Hundreds of Students Take up the Read to Succeed Challenge
October 20, 2021

Hundreds of Students Take up the Read to Succeed Challenge

Please note: This article was published on October 20, 2021 and may contain information that is no longer current or up to date.
Read to Succeed ESOL students

Staff are leading a reading revolution at an award-winning post-16 education centre in Coventry with hundreds of students taking on an extracurricular challenge designed to boost their language skills.

Coventry College’s Read to Succeed initiative invites learners across the college to read six books over the course of their studies and is specifically aimed at English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students, though students across any subject are invited to take part.

The challenge has drawn almost 400 applications from students across multiple courses in a bid to support the development of good grammar and vocabulary and encourage reading outside of education. The signups represent a three-fold increase on pre-pandemic levels.

Participants are given a diary to track their reading and encouraged to review and reflect on the books they have read.

Those who complete the challenge will receive a certificate and will be entered into a prize draw at the end of the academic year, with a tablet up for grabs for the winner and Amazon vouchers on offer to runners up.

Claire Lyness, Senior Learning Resources Adviser at Coventry College, said: “Read to Succeed has been a proven way to help students boost their English language skills over the last couple of years, no matter which level they join us at or which subject they study, and we are blown away by the initial response to it this year.

“It is a great time to be an ESOL student, reading fanatic or someone who simply wants to expand their mind and try a new hobby at Coventry College, especially with our refurbished library facilities at the Learning Hub.

“There is a huge amount of material available in the Hub including Easy Readers and Quick Reads, and we have seen loans of these rise dramatically since the challenge has started this academic year.

“There are several levels that our students can begin our programme at, but the choice of book is entirely theirs. The only rule is that it must be fiction.

“With the huge take up so far, some shelves are looking a little more sparse than normal, which is always a good thing in our library.

“We hope that at the end of the year we can have hundreds of book lovers in our ranks, with all of them feeling a huge amount of confidence in their language skills.”