‘Tell Me About It’: How Conversation and Companionship Create Lifelong Readers

Inspired by Aidan Chambers, Mathew Tobin shares a vital roadmap for nurturing lifelong readers, beginning with two tales.

The First Tale:

Some years ago, as English Lead in my primary school, I was on a learning walk when I paused at the back of a Year 5 classroom during silent reading. A pupil I had taught in Year 2 had turned the final page of her novel.

She looked up, scanning the room, and caught my eye. She smiled – the quiet, knowing smile of someone who has finished a journey and is already thinking about the next one. Book in hand, she walked over to her teacher, who was marking the morning’s work.

‘Well done,’ her teacher smiled. ‘Find a new one from the reading corner.’

Something in me sank.

The Second Tale:

A different moment. A different setting. A different reader of a similar age, some years later.

I was browsing in Blackwell’s in Oxford when I overheard a father tell his daughter she could choose any book she liked. She took her time, moving between shelves, scanning covers and peering inside before pulling out Hilda and the Troll by Luke Pearson. Book in hand, she walked over to her father.

He glanced at the cover, flicked through the comic-like pages, and gently shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean a real book.’

Something in me sank.

***

Two moments. Two adults. Both well-intentioned. And yet, something did not quite happen.

I knew immediately why those moments unsettled me. Years earlier, two books had shaped how I understood reading: Aidan Chambers’ Tell Me and Margaret Meek’s How Texts Teach What Readers Learn. I encountered them as a B.Ed. student specialising in English at Westminster College, Oxford, where children’s literature was not an optional extra but the beating heart of our training.

Under the guidance of lecturers such as Mary Sutcliffe, Aidan Chambers, Philip Pullman and others, we were told that if we were to stand beside young readers with integrity, we needed to read children’s books widely ourselves. Picturebooks, poetry, short stories, novels, information texts, traditional tales. A hundred books a year. Four years. Four hundred before graduation. It was daunting, yet transformative.

In my first term, Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting knocked me sideways with its philosophical depth. Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry revealed the moral intelligence of children’s fiction. Text after text showed me that stories written for children could hold tenderness, complexity and universality in equal measure. I’d had no idea. But the reading itself was only part of it.

We kept journals – not just to prove we had read, but to reflect on how we had read. Chambers’ ‘Three Sharings’ shaped those reflections: What did you enjoy? What puzzled you? What patterns or connections did you notice? Reading was treated not as an extraction, but as an encounter. Personal, yes – but also social. Meaning deepened when it was spoken aloud, listened to, questioned, extended.

And so I recognised immediately what had unsettled me in those two earlier moments. Reading had been acknowledged. It had not been shared.

Aidan Chambers described the adult here as ‘the enabling adult’ – not a gatekeeper or assessor, but a wayfinder: an informed reader who knows the landscape of children’s literature and helps the child find their own path through it. In his Reading Circle, selection, reading and response are interdependent; each relies on the others. A child chooses a book. A child reads. A child responds. That response shapes the next choice. Remove the response, or rush past it, and the circle falters.

Margaret Meek described reading as a series of ‘private lessons’ – not lessons delivered by teachers, but lessons readers give themselves through involvement. As children become absorbed in a story, they are learning far more than how to decode words. They are learning how stories work, how voices sound, how meaning is shaped. They rehearse being both teller and told – inhabiting a narrative while also making sense of it. These lessons are not easily measured because they arise from engagement. They happen in what Meek calls the ordinary acts of reading: the rereading, the retelling, the reshaping, the deep play.

Chambers shows us the structure that sustains reading; Meek reminds us what unfolds within it.

And yet children’s books pass through many adult filters before they reach young hands. Publishers shape lists; reviewers confer prestige; teachers curate spines; parents, often with the best of intentions, steer choices. As Peter Hunt reminds us, what counts as ‘literary’ often reflects adult cultural hierarchies more than children’s lived reading experiences. When we dismiss a graphic novel as ‘not a real book’, we may think we are guarding standards. In reality, we narrow the routes into readerly identities and send powerful messages about what counts.

In both of my tales, adults stood at the threshold of a child’s reading life. In both moments, reading was acknowledged – even encouraged – but not quite entered into. There was no invitation to respond, no space for the private lesson to surface, no shared delight in what had been felt, discovered or imagined.

In this National Year of Reading, we are rightly asking how we might inspire the current generation of young readers. We talk about declining reading for pleasure, about children who no longer see themselves as readers, about curriculum pressures and digital distractions. All of this matters. But beneath the strategies and frameworks sits a quieter truth: if we want reading to flourish, we must begin by listening – not only to research and policy, but to children themselves.

Becoming a reader is not simply about finishing books or selecting the ‘right’ ones; it is about being seen in the act of reading. It is about agency, about adults who resist the urge to control, correct or categorise, and instead choose to enter the conversation. It is, vitally, about children seeing that the adults in their lives read, too, and take pleasure in it.

If we are serious about nurturing readers, not just children who can read but children who choose to read, we might begin by looking carefully at the adults who stand beside them.

Much of our current discourse about reading quite rightly emphasises mechanics: word recognition, fluency, automaticity. These are vital. Without them, the engine will not start.

When I speak to teachers and trainees, I sometimes ask them to imagine reading as learning to drive. The gears and pedals – the unseen mechanics – are like word recognition. The mirrors help us scan the road ahead, anticipate meaning and connect what we encounter to what we already carry within us. But knowing how to operate a vehicle does not tell us where to go; it does not give us a reason to set out. On its own, it risks making reading feel procedural rather than purposeful.

The joy of driving lies not in mastering the vehicle, but in the destinations it makes possible. In the early days, if we are lucky, someone else drives. They take us somewhere. They show us that the world is larger than we imagined.

In the same way, many children begin their reading journeys with adults at the wheel. We might visit the playful rhythms of the Ahlbergs’ Each Peach Pear Plum, wander through the deep dark woods of Donaldson and Scheffler’s The Gruffalo. Later, we might travel further afield to Sophie Anderson’s The House with Chicken Legs, Sita Brahmachari and Jane Ray’s Corey’s Rock, S.F. Said’s Varjak Paw, or Robin Robinson’s graphic novel No One Returns from the Enchanted Forest.

Each destination reveals something different. Each journey shows that reading can be expansive, surprising, comforting or challenging. Over time, the map widens, and there comes a moment when the steering wheel is passed to them.

This is where the enabling adult matters most. Not in controlling the route, but in modelling how wide the map can be. We sit beside them, no longer steering, but attentive to the road ahead.

And so we return to those two moments.

***

The First Tale:

She looks up, smiling – that same quiet pride. She walks to her teacher.

‘Well done,’ the teacher says, and then pauses. ‘Did you enjoy it? What moment stayed with you?’ A brief exchange follows. Thoughts shared. A question returned. They walk to the reading corner together. ‘Shall we see what you might choose next?’ the teacher says. ‘If you’d like, I can share a couple that stayed with me.’

The Second Tale:

The girl in Blackwell’s holds up Hilda and the Troll, eyes bright.

‘Oh, can I take a look?’ her father says. She passes him the book and he kneels beside her, turning the pages slowly. ‘What made you choose this one?’ She points to something on the page. He listens. ‘Oh, I can see why,’ he says. He notices something at the back of the book. ‘There are others in the series, too. How exciting!’ He hands the book back. ‘Can I read it after you? Or perhaps we can look at it together?’

***

We may invest in initiatives, frameworks and strategies, and rightly so. But perhaps the most powerful shift lies in something quieter: in the pause before we move a child on, in the question before we judge a choice, in the willingness to read alongside rather than above.

The mechanics of reading matter. We must teach children how to steer. But if we want them to keep reading long after we are no longer beside them, we must also show them that the journey is worth taking, and that the map is wide.

Reading is learned in company before it becomes independent. It is private and personal, yes, but it flourishes in conversation.

The difference between a reader who reads because they must and a reader who reads because they choose to lies in something as small as a question:

‘Tell me about it.’

Mathew Tobin is a Senior Lecturer in Primary English and Children’s Literature. His co-authored book, Teaching and Understanding Primary English, is published by Sage Publishing, 9781526426598, £24.99.

Books mentioned:

Hilda and the Troll, Luke Pearson, illus. (same), Flying Eye Books, 9781909263789, 40pp, £8.99 pbk.

Tell Me, Aidan Chambers, Thimble Press, 9780903355544, 220pp, £10 pbk.

How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, Magaret Meek, Thimble Press, 9780903355230, 32pp, £4.75 pbk.

Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt, Palgrave USA, 9781250322210, 176pp, £8.99 hbk.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred D. Taylor, Penguin, 9780140371741, 224pp, £4.99 pbk.

Each Peach Pear Plum, Allan Ahlberg, illus. Janet Ahlberg, Puffin, 9780141502526, 32pp, £5.99 pbk.

The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson, illus. Axel Scheffler, Macmillan Children’s Books, 9780333710937, 32pp, £7.99 pbk.

The House With Chicken Legs, Sophie Anderson, illus. Melissa Castrillon, illus. Elisa Paganelli, Usborne, 9781474940665, 336pp, £8.99 pbk.

Corey’s Rock, Sita Brahmachari, illus. Jane Ray, Otter-Barry Books, 9781910959978, 96pp, £8.99 pbk.

Varjak Paw, S.F. Said, illus. Dave McKean, Corgi Childrens, 9780552572293, 256pp, £8.99 pbk.

No One Returns from the Enchanted Forest, Robin Robinson, illus. (same), St Martin’s Press, 9781250211538, 240pp, O/P.