Feedback 28 september 2020
Although Arjen Lubach makes fun of me, I am eternally grateful to him
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Arjen Lubach made in Sunday Sunday with Lubach an item about the lack of reading pleasure in our youth. He used, among other things, fragments from my YouTube video in which I explain to students the tips and tricks of the Dutch final exam. Although Arjen Lubach makes fun of me and his convincing story is not always completely correct in terms of content, I am eternally grateful to him. I’ll explain why.
The essence of Lubach’s item is as follows: the level of reading skills and reading pleasure of the Dutch students is declining despite the fact that in Dutch lessons most attention is paid to reading comprehension. Of course Lubach could have cited other causes for the declining reading level, such as the distraction from the mobile phone and the lack of general knowledge. Still, during the episode, Lubach makes it very clear that reading comprehension is uninspiring and that it does not improve text comprehension. But why are we doing it then? Why have we been ‘reading comprehension’ for years, when reading comprehension is not improving?
The biggest culprit in this story, in my opinion, is the content of the Dutch final exam, which since 2015 consists entirely of reading comprehension. How you turn or turn it: teachers and schools are judged on exam results and that means ‘practicing with texts’ in teaching practice. Horrible. Don’t get me wrong, reading a current text in class really adds value. The misery begins when students have to complete the questions for the text. And strange but true: I suspect that by training in reading comprehension, students understand less of what they are reading.
I think that a large number of Dutch teachers would like to approach their reading skills differently, but do not know how. I think the government would like it differently, but I don’t know how. And so we all do something, or we pretend we know what is right and we obediently follow the method in which texts with a number of uninteresting questions are formulated.
I myself am in favor of discussing and discussing a current text in which we not only read a text, but also study the entire context. However, I have no idea whether my students are well prepared for the Dutch exam. As a teacher, if you want some guidance, you teach the students the exam tricks. In any case, we cannot be blamed. I know: it is a strange way of doing things and actually does not fit in at all with the education that we should and would like to provide in the Netherlands. Isn’t it about time for a change?
That is why I am so grateful to Arjen Lubach for showing in fifteen minutes what is wrong with the current reading literacy policy in education and that it must be given a high degree of urgency to improve it. Incidentally, he is not the first, because teachers of Dutch have long been advocating a different content of the subject and the final exam. The fact that Dutch has been seen by students as one of the most boring subjects for years is in my view directly related to the many reading comprehension.
A few years ago, a few active colleagues and I took the plunge. Since then we have sat around the table with Cito and the Board for Tests and Exams (CvTE) on a regular basis. They are responsible for the content of the exams. Together we looked at whether and how the Dutch exam could be done differently. I can tell you: the change process is slow and, in my opinion, at a snail’s pace. It takes far too long for even a comma to change in the whole. A radical change would be best.
I hope for our students, for their reading pleasure and level, but also for all hard-working Dutch teachers, that this episode will be a breakthrough to radically change the Dutch final exam, as well as the content of our subject.
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