Blessings for the Lost

Even a lost guide needs a marker to show which way she's drifting. What should we read? How should we read? Why read at all? Carrying these questions, I drifted through a sea of information until I landed on a National Library report: A National Agenda on Reading for Pleasure: Insights from Communities of Readers Research.*

*Commissioned by the National Library of New Zealand, written by AUT's (Auckland University of Technology) School of Education. A literature review and two case studies, based on Huntly College and the Te Kāhui Ako o Tiriwā community project in West Auckland. 2021.

Its core finding, in the report's own words: "reading, as they progress through school, is more likely to become something they do because they must." In plain terms, the more schools prioritise literacy achievement, the more reading gets recast as a tool for improving that literacy. Reading to study, reading to get ahead, crowds out the time and space for reading purely for pleasure. Digital media is filling some of that gap — it can inform, it can entertain — but outside a few purpose-built ebooks, it rarely sustains the kind of deep, continuous reading a book demands.

The report argues that reading for pleasure, often mistaken for something solitary and personal, is at its core a social activity. A parent's cultural capital matters decisively here: time spent with a child, trips to the library together, simply reading aloud.

Of course the report wasn't written with immigrant or ESOL/EAL families like mine specifically in mind. But it made one thing clear: the vague, directionless feeling I've had since arriving here isn't mine alone. I'm living its limits myself — the cultural capital I once held in my mother tongue doesn't transfer into English, and I feel that gap in my children's reading. In Korea, we always read for joy. Books were our favourite toy, the start of countless games, a stop along the way and sometimes the destination itself. If that journey also grew their own way of thinking and feeling about a story, wonderful. But it was enough if they simply grew up loving books.

But here, I'd picked up an anxiety without noticing. Which book would make English easier for my children, still shaky in it? Which book would they understand completely? Which book would spark enough interest to make them want to study? Books had stopped being play. They'd become a means to an end, and that end was English.

Still, I could steady myself again. We need to go back to reading for joy. Instead of forcing ourselves to sit down with a book to learn English or build literacy, we'll do what we've always done: choose whatever pulls us in, and turn the pages with the kind of restless curiosity that can't wait for the next one.

We're all growing into a new language here, and before anything else, I had to accept a change in my own role. For now, I'm setting down the guide who walks ahead, and becoming a pacemaker who runs alongside instead.