First, let’s cut to the chase: this blog is a thinly disguised advert for my new book, Primary Reading Simplified. I devoted a frankly absurd amount of time and energy to writing the book, and I think it might be rather useful to a lot of teachers and school leaders. If you’re interested, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

However, for those with no interest in buying the book – and those who might buy the book who nonetheless would like a little taster – in this blog I’ll share five key ideas upon which Primary Reading Simplified is built. I hope this might allow you to reflect upon the teaching of reading in your school and consider where there might be room for improvement:

1. Misconceptions about the nature of reading comprehension – reinforced by accountability pressures – have commonly led to ineffective, stultifying teaching.

A pupil’s ability to comprehend text is usually tested via standardised assessments. The most influential of these is the end-of-key-stage-2 assessment, usually just called year 6 SATs. This assessment is divided arbitrarily into domains that are supposed to align with certain types of questions: questions that test vocabulary knowledge, questions that require inference, etc. Of course, dividing the questions asked about texts into these categories makes little sense. Don’t all questions rely on a pupil’s grasp of the relevant vocabulary? Don’t most questions require inference? These domains might serve a purpose in helping assessment-creators achieve a degree of consistency between each assessment and the ones that have come before, but the nature of these artificial domains tells us nothing about reading comprehension and how to teach it. (It isn’t necessarily a problem if you divide the questions you ask into categories to ensure you ask a variety of questions. However, there is no reason to think that categorising your questions as ‘inference questions’ or ‘vocabulary questions’ is a particularly productive way to achieve this.)

Sadly, this hasn’t stopped many schools from reverse-engineering their approach to reading instruction from these question types. In the absence of a shared understanding of the nature of reading comprehension, they have assumed that an effective way to teach reading is to try to teach pupils how to answer particular types of questions. The result of this has often been reading lessons in which pupils briefly read disconnected snippets of texts before spending most of the lesson practising how to identify and answer different types of questions.

If you ask trainee teachers what they think might be necessary ingredients in reading instruction, they tend to name a few things: texts chosen for the language and perspectives they offer to pupils; lots of time spent reading; discussions about the craft of writing and pupils’ own ideas; shared exploration of entire stories and other texts to build motivation. It is a sad reality of our profession that accountability pressures gradually push teachers towards a status quo that rarely offers any of these. It is even sadder when you realise that this status quo doesn’t even succeed on its own cynically narrow terms. There is nothing wrong with some well-timed SATs rehearsal in year 6 to build pupils’ familiarity with the nature of the assessment so that they can tackle it with confidence. (A chapter of Primary Reading Simplified is dedicated to this very subject.) But I can think of almost nothing that could impede pupils’ reading development – and consequent SATs results – quite like reading instruction that minimises the amount of time spent reading and turns lessons into tedious practice of non-existent transferable skills.

So, once pupils have learned the basics of decoding through phonics, what might a more effective and engaging approach to reading lessons include?

2. Any approach to reading lessons can be effective if it includes three things: plenty of decoding practice to build fluency, vast amounts of experience with written language, and meaningful text discussions.

Primary Reading Simplified describes a tried-and-tested approach to reading lessons, including how these can be introduced and sustained in a classroom or across a school. But the book also makes it clear that there isn’t just one approach that can be effective. What matters is that all the essential ingredients of post-phonics reading lessons are included and that these are balanced appropriately to meet the needs of individual classes of pupils. Let’s explore these three ingredients one at a time:

The purpose of systematic phonics is to provide pupils with the decoding knowledge and habits that allow them to begin their journey to reading fluency. By applying what they have learned to countless unfamiliar words, pupils learn more about the real complexities of the English writing system. Through conscious decoding, they gradually become able to recognise tens of thousands of words automatically, which allows them to flow through text and devote their efforts to comprehension. This all means that the sheer amount of active decoding that a pupil does is a vital factor in their likelihood of becoming a capable reader. But organising this decoding practice is especially tricky when pupils are at the early stages of fluency. Structures like repeated oral reading are useful throughout primary school and are utterly essential for pupils at the beginning of their journey to fluent reading.

There is a great deal of overlap in our understanding of spoken language and our understanding of written language. As pupils learn more about spoken language and the world to which it relates, their ability to comprehend texts develops accordingly. But spoken language is not exactly the same as written language. There is much to learn about the way that books and other texts are put together, from punctuation and paragraphing to the purpose of sub-headings and the conventions of different genres. Equally, books and other texts offer pupils an understanding of the world that goes beyond their own lives. Thus, another vital factor in a pupil’s likelihood of becoming a capable reader is the breadth and variety of their reading experiences. A thoughtfully built reading curriculum – facilitated by sufficient time devoted to pacy, engaging experiences with entire texts – ensures pupils develop the necessary understanding of written language and the wider world.

Text discussions are the third vital factor in a pupil’s likelihood of becoming a capable reader. Shared exploration of texts allows the craft of writing to be explored by analysing the language choices of authors and their potential impact. And these discussions recognise pupils’ personal interpretations of written language, helping them to develop a sense of themselves as readers with their own ideas and preferences.

The three vital factors in effective post-phonics reading lessons are important throughout primary school, but as pupils become more fluent, the need for structures that scaffold accurate decoding – such as repeated oral reading – gradually decreases. Equally, pupils’ capacity for sustained discussion of the craft of writing gradually increases. This means that the appropriate balance between these three factors tends to change as pupils mature. Ideally, a school’s approach to reading should reflect this.

3. Any approach to teaching reading should be judged both on the scope it provides for expert teachers to excel and on the support it provides for novice teachers to achieve adequacy.

As an experienced teacher who had learned a fair bit about reading development and was, I hope, proficient at teaching reading, I could never understand why I was rarely left to simply teach reading however I saw fit. But the reason became clear once I was the one in charge of co-ordinating reading across a school. Much though we might feel this way sometimes, our classrooms are not islands. Pupils move from one year group to the next, and the transitions between classrooms are supported by shared routines. And without some coherent structure to the way a school teaches reading, more-expert teachers are ill-equipped to support novice teachers.

However, it is perfectly possible for experienced teachers to be unnecessarily stultified by structures that are put in place to help ensure that the learning in classrooms of novice teachers is at least adequate. It is essential that any whole-school approach provides enough structure to scaffold the teaching of those new to the profession while providing plenty of scope for expert teachers to apply their hard-won understanding of reading pedagogy and to develop further. Without recapitulating several chapters from Primary Reading Simplified, it suffices to say that guaranteeing the three factors mentioned in section 2 of this blog is a good place to start.

4. A reading curriculum mostly consists of the texts pupils experience.

Across the country, schools have spent – and continue to spend – time and energy creating reading progression documents, consisting of lists of comprehension skills for each year group. Such progression documents at best provide no direction to classroom teaching (and, where they do, this is usually counterproductive for the reasons described in section 1 of this blog). These documents are equally useless in terms of assessment.

So why do they exist at all? They exist, in part, because schools have tried to follow the lessons they have learned from the rest of the curriculum. It makes perfect sense to specify the knowledge and skills to be learned and a sequence for this in subjects like mathematics, history and music. However, beyond the sequence of alphabetic code knowledge in a phonics programme, the vast experience and understanding of written language required for reading development simply refuses to be delineated in the same way as other school subjects. (For more on this, here is a blog that explores this further: https://primarycolour.home.blog/2024/02/10/why-reading-progression-documents-are-probably-a-waste-of-time/)

This means that we need a different approach when specifying the content of a school’s reading curriculum. Naturally, there is a chapter dedicated to the art of constructing a reading curriculum in Primary Reading Simplified, but a sensible starting point is to include the following:

• A general statement of end-of-school expectations (i.e. that pupils become capable, confident readers who understand their own reading preferences and recognise the individual and social aspects of interpreting texts)
• A scope and sequence relating to the chosen systematic phonics programme
• A list of the comprehension strategies to be introduced and when these are likely to become more explicit in reading lessons
• A list of the texts that pupils will experience in different ways and the text structures, themes, tenses, perspectives, familiarity of content and other language choices of these texts

5. To support those that find learning to read more difficult, a systematic, achievable approach to assessment and intervention is required.

Schools have limited resources at their disposal to assess and address barriers to reading development. It makes sense to target the majority of these resources at foundational barriers, especially as these are hardest to address in whole-class teaching. A sensible starting point is represented by the flow diagram below:

For many schools, even this might seem unattainable. A simpler starting point might look this this:

While significantly more sophisticated approaches to intervention are possible (i.e. those that are more personalised to the barriers of individual pupils), the basic approaches outlined above would be a step forward in many cases. For example, far too many schools are trying to support pupils on the basis of nonsense feedback from question-level analysis, sold to them by companies that should know better but clearly do not.

Of course, a systematic approach to assessment and intervention does not obviate the need for teachers and SENDCOs to work in partnership to identify other barriers to literacy development that might need to be addressed (e.g. developmental language disorder, hearing impairments, etc). But a systematic approach allows interventions to address foundational barriers to reading development, leaving capacity for greater precision in the relatively rare cases where it is required.

I hope you found this blog useful. There is so much more that I could explore relating to the five key ideas above. And there are countless other ideas that need to be addressed if we want to maximise the chances that all pupils in our schools become capable, confident readers. If you want to learn more about every aspect of classroom teaching and whole-school implementation relating to reading, then Primary Reading Simplified, can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

For those of you who have already read my first book, The Art and Science and Teaching Primary Reading, I promise you that my new book is infinitely more practical and better written. If you’re interested, here is a preview of the contents of Primary Reading Simplified:

Every experienced teacher of reading recognises the power of hearing pupils read on a one-to-one basis. While whole-class reading can, and should, be organised to provide the mixture of reading practice, modelling and feedback that is the essence of one-to-one reading, there is no substitute for the real thing, especially for those struggling with the early steps towards reading proficiency.

But opportunities for one-to-one reading are difficult to organise across a school, and asking a teacher or teaching assistant to focus their attention on just one pupil has an obvious opportunity cost. As such, where we commit to one-to-one reading, we need to know that we are doing it well.

Here are my top tips for maximising one-to-one reading in your setting, taken from my book, Primary Reading Simplified, which is released January 2025 and can be pre-ordered here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

1. From their reading experience, pupils will immediately and automatically recognise at least a few of the words they encounter.  The key to effective one-to-one reading is the support you offer to pupils with the rest of the words, those that are not immediately and automatically recognised. With each and every one of these unfamiliar words, support pupils to decode throughout the word by paying attention to all the letters and the sounds that are represented. [i] Specifically, we want pupils to apply their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). Model this decoding whenever pupils get stuck on a word, and then ask the pupil to repeat what you did (e.g. ‘ch-a-m-p’ –> ‘champ’).

2. Keep an eye out for pupils who take a guess at the whole word after decoding the first sound or two that is represented within it. This ‘partial-decode-then-guess’ strategy can appear successful for some pupils, but it is counter-productive over the long term, often drastically so. Again, a key aim is to support pupils to use decoding through the entire word as their go-to strategy for recognising any unfamiliar word.

3. If a pupil decodes a word using GPCs that they know but then comes unstuck (e.g. they decode ‘café’ as ‘caif’ of ‘caffee’), ask them if they know a word that sounds similar. If not, tell them what the word is, what it means and point out the GPCs in this word (e.g. *pointing to the ‘e’ in this word*, “This letter spells ‘ay’; ‘c-a-f-e’ –> ‘café’.”).[ii] In this way, you are priming the pupil to learn new GPCs by applying the ones they already know. This orthographic learning is essential to reading development.

4. Where a pupil struggles to decode polysyllabic words (i.e. words with more than one syllable), model breaking the words into syllables and decoding these piece by piece (e.g. ‘unhelpful’: ‘u-n’ –> ‘un’; ‘h-e-l-p’ –> ‘help’; ‘f-u-l’ –> ‘ful’; ‘un-help-ful’). Again, get the pupil to practise this immediately after modelling. Some argue that there are particular rules that we should follow when breaking words into syllables. However, teaching pupils to do this flexibly appears to be more beneficial.[iii]

5. Nascent readers often struggle most with blending. If this is a particular difficulty for a pupil, this is often because of the load placed on working memory: by the time a pupil gets to the end of the word, they have forgotten the first sound they recognised. Scaffolds can help. Consider progressively blending challenging words by elongating sounds that allow this (e.g. mmmmiiiillllk –> milk).[iv] It can also be helpful to incrementally reveal graphemes, blending each time (e.g. chomp: ch –> cho –> chom –> chomp). This is best thought of as a scaffold to the usual step-by-step decoding used in your school’s phonics programme.

6. Until a pupil has developed the habit of paying attention to all the GPCs within an unfamiliar word, it makes sense for their decoding practice to be undertaken with decodable text (i.e. text that allows them to practise using GPCs with which they are already familiar).[v] The transition to ‘regular’ books depends on the pupil. This transition often happens towards the end of year 1, though it can be made considerably earlier or later, depending on a pupil’s decoding capabilities. Carefully manage this transition to ‘normal’ text, watching out for the counterproductive ‘partial-decode-then-guess’ strategy described above.

7. Where pupils are capable of decoding individual words without too much help but are still particularly dysfluent (i.e. their reading is stilted or much more stop-start than their peers), give them occasional opportunities to re-read sentences, aiming for a little more flow the second or third time around. Again, this can be modelled for the pupil.

8. Where pupils struggle to the point that motivation or attention become a factor, consider taking turns with the pupil. This might be on a sentence-by-sentence or page-by-page basis. You should try to read at a pace that is fluent but steady. You should also point at the words as you read them, modelling how to decode particularly challenging words.

9. When pupils’ reading is relatively dysfluent and/or decoding is still laborious, do not expect pupils to make much sense of a text independently as they read. Support meaning-making by briefly discussing and summarising what the text has said. If you want a relatively dysfluent reader to independently make sense of a chunk of text, they will probably need to re-read it to the point where it does begin to flow. In particular, a sense of prosody – the way oral reading sounds (i.e. rhythm, stress and intonation) – is often a sign that comprehension is more likely. This prosody can be modelled and supported.

10. If a reader is relatively fluent, then other pupils are likely to benefit more from one-to-one reading time than they are. One-to-one reading is valuable to all pupils, but it is a precious and (usually) scarce resource. It makes sense to target it at pupils who are struggling most with foundational aspects of reading. However, in the rare circumstances that a pupil is relatively fluent yet has significant issues with comprehension relative to their peers, one-to-one reading can emphasise the active role that pupils need to take in making meaning. This can be achieved by supporting the pupil to summarise and visualise what they have read, by showing where to re-read tricky bits and by emphasising the ‘detective work’ that is often required to make sense of a text, such as when a word refers to something that has come before.

11. Where it becomes apparent from one-to-one reading that a pupil struggles with a particular aspect of decoding, allow this to inform the interventions that you might use beyond one-to-one reading. If adequate knowledge of GPCs is lacking (i.e. not enough to allow pupils to begin successfully decoding words for themselves and learning more GPCs in the process), the suitable intervention will likely be a phonics intervention aligned with your school’s phonics programme. If a pupil has adequate GPC knowledge but struggles with blending, then an intervention that targets blending is more likely to be fruitful. If the difficulty relates to the decoding of polysyllabic words, then the intervention should support pupils to flexibly break these words into syllables before decoding these and then the entire word. Decoding interventions work far better when they target the aspect(s) of decoding with which a pupil is struggling. All of this means that if someone other than a teacher is undertaking one-to-one reading with pupils, it is helpful for them to give feedback to the class teacher on pupils’ individual progress with decoding and fluency.

12. This is arguably the most important tip of the lot: make clear to every pupil exactly what a pleasure it is to witness their improvement, and tell them how worthwhile their efforts are. Helping pupils to develop as readers is one of the joys of being a teacher. Let pupils know this through your words and actions.

A final aside on the ‘who’ of one-to-one reading: it is common for volunteers – usually parents or governors – to come into school to support pupils with their reading. This support can certainly be beneficial for those that are well on their way to decoding proficiency but who lack fluency. However, pupils who are struggling most with the foundations of reading are best served by support from teachers and teaching assistants with the sufficient training required to understand reading development in theory and practice.

[i] Specifically, the relationships between sounds and letters that we are talking about are correspondences between phonemes (the smallest chunks of sounds that differentiate between two words) and graphemes (the individual letters or groups of letters that represent these phonemes.

[ii] For more on this, check out work on ‘set for variability’ or ‘mispronunciation correction’. This paper is a good place to start: Colenbrander, D., Kohnen, S., Beyersmann, E., Robidoux, S., Wegener, S., Arrow, T., … & Castles, A. (2022). Teaching children to read irregular words: A comparison of three instructional methods. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(6), 545-564.

[iii] For more on this idea: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/on-eating-elephants-and-teaching-syllabication

[iv] For more on this: Gonzalez-Frey, S. M., & Ehri, L. C. (2021). Connected phonation is more effective than segmented phonation for teaching beginning readers to decode unfamiliar words. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(3), 272-285.

[v] This, of course, is not to say that decodable text is the only kind of text that pupils should experience. They should have the opportunity to hear and discuss all sorts of texts, including books that they have freely chosen from a reading corner or library. However, asking pupils to undertake sustained decoding practice with words primarily containing unfamiliar GPCs can be exceptionally demoralising and can foster counterproductive habits.

I spend roughly five hours per week responding to questions about reading instruction via emails and direct messages on Twitter. And I receive one question more than any other:

“What should our school put on its reading progression documents?”

This question is usually followed by the reason for the request:

“A member of SLT / an LA advisor / a visiting consultant told me we needed
this.”

There is a sort of logic behind a reading progression document. In other areas of the curriculum, it makes perfect sense to write down what we intend to teach in each year group. For example, if teachers know that they will teach equivalent fractions in year 5, they can look at a progression document when considering the prior knowledge that has been developed and the future knowledge for which they are laying the foundations. This can then inform classroom teaching.

So, does this sort of progression document make sense for reading?

Mostly, the answer is no.

There are parts of reading that benefit from a clearly defined progression. Systematic phonics programmes by definition are built around a scope and sequence of the knowledge and skills to be learned, specifically knowledge of the relationships between letters and sounds and the phonemic skills required to make use of these. It can also be argued that it is helpful to specify reading fluency expectations in terms of accuracy, rate and prosody for each year group.

But when people ask me about progression documents for reading, they are not referring to the teaching of decoding or the development of fluency. What they are searching for is a list of clearly defined knowledge and skills for the development of reading comprehension. And the purpose of this blog is to explain why such progression documents are inevitably a waste of time.

I have seen many examples of progression documents for reading. They are usually divided into categories like ‘vocabulary’, ‘retrieval’, ‘inference’, etc. They are populated by statements that attempt to identify what a pupil should be able to do in a given year group. It is common to see things like this:

Year 4 – Inference: be able to infer characters’ emotions from explicit details in the text.

Then there is an attempt to show progression by making the next year group’s statement sound a little more complex. Sometimes this is done by just adding adjectives like ‘challenging’ or adverbs like ‘confidently’. What makes something ‘challenging’ or what it means to infer ‘confidently’ is never detailed. It is left for teachers to divine these distinctions. Sometimes, instead, the statement is changed in a more substantial way:

Year 5 – Inference: be able to infer characters’ emotions from implicit references in the text.

Let’s put aside for a moment why the transition from year 4 to year 5 is considered to be the precise moment when pupils should begin to understand implicit references to characters’ emotions. Instead, let’s focus on the absurdity of thinking that these statements mean anything in isolation from a specific text. If a pupil in year 2 recognises that Winnie the Pooh is confused to find Piglet in his house, is this pupil working at a year 5 level for inferences of this sort? Equally, if a pupil in year 7 struggles to recognise Mr Rochester’s repressed ardour towards Jane Eyre, does that mean that they are working below this level?

One might argue that we should only make these judgements with age-appropriate texts. This might make sense if the age-appropriateness of texts wasn’t fundamentally subjective beyond measures of word and sentence complexity that tell us very little. The unavoidable truth is that a pupil’s ability to meet every criterion written on a progression document depends on the specifics of the text they are reading. And this depends primarily on the pupil’s understanding of the language contained in the text and the world to which that language relates.

Of course, parts of this knowledge could in theory be specified. Take vocabulary: we could write down a list of the tens of thousands of words, phrases, idioms, metaphors, etc that we wish pupils to understand by the time they leave primary school. We could then attempt to divide these up and assign several thousand of them to each year group. But – and this is the question at the heart of this blog – what purpose would this serve? Any such list would either to be too short to adequately reflect the complexity of what is to be learned or too long to be of any use to teachers. Yes, we might decide to select a list of particularly valuable vocabulary that we want pupils to learn across the curriculum to support their understanding of academic texts, but such a list would not inform us at all about how to teach reading or how to assess pupils’ progress.

In other words, the integrated bodies of knowledge upon which comprehension depends are vast and beyond any attempts to condense them. They relate to everything that pupils learn about language and the world. And trying to boil down the application of this knowledge into a list of ‘comprehension skills’ on a progression document is useless in terms of assessment or teaching. 

In fact, such progression documents are worse than useless. First, the creation of these documents wastes the time of the school leaders who create them and the teachers who use them. Second, attempts to assess pupils’ reading against the statements on these documents are nothing more than a pretence in which teachers reverse-engineer what statements they will tick based on what they already know about a pupil’s reading. And third, the existence of these documents perpetuates a false impression of the nature of reading comprehension development, warping teaching further towards ill-conceived, counter-productive test preparation.

So, what should we use instead? We need to begin by accepting that the bodies of knowledge that underpin comprehension cannot be written down in a worthwhile way. And on this basis, we should use a minimalist approach to assessment and a meaningful approach to teaching.

What does a minimalist approach to assessment look like? It means only using things that have a chance of providing meaningful information:

• Phonics assessments for those in the early stages of word recognition development tell us what might need re-teaching and which pupils require additional support.
• Fluency assessments tell us which pupils are likely to benefit most from independent reading and which pupils require extra supported practice.
• Standardised comprehension assessments – the results of which can only give a vague overview of pupils’ current reading capability – allow us to share with pupils’ families fairly reliable information and track big-picture trends across a school.

In concert, these assessments allow us to determine pupils’ most pressing barriers to reading development so that interventions can be provided. (Of course, such a systematic approach should be complemented by bespoke assessments of language-related needs by a SENDCo.)

It might also be worth keeping track of individual pupils’ attitudes to reading: how much they read, what books they like, how they contribute to class discussions of texts, etc. This information can be passed on from one teacher to the next at the end of the academic year.

And what does a meaningful approach to teaching look like? When it comes to defining what we will teach, it means our reading curriculum for comprehension development is the collection of texts that we have curated and the lesson structures we use to teach them. Why? Because introducing pupils to the wonders of written English through exploration and discussion of the language within these texts is how we teach reading comprehension. Part of curating this selection of texts involves ensuring we provide pupils with a variety of text types, language choices and perspectives. These aspects of the chosen texts can be specified in a curriculum to (a) support the teaching of these texts, including the making of connections to pupils’ knowledge of prior texts, and (b) influence future discussions about changes to the curated selection.*

Alongside this, we might include a short list of comprehension strategies (e.g. summarising, self-questioning and re-reading), specifying when we might explicitly begin teaching these to pupils. However, we should bear in mind that these strategies can be integrated into classroom teaching that focuses on text exploration.

In short, I suspect there is no worthwhile argument for the existence of progression documents for reading comprehension. I have sympathy for those who feel compelled to create such pointless artefacts to satisfy ill-informed authority figures. But, ultimately, for the sake of pupils and those who teach them, the best thing we can do is to refuse to waste everyone’s time.

P.S. – Since writing this, I have been reminded of the disappointing fact that the list of ill-informed authority figures asking for pointless documentation includes some – but certainly not all – Ofsted inspectors. It appears to be an unfortunate (and timeless) reality of our accountability system that inspectors are required to cast judgement on aspects of teaching about which they might be relatively ignorant. This being the case, it might be wise (if somewhat cynical) to call your list of texts and their contents a ‘progression document’ so that the inspector can feel like they have got what they asked for. I appreciate that the result of an Ofsted inspection shouldn’t come down to doing stuff like this, but I have lost count of the number of dedicated school leaders who have told me about the importance of ‘playing the game’.

All this makes it even more essential that school leaders are knowledgeable about reading development. For more on the theory behind this, a really good place to start is the idea of constrained and unconstrained aspects of reading (Paris, 2005; Stahl, 2011; Snow & Matthews, 2016). And this blog on the US equivalent of this subject by Professor Timothy Shanahan is also well worth a read: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/should-we-grade-students-on-the-individual-reading-standards-1

If you’d like to find out more about how I organise every element of reading in a classroom and across a school, please consider my second book, Primary Reading Simplified, which is released January 2025: link

Equally, if you’d like to learn more about the theory behind reading and how it relates to classroom practice, please consider my first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link

All royalties from The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading go to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity.

* Hat tip to Clare Sealy for letting me know that this idea was not clear in the first version of this blog.

On a scale of 1-10, how good are you at comprehending what people say to you?

It’s a bit of a silly question, isn’t it? Whether or not we comprehend what we are told is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Talk to me about the first nine seasons of The Simpsons using familiar words and I’ll comprehend pretty well. Talk to me about your favourite anguilliform Pokemon character and I’ll probably stare at you blankly. Yes, there are some basic capacities that underpin our ability to understand what people say aloud, such as our hearing and our working memory capacity. But – on the assumption that these things aren’t an impediment – our ability to comprehend what we are told is dependent on what we know about the subject at hand and the words being used to describe it.

In other words, there is no generic listening comprehension ability. There is instead a vast network of understanding that determines the extent to which we can construct meaning from the words we hear. Trying to determine – or, heaven forbid, quantify – a person’s ability to comprehend what they are told would rely on some way of measuring their grasp of all there is to know about the world and the language used to describe it. How do you measure a person’s entire understanding of their world and their language? How do you effectively sample a domain this extensive? Answer: you can’t.

And this brings me on to reading comprehension. Our ability to comprehend what we read is reliant on much the same network of understanding that is required for listening comprehension. Let’s assume that we can recognise the words on a page fluently enough to free up the cognitive resources necessary for comprehension. Under these circumstances, whether or not we comprehend what we read is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Just as with listening comprehension, this is a domain so vast as to rule out precise, valid assessment.

To be clear, what I’m suggesting is that – beyond the development of relatively fluent word recognition* – our ability to comprehend what we read is based on everything we know about our world and our language, alongside an additional layer of knowledge related to written text conventions (e.g. punctuation, sub-headings, italics, etc). How do you measure a person’s entire understanding of their world, their language and the conventions of written texts? Answer: you can’t.

From this we can see that the result of any single standardised comprehension assessment needs to be interpreted with plenty of caution. However, such assessments can offer a loose sense of the overall reading capability of a pupil or cohort of pupils, especially when multiple assessments are used over a longer period of time.

And this is where this blogpost would end if reading comprehension assessment hadn’t warped the teaching of reading. But it has. A lot. For the sake of assessment, teachers have been incentivised to see reading comprehension as a generic skill, or, more precisely, a small set of generic skills. If this perspective were a canvas, it would look something like this:

Here is reading comprehension ability interpreted as a small collection of generic skills, things like retrieval, prediction and summarising. Reading comprehension assessments tend to divide the questions they use into a few categories such as these. Countless teachers and school leaders have thus made the understandable leap that teaching reading comprehension is the process of building up each of these generic comprehension skills. They attempt to add another broad-brushstroke layer to a pupil’s prediction skill as a means of filling up the canvas. This conveniently allows for the creation of medium-term plans that state that a given class is working on prediction or inference or some other generic skill. It also allows schools to make lists related to those skills that can be ticked off as children develop. If we’re going to gather evidence of a pupil’s reading comprehension development, then what we presumably need is a small set of statements that correspond to a relatively small set of generic skills. This interpretation of reading comprehension achieves that.

The problem, of course, is that this interpretation is completely bogus. It is based on a view of reading comprehension that is palpably false. Yes, when we comprehend what we read, we tend to be able to retrieve information, to make predictions, to summarise what we have read, etc, and doing this stuff while we read is a useful set of habits that keeps us awake to what we are doing.*** But this is an unhelpful way to visualise our ability to comprehend what we read. I’d argue that this is better:

Forget for a moment the exact scene being portrayed, and consider the means of portraying it. Here reading comprehension ability is interpreted as a vast interacting network of understanding. It is not built up through broad brushstrokes, but through the painstaking accumulation of knowledge about words, texts and the wider world to which they relate. The natural consequence of such an interpretation is that the teaching of reading comprehension must prioritise the guided exploration of text, involving lots of reading and lots of rich discussion. Retrieval, prediction, summarising, etc will naturally form a part of this, but developing these habits is not the central goal of reading comprehension lessons. The central goal of reading comprehension lessons is to understand the specific text being read, the world to which it relates and our relationship to both of these through exploration of the text’s use of language. Everything else is secondary.

However, this interpretation leaves us with some problems. I’ve lost count of the number of school leaders and teachers who – despite their instinctive enthusiasm for this more meaningful conception of reading comprehension – have asked the same two questions:

1. “How would we evidence this?”
2. “What would this look like in terms of our long-term planning?”

I will address these two questions in turn:

The answer to (1) is simple: Don’t bother.

I’m serious. Just don’t bother. Ofsted have made it abundantly clear that they don’t want teachers gathering evidence for its own sake. If your interpretation of an assessment requires you to pretend that reading comprehension is something that it clearly is not, then it’s time to reconsider how you use that method of assessment. You need to know how fluently your children read and you need to try to get a sense of much they know about the English language and the wider world. The former can be assessed by hearing children read aloud and by undertaking quick fluency assessments; the latter, however, is not accessible via reference to simple rubrics. Standardised reading comprehension assessments can give a rough idea of overall reading attainment and progress, and they are potentially useful for this purpose, but they tell us little about what we should or should not teach. It’s time to accept that there are some things that we can measure and other things that we cannot, and we need to change our assessment decisions accordingly.

The answer to (2) is a little more difficult. Think back to the canvas above. To build up a picture like that, many thousands of dots are added across the breadth of the canvas, each chosen partly based on its relationship to the other dots on the canvas. In a language-focused view of teaching reading comprehension, our planning must focus on the content being read: the characters, the themes, the text features, the aspects of the world being described, etc. And it must do so in relation to the rest of that which has been, and will be, added to the canvas. In short, stop focusing on how non-existent generic comprehension skills will be taught. Instead focus on the texts themselves – not least their variety and their relationship to the rest of the curriculum**** – and on how you will ensure that pupils learn lots about them.

A meaningful approach to the teaching of reading comprehension aligns with a more accurate view of what reading comprehension is. It allows teachers to do away with pointless, time-consuming forms of tick-box assessment. It encourages school leaders to re-imagine their reading curriculum primarily in terms of the texts to be shared. Most of all, it offers our pupils a more authentic, enriching and effective experience of reading.

So, what’s stopping us from teaching reading comprehension really well? Absolutely nothing.

If you’d like to find out more about how I organise every element of reading in a classroom and across a school, please consider my second book, Primary Reading Simplified, which is released January 2025: link

Equally, if you’d like to learn more about the theory behind reading and how it relates to classroom practice, please consider my first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link

All royalties from The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading go to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity.

* Fluent word recognition is also dependent on our broader language comprehension alongside our knowledge of phoneme-grapheme relationships, phonemic skills, etc.

** The Teachwell blog has an excellent series on this idea: http://www.teach-well.com/reforming-the-key-stage-2-reading-sat-why-its-needed-and-possible/

*** There is lots of research into comprehension strategies. This blog is a good place to start if you want to know more: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/comprehension-skills-or-strategies-is-there-a-difference-and-does-it-matter#sthash.ZC5WlzWX.dpbs

**** This does not mean that every text has to directly relate to something else in your wider curriculum. It might even be the case that texts are chosen precisely because of how they supplement the curriculum. (E.g. If a primary history curriculum doesn’t include a study of a South American civilisation, a non-fiction text relating to the Maya civilisation might be an apt choice to add breadth to the pupils’ understanding of the challenging – and often controversial – concept of civilisation.)