Jacques Vriens is ambassador of the Kletskoppen Festival: “Making every child a reader”

Vriens says: “In the end, it all has to be about the joy of reading. Research shows that children who experience enjoyment in reading from an early age already know about 4,000 words in group 1 (kindergarten). Children who have had little exposure to reading at the same age know only about 1,000 words.” From his experience as a teacher, he knows this better than anyone: “Children who didn’t grow up with reading ask themselves just one thing in class: how am I going to get through all these pages? Sometimes pupils told me after reading only two pages that they thought a book was stupid. I would then ask them to read at least three pages. If they still thought it was stupid, I told them to exchange the book immediately. The funny thing was that some of the children never came back to my desk after those three pages, because the book turned out to be more fun than they had expected.”

In one corner of his classroom, Vriens also set up a place where children could listen to audiobooks, some of which he narrated himself. He turned this into “the milk machine.” “My greatest triumph was always when children who struggled with reading said to me after a few weeks at the milk machine: ‘No, I’m not going to the milk machine today, I’ll just read myself.’”

Classroom

When he himself was a beginning teacher in Amsterdam, his own principal was one of his biggest fans. “While I was teaching, I actually saw the world in miniature in the classroom. So much happens in a classroom: friendships and crushes develop, but bullying also takes place. I wrote all those stories down. My principal at the time thought my book was wonderful and knew someone at a publishing house. But that publisher rejected it,” Vriens says. “His conclusion was short and powerful: ‘Well, Mr Vriens, I think you’d better stay in the classroom.’”

Vriens put his school story Die Rotschool met die fijne klas (That Great School with That Nice Class) aside for a few years. Until he got hold of the book De Marokkaan en de kat van tante Da (The Moroccan and Aunt Da’s Cat) himself. “By the great Hans Barnard,” Vriens says with admiration. “I recognized the atmosphere in the book, which was very similar to my own writing. So I sent my book to the same publisher as Barnard’s: Van Holkema & Warendorf. There I was invited for a meeting!”

Vriens remembers his visit to Van Holkema & Warendorf, still his publisher to this day, as if it were yesterday. Not only his editor was present, but also Paul Biegel. “The children’s book author who received the State Prize for Children’s and Youth Literature in 1973, and whose books I devoured as a child. This giant had co-assessed my work!” Vriens says. “I was over the moon when he said he had enjoyed my book. That was the greatest gift. That he said I could become a children’s book author.”

Emotion

One of Vriens’ best-known books is Achtste groepers huilen niet, which revolves around a girl in the final year of primary school who develops leukemia. Vriens says: “I recently received a letter from a girl who wrote that she had laughed and cried because of the story. That’s the greatest compliment for me. With my books, I try to get very close to children’s emotions. In this case, that worked with two extreme emotions.”

In the fifty years that Jacques Vriens has been writing children’s books, one thing has not changed: his wife is his biggest critic. If there is room for improvement, she subtly scribbles it in the margins. But now that his eldest son Boris also reads along, he gets different feedback. Vriens laughs: “‘Nonsense,’ I’ll read next to something that’s been circled. But it is useful, I’ll give him that!”

Inspiration

Vriens drew inspiration for his stories from his immediate surroundings. When he moved with his parents to Helmond at the age of six, his parents opened a hotel there. He spent time there with his friends, and all of that became inspiration for his book De bende van Hotel De Korenwolf (The Gang of Hotel De Korenwolf), in which four children from the Maassen family form a gang because their parents don’t have much time for them due to the hotel.

When Vriens was sixteen, his parents decided to divorce. He moved with his mother and brother to Amsterdam. “There, my mother rented out a room to Johan Elsensohn, at the time a well-known Dutch actor and playwright. That was wonderful! Johan noticed that I already had a strong interest in theatre. He would knock on my bedroom door while I was doing homework and, in a deep voice, announce that he was going to perform a play. He would shine the table lamp onto the curtain and act something out. Later he told me that he had performed with a travelling theatre company and went from fairground to fairground.”

About fifty years later, Vriens thought: “Gosh, that’s still actually a beautiful subject.” That’s how Kermiskind came about, in which Rosa travels around the country with her family to perform theatre shows, but actually finds acting on stage dreadful.

Escape room

He also finds it special that students from Radboud University have drawn inspiration from his book Kermiskind. “They’ve turned the story in the book into an escape room, which will be unveiled during the Kletskoppen Festival,” says Vriens. It promises to be an adventure in which children aged eight and up must save the theatre and discover how language opens doors.

What else is there to do?

On Sunday 22 February, the Kletskoppen Festival will take place at Mariënburg Library in Nijmegen. During the festival, children aged two to twelve and their (grand)parents and caregivers are introduced to language, language development, and language science in a cheerful and playful way. Various researchers from Radboud University have developed programme components.

Researcher Else Eising developed the Taallaboratorium (Language Laboratory), which can also be found at the Kletskoppen Festival. Here, festival visitors can learn about methods used in language research. In the reaction time test, for example, they have to indicate as quickly as possible whether a word really exists or not. In the Virtual Reality experiment, visitors can investigate whether it helps when a conversation partner uses gestures or not. “During the festival, we want to show that you can do scientific research with language,” Eising says. “By introducing people to language research and to us as researchers, we show how diverse science can be.”