In Defence of the Whole: Why Students Should Read Books Not Just Extracts

What use is reading instruction if it doesn't form readers?

“The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?” - Jonathan Franzen

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Over the past few years an uncomfortable truth has emerged across every major reading survey: children are simply not reading books any more, and certainly not whole ones. In 2025 only 18.7 per cent of eight to eighteen year olds told the National Literacy Trust they read anything daily in their free time, the lowest figure since records began. Renaissance Learning’s annual What Kids Are Reading report, which analyses the reading habits of more than a million pupils, recorded the first decline in the number of books read since the study began in 2008. Across the 2022 to 2023 school year pupils read 4.4 per cent fewer books than the year before.

In many schools, students encounter literature only as fragments, selected not for their narrative power but for their utility in teaching discrete skills or “strategies.” Against this landscape of declining stamina and thinning attention, the rise of the extract-based curriculum begins to look less like a pedagogical choice and more like a capitulation; schools replicating through curriculum the very fragmentation of attention they should be working to counteract.

The Limits of Extract-Based Reading Instruction

Tim Shanahan’s recent post on whole books versus excerpts in reading instruction makes a well argued claim that, on the face of it, appears a strong one: there is no research demonstrating that teaching reading with complete books produces better “reading ability” than teaching with excerpts. This is true, at least in the narrow evidentiary sense. What we have are studies of particular strategies, particular tasks, particular assessment formats. However, we do not have a large-scale RCT in which one group of students reads To Kill a Mockingbird and another reads carefully curated snippets of it, followed by a standardised measure of reading ability.

But even with that distinction, I think we are not really getting at the full possibility of what reading actually means, at least not in the sense of a formed reader. Research on reading instruction tends to measure what is convenient to isolate, not what is constitutive of reading itself. Extracts are easier to standardise, easier to align with discrete skills, and easier to plug into comprehension tests. They are also perfectly suited to the way reading is conceptualised in much of how English curricula are enacted: a set of generic transferable operations (infer, predict, summarise, identify the main idea) that can be practised on any text, regardless of length, genre or coherence.

As Ariel Sacks wrote in Education Week, the obsession with “close reading” of brief texts “overlooks so much of what literature offers young people.” Meanwhile, digital culture has rewired our attention. Daniel Willingham puts it bluntly: “Being bored has become unnatural.” In a culture of quick dopamine hits from social media, reading a long, demanding book has become anathema to many kids today.

The problem with the extract-based curriculum is not that it fails to teach reading skills. As Shanahan correctly observes, excerpts are an important part of teaching reading and do so quite effectively. Short-form reading can produce students who perform well on reading comprehension tests, who can decode unfamiliar words, who understand how to summarise a paragraph or identify an author’s tone. The problem is that it systematically prevents the formation of readers.

Reading instruction develops technical competencies; reading formation cultivates dispositions, identities, and appetites. The former produces people who can read; the latter produces people who do read, who choose to read, who find reading rewarding enough to continue doing it when no one is watching, testing, or grading them.

What is the point of reading instruction if it produces adults who can read but never do? What use is ‘reading ability’ if it doesn’t produce readers?

Of course I am being facetious there. I know there are many reasons why being literate matters and not everyone wants to read novels. But I feel we lose something essential when we don’t design experiences where kids can at least once experience what it means to be lost in a book.

What Do We Mean By Reading?

In much educational research and assessment, reading ability refers to a relatively narrow set of measurable competencies: the capacity to decode words accurately, to comprehend sentences and paragraphs, to make local inferences, to identify main ideas, to summarise passages, to answer questions about short texts. These are real and important capabilities. A student who cannot do these things cannot read in any meaningful sense. But they are not sufficient. They describe the mechanics of reading without capturing what it means to be a reader.

However, reading ability (if we take the term seriously) must encompass more than performance on comprehension tests. It includes the capacity for sustained attention over long stretches of text. It includes the willingness to dwell in uncertainty when a narrative has not yet revealed its patterns. It includes the patience to allow meaning to accumulate gradually rather than demanding immediate clarity. It includes the ability to hold multiple narrative threads, character arcs and thematic developments in mind across days or even weeks of reading. It includes tolerance for ambiguity, for complexity, for texts that do not yield their meanings easily.

These capacities are not discrete skills that can be isolated, taught in a single lesson and ticked off a curriculum checklist. They are habits of mind, formed through repeated practice with demanding texts. They develop slowly, through accumulated experience of what it feels like to be genuinely absorbed in a book, to lose track of time whilst reading, to find oneself thinking about characters or plot developments between reading sessions, to experience the peculiar satisfaction of a narrative’s resolution after sustained engagement. None of this appears on a comprehension test. None of it can be measured by asking students to read a two-page passage and answer questions. Yet these are precisely the capacities that distinguish lifelong readers from people who can read but choose not to.

Of course reading is founded on technical measurable skills but it finds richer resonance through a gradual accumulation of understanding, the pleasure of seeing patterns emerge across chapters, the experience of dwelling in an imaginative world over days or weeks, the delayed gratification of narrative resolution earned through patient attention. These are not skills that can be taught in a lesson or practiced on a worksheet. They are dispositions that develop through repeated experience of what it feels like to be genuinely absorbed in a book, to lose track of time whilst reading, to find oneself thinking about characters or plot developments between reading sessions.

The Reading Skills Fallacy

The dominance of extract based curricula has emerged out of a flawed idea; the idea of reading as a set of generic skills. In most policy documents and classroom materials, reading is presented and assessed as a set of generic operations that can be taught, practised and mastered independently of any particular text.

Schools under pressure to cover specifications and deliver measurable progress (guidance for reading strategy interventions often emphasise texts selected to support discrete skills) often favour extracts over full texts. In short, the extract model is not simply a matter of convenience, it is tethered to a system built around coverage, narrow testing and measurable outcomes.

The reading skills approach makes a fundamental category error: it mistakes outcomes for processes. Inference is not a discrete, transferable skill that can be practiced on any text and then applied elsewhere, like learning to ride a bicycle. It is, rather, an emergent property of possessing domain-specific, relevant knowledge.

A student who can successfully infer character motivation in a Jane Austen extract may fail entirely when faced with a science fiction story set in a culture they know nothing about, not because they have forgotten “how to infer” but because inference requires content to work with.

The extract-based curriculum is the natural pedagogical expression of this skills model. If reading is fundamentally about applying transferable operations, then it matters little whether one practices inference on a paragraph from Great Expectations or a magazine article about climate change; the skill itself is what counts. And again, schools under pressure to demonstrate measurable progress find this approach seductive. One can teach “inference” on Monday using a short passage, assess it on Tuesday with a comprehension worksheet, record the data on Wednesday, and move to “language analysis” on Thursday using a different extract entirely.

As far as “reading comprehension” goes, the more one knows about a topic, a period, a genre, a context, the better one comprehends. This is not because knowledge makes one a better “inferencer” in some abstract sense, but because inference itself depends on connecting textual cues to prior knowledge. When a text refers to a telegram dated “November 1918” or mentions a warning to a character not to “open Pandora’s box,” comprehension depends entirely on whether the reader possesses the relevant historical or cultural knowledge to make sense of these references. No amount of generic inference practice will help if the knowledge is absent.

Saying Everything Without Saying Anything

Although a little lofty, one of my favourite illustrations of the singular importance of background knowledge to reading comes from George Steiner, discussing a passage in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. In a brief exchange between two characters on a bus, one mentions the word: “Roncevaux.” Nothing else is explained.

Steiner points out that Hemingway relies on his reader recognising this allusion; it is what signals that the two characters, who believe themselves true to one another, are in fact approaching the end of their friendship. Without that knowledge the passage collapses into mere description.

It’s so fascinating to me that at the end of that clip, Steiner bemoans his students who do not know the allusion (in a kind of conceited way it has to be said) and how they miss the central meaning of the text. One shudders at what he would have thought if he was to teach today.

The Transformative Power of Reading a Novel at Pace

Of course, Shanahan is right in the sense that we lack large-scale RCTs comparing whole books to excerpts. But a study by Westbrook et al from 2019 provides compelling evidence about what happens when we give struggling adolescent readers access to complete, challenging novels read at pace. Over 12 weeks, 365 students aged 12-13 read two whole novels consecutively, and the “poorer readers” made 16 months progress in reading comprehension compared to 9 months for average readers.

What produced these extraordinary gains? Not simplified texts or careful scaffolding, but the opposite: challenging novels initially deemed “too difficult,” read aloud at a faster pace with minimal analytical interruption, allowing students to experience what the researchers call “continual textual engagement.” As one teacher noted, students had “remembered the text well because we’ve read so much and never been taken away from the text for a long time.”

Another interesting finding from this study was that it seemed to spark something that years of extract-based literacy lessons had failed to ignite; a renewed appetite for reading itself. As Natalie Wexler points out in Beyond the Science of Reading:

Although the researchers weren’t evaluating whether this approach would spark students’ love of reading, it did seem to have that effect. They couldn’t wait to hear more of the novels, frequently asking questions such as “Can we speed read so we can finish the book?” “Can we just read and not do any questions?”

Reading this made me reflect on something I personally wrestled with as an English teacher who often had to teach using extracts: What use is a student who can identify literary devices in an extract but has only learned to experience long-form reading as tedious labour? The students in this study read perhaps double than they normally would, experiencing for perhaps the first time what it means to dwell in a text rather than merely sample it.

A curriculum that focuses on short extracts rather than long-form texts encourages a constant interruption for analysis, round-robin reading that fragments narrative flow, staying at the level of “lifting quotes” rather than building coherent understanding.

The Westbrook study inadvertently captured something about reading formation rather than merely reading instruction. Students who had been positioned as “poor readers,” presumed unable to sustain attention or cope with demanding texts, were suddenly rushing into English lessons in anticipation, disappointed when reading time ended.

“Continual Textual Engagement”

This phrase, “continual textual engagement”, deserves closer examination, for it describes precisely the cognitive state that excerpt-based teaching systematically disrupts. We live in a culture already characterised by what technology writer Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention”: that state of perpetual vigilance across multiple digital streams, constantly scanning for the next notification, the next update, the next stimulus. Stone describes not multitasking but a chronic condition of alertness without depth, of being always on the surface but never penetrating beneath it.

Consider what happens in a typical English classroom when a text is taught through excerpts. Students encounter a passage on Monday, analyse it intensively, produce written work, then move to a different extract on Thursday. They are asked to switch between texts, between modes of analysis, between contexts. Even within a single lesson, reading is interrupted for questions, for note-taking, for literary terminology, for assessment objectives. The cognitive demand is not sustained attention but constant switching; not immersion but perpetual reorientation. One of the teachers in Westbrook’s study captured this precisely: she had stopped reading the novel aloud “after every page to ask prepared questions,” frustrating her students’ desire simply to follow the narrative. The students themselves articulated what they needed: “Can we just read and not do any questions?”

This pedagogical fragmentation, whatever its intentions, produces readers trained to attend in bursts, to expect interruption, to remain always at surface level because depth requires time they are never given. They scan for what the teacher wants, for quotable phrases, for identifiable techniques, but they never dwell long enough to construct what Walter Kintsch calls a situation model: that coherent, integrated mental representation of a narrative as a whole. The architecture of meaning collapses when reading is perpetually interrupted, when texts arrive only as fragments, when the full arc of narrative is never experienced.

The Novel Under Attack

Long-form reading is not just under attack from the lure of the screen, the professional body representing English teachers has formally endorsed the problem. In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English (which actually seems to be dominated by education academics not teachers) published an unfortunate position statement declaring that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” This represents a peculiar form of professional suicide: the organisation dedicated to teaching English has announced that the central activities that define the discipline, reading books and writing extended prose, should be “decentered”. One might ask what exactly remains at the “center” once books and essays have been moved to the periphery, but the question answers itself.

The NCTE statement, dressed in the academic language of equity and innovation, merely formalises what practice has already accomplished. When students experience reading only as discontinuous fragments, when narrative architecture is systematically dismantled, when duration and depth are treated as optional extras, declaring books “decentered” is not controversial; it is simply descriptive.

Reading as Formation, Not Just Instruction

Almost 25 years ago when Jonathan Franzen was being lauded the next great American writer (he wasn’t for me) I read an essay by him in a collection called Why Bother? I don’t remember much by Franzen but I remember that. In that essay he argued that reading long novels was not merely entertainment but a means of becoming oneself.

“Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive — my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.”

There is a distinction, often elided in educational discourse, between reading instruction and reading formation. Reading instruction is about teaching the skills necessary to decode, comprehend and analyse text. Reading formation is about cultivating readers; people for whom reading is not merely a competence but a disposition, a pleasure, a way of being in the world.

Both matter. We need students to be able to read proficiently; this is not negotiable. But we also need students to become readers in the fullest sense of the word, and this requires more than skill instruction. It requires exposure to literature in forms that reveal why reading matters, what it offers, why it is worth doing well.

Complete novels play a role in reading formation that excerpts, I would argue, cannot. Novels demonstrate what sustained narrative engagement feels like. They model the rhythms of literary art. They show students that some pleasures require patience and effort. They invite habitation rather than mere comprehension. They make demands that, when met, yield rewards that excerpts rarely provide.

This is not to say that excerpts have no place, it’s not either or. Tim Shanahan is right that a curriculum solely focused on complete novels would be deficient in breadth, exposure to diverse voices and styles, and engagement with forms other than the novel. Balance is reasonable. But for me, the balance should not be driven solely by expediency or by the absence of evidence for books’ superiority in teaching discrete reading skills. It should be driven by a conception of what we are trying to achieve: not just skilled readers, but formed readers.

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