Faith, phonics and identity: reading in faith complementary schools

Abstract

Abstract Thousands of UK school children spend considerable time during a lengthy period of their youth learning to read, or decode, a ‘religious classical’, the liturgical language connected to their faith. Drawing on recent theories of reading, identity and literacy practices, this paper briefly describes and seeks to share tentative thoughts about some common issues around the teaching and learning of religious classicals within minority ethnic faith settings. It presents a comparative textual analysis of a central teaching resource used in three Jewish, Muslim and Sikh complementary schools in the United Kingdom. It is concluded that, regardless of any relative effectiveness of method or resource, what may be more interesting for researchers is the symbolic value of learning to read the religious classical. This may be more important than the eventual outcome in terms of reading competence. Here, ‘successful reading’ is understood primarily as ‘successful decoding’. The tenacity of this literacy practice in the face of spoken community language attrition is testimony to the importance placed upon it both individually and collectively.

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