If you’ve ever looked at your child’s Language and Literature grades — solid, sometimes excellent — and then watched them show zero interest in picking up a book at home, you’re not imagining a contradiction. It’s a real pattern, and it’s worth understanding why, because there’s a simple thing you can do about it at home.
Why “good at English” and “loves reading” don’t always go together
IB MYP Language and Literature is designed, quite deliberately, to build analytical skill: understanding how a writer’s choices create meaning and effect, using evidence, structuring an argument. That’s valuable, transferable thinking, and your child is genuinely learning something real when they do it well.
But building that skill usually means working with excerpts — a chapter, a scene, a passage chosen because it illustrates something teachable — rather than a full novel read start to finish. And research on how readers actually engage with stories suggests that’s a meaningful gap. Finishing a story — sitting with how it resolves — is a big part of what makes a book emotionally memorable, not just intellectually understood. Reading theorists distinguish between reading to extract information (what most classroom analysis trains) and reading to experience the story (what makes someone want to pick up the next book). Both are real skills. Only one of them is being graded.
So a child can be genuinely excellent at analysing a text and still never develop an appetite to read one for its own sake — because the system is training the extraction muscle, and the experience muscle mostly has to be built somewhere else.
The workaround: close the loop at home
You don’t need to wait for curriculum change to fix this: you can close the gap in about twenty minutes a week.
Ask what book (or excerpt) they’re studying in class, and get the full copy. The goal isn’t another assignment — it’s letting them finish what school only gave them a piece of.
A few things that tend to work well:
- Read it with them, or alongside them. You don’t need to read every page together — even reading the same book on your own time and comparing notes over dinner works. “Did the ending surprise you?” is a much better conversation starter than “What’s your homework?”
- Protect it from becoming schoolwork. No questions about themes or devices. If they want to talk about a character, follow their lead — don’t redirect it into an essay topic. The whole point is that this reading doesn’t get graded.
- Let the ending be the destination, not a chapter title. If they finish a book you gave them and seem quiet afterward, that’s not nothing — that’s the “I’m still thinking about it” feeling that excerpt-only reading in class often doesn’t have room for. Give them space for it rather than moving straight to the next thing.
Your child’s grades tell you they can think about a story with real precision. Whether they’ll want to read one on a Saturday afternoon in ten years is being shaped somewhere else entirely, and that “somewhere else” can be your living room.
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