Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction

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Overhauling the way we taught reading had been on our school development plan for a long time, but other things became a priority and it kept on getting pushed further down the list. The Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Putting evidence to work’ guidance report was a really useful starting point for implementing change. At the time I was teaching in Y4 and identified that while we were using texts in literacy, we weren’t giving children opportunities to read a book without having to keep stopping and analysing it. It’s all very well saying that reading was on our school development plan, but what was it that we wanted to change? We knew why we had to have it as a focus, but needed a clear whole-school picture. Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with teachers, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction. Reading fiction and non-fiction

Every day, each teacher would read to their class for 15 minutes without any interruptions – just simply modelling ‘how to read’. In KS2, we planned for reading to take place after break between 10.30am and 11.15am, followed by literacy until lunch at 12.15pm. Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Shanahan’s point is that reading aloud is valuable insofar as it improves students’ reading fluency, which is strongly associated with comprehension (e.g. see the EEF’s most recent guidance on literacy at key stage 2). But, Shanahan argues, students need large volumes of practice to improve reading fluency – taking turns one-at-a-time is ahighly inefficient way of providing this.It breaks the process down into four stages: explore, prepare, deliver, sustain. Reading for pleasure and reading & writing We decided that reading needed a dedicated, non-negotiable space in the daily timetable. Distinct reading and literacy lessons Teachers read to children but it wasn’t consistent across year groups and books were seldom finished. In the national curriculum, the programmes of study for reading at KS1 and 2 consist of two dimensions: word reading and comprehension (both listening and reading).

We carried out a staff survey, asking questions about how often teachers read to their class and which text types they chose. We also surveyed pupils and asked then if they enjoyed reading, which types of texts they liked and if they read at home. Shanahan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, and has led the US Government’s National Reading Panel. Recently on his blog, he fielded aquestion about the effectiveness of whole-class reading approaches, where one student reads aloud while their classmates follow thetext To fit our school’s context and our pupils needs, we adapted his suggestions, enabling us to include a more diverse range of text types. In addition, different year group teachers were asking different types of reading comprehension questions: some used the ‘ VIPERS’ approach (vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval, summarise), while others used different approaches they’d found online.

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For Shanahan, preferable alternatives include reading in pairs, where students alternate after each paragraph, choral reading, where students and teachers read the same section of the text simultaneously, and repeated reading, where students read the same passage multiple times. In all cases, Shanahan argues that students read more and have greater opportunities to improve fluency, citing studies reviewed by the US National Reading Panel (NIHCD, 2000