Survey shows students eager for more extracurricular reading time

A survey conducted in China has found that most primary and high school student respondents are interested in extracurricular reading, but many do not have time to do it.

The survey, which covered more than 30,000 primary and high school students from 30 provincial-level regions, showed that 90.4 percent of the respondents were interested in extracurricular reading and around 82 percent said they have abundant reading materials available.

However, nearly 70 percent of the students spent less than one hour reading per day, including 19.6 percent reporting less than 30 minutes of daily reading time, the China Youth Daily reported Monday.

The number of students with less than one hour of daily reading time increases the older a child is, according to the newspaper.

Meanwhile, 42.1 percent of the respondents spent 0.5 to less than one hour writing per week and 24.4 percent had less than 0.5 hour of weekly writing time, the report showed.

The newspaper quoted Wang Feng, deputy head of the Peking University Center for Chinese Linguistics, as saying that primary and high school students should have enough time to read and write in order to improve their skills. Schools should do systematic research and provide effective instructions on reading and writing methods.