After the keynote speech, the guests were given a tour of the city library. The author Heidemarie Brosche gave a keynote speech on the topic of promoting reading among children and young people who are not able to read.
©Laurence Feider
The city library invites you to “read UM” together.
Dornbirn. Studies at regular intervals show how poor the reading skills of many adolescents are. The City Library team has been trying to counteract this for years with specific offers and events – now they are going one step further and completely reorganizing the promotion of reading. The aim is to motivate those children and young people to read who have not yet been reached. “Reading and language promotion is engraved in our DNA as a library. However, a rethinking of reading promotion can only succeed together with schools, leisure and educational facilities,” says Naemi Sander. For this reason, the city library team had invited to the kick-off event “UM Reading”.
promote reading fluency
The educator and children’s book author Heidemarie Brosche started with a keynote speech on promoting reading for those who are far away from reading. She has dealt intensively with the question of why reading promotion is often not fruitful. “You have to differentiate between those who don’t read well and who come from families with a good education and children who grow up reading far and without reading role models,” says Brosche. Many parents do not have an adequate formal education and cannot give their children the necessary “knowledge of the world” in order to be able to read meaningfully. “Until now, reading promotion has tended to be thought of from above – e.g. B. by means of reading competitions. In the process, however, the self-concept of reading is lost and poor readers become frustrated,” said Heidemarie Brosche. You have to orientate yourself more downwards and start with the 25% of young people who cannot read.
The author talked about a school where a daily twenty-minute reading time, starting with “Viva la Vida”, was anchored in the timetable. “The focus is on reading fun, which leads to an improvement in reading fluency. If there is a lack of reading fluency, there is no capacity for understanding the text.”
In the Dornbirn City Library there are already numerous didactic offers and events that arouse the desire to read in children and young people. “It’s often a lot of small steps that make a big difference,” said Naemi Sander. Every Tuesday afternoon, for example, the “story universe” opens and picture books, fairy tales and stories are read to children big and small – often in several languages. Under the motto “Hear, hear! – Stories get loud” the city library becomes a radio play studio. The children can borrow the stories and radio plays read by the employees from the city library Tonies. Events are offered under the title “Family Reading Time”, with special highlights for the whole family. There was a children’s concert, where the audience decided how the story went, a Bobby Car drive-in cinema with picture books, a poetry telephone and even a hairdresser reading aloud visited.
Workshops on various topics are offered for young people, and young people also feel very comfortable in the gaming zone and the BI:JU (youth library). During a tour of the city library, visitors found out what else is being offered and planned in terms of reading and language promotion.
