detriment of other children's favourite activities such as outdoor playing, drawing, or reading. Parents play a great role in developing their children's interests in reading through modelling. To ensure early literacy development, schools should develop programmes and projects involving parents, and help them learn strategies for realising an environment that increases children's motivation for reading.