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.

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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.

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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.

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[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.

Warning: Parts of this blog are going to feel like an advertisement for my consultancy work and books. This is unavoidable as I have written this for those who ask me about the issues relating to reading instruction that I see across primary schools and how I seek to address them.

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In this blog, I’d like to explain how I try to support schools and, in the process, offer some thoughts about patterns that I see that might be of use to classroom teachers and school leaders.

I spend a few hours most weeks in conversations with school leaders talking about their current reading provision. In some cases, these online chats are the pre-cursor to my working with their school. In other cases, schools simply want constructive feedback on their current approach to reading. As a result of these conversations, I have identified a number of recurring issues with schools’ approaches to reading lessons, of which these are by far the most common and important:

• Fluency development is not explicitly targeted through scaffolded reading practice.
• Reading lessons involve precious little actual reading, especially of whole texts.
• There is a lack of text discussions aimed at developing pupils’ appreciation of written language and their active, personal role in reading.

As a result of these conversations, I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of teachers and school leaders knowing the fundamentals about reading development, something I generally refer to as the theory behind reading: the connections between word recognition & the structure of the English writing system; the connections between decoding, fluency & comprehension; the integrated bodies of knowledge required to make sense of a text; etc.

I have consistently found that schools that understand this domain make better decisions in how they approach the teaching of reading. Often I work with schools that are less confident with this domain, helping them to better understand reading so that they can develop their approach to reading with greater confidence. This work ranges from hour-long keynote presentations to professional development days. Central to this work is my reading map, an aide memoire for the key things I believe every teacher and school leader needs to understand about reading:

(A 9-minute introduction to this reading map can be found here: link to YouTube video)

For some purposes, I am wary of one-off professional development sessions. If you want to support teachers to make practical changes in the classroom, sustained support is required. But when it comes to helping schools to strengthen their grasp of reading development and identify potential areas for future improvement, I’m confident that this sort of work can be useful.

However, some schools and MATs want considerably more than this. Specifically, they want to be shown a particular approach to reading lessons beyond phonics that they can adopt, adapt or merely use as a jumping-off point for change. In these cases, initial support on the theory behind reading is usually followed by three sessions that help schools to balance the three priorities addressed by every effective approach to teaching reading lessons:

• Build reading fluency through practice.
• Read plenty of thoughtfully chosen texts.
• Discuss texts in depth.

Specifically, I discuss in detail how to teach using three reading lesson structures, each of which matches one of the above priorities:

• Fluency reading
• Extended reading
• Close reading

These reading lesson structures are not stunningly innovative or hugely difficult to pull off. They are also certainly not the only way to meet the three priorities of reading lessons. They are simply ways of organising reading lessons that aim to meet the needs of developing readers while providing teachers with the mixture of support and agency required for high-quality teaching and ongoing improvement. Usually, I introduce teachers to these lesson structures one at a time with a gap of at least a couple of weeks between them so that teachers have the chance to experiment in the classroom and get support with any initial challenges to implementation. (For schools who want more flexibility or those in parts of the world that make live professional development difficult, I also have a sequence of videos that can be used for this professional development.)

That’s basically it. Of course, there are other issues that I help schools with (how to systematically assess & address reading difficulties; how to build a reading curriculum; how to nurture a reading culture; etc), and the work that I do is moulded to meet the requirements of each individual school or multi-academy trust. But I can sum up the vast majority of the consultancy work that I do thus:

(1) I provide constructive feedback on schools’ current approach to teaching reading and their reading curriculum either as part of informal online conversations or formal in-person consultancy.

(2) I help classroom teachers and school leaders to better understand reading development so that they can make better-informed decisions about their approach to teaching reading.

(3) I explain in detail one specific evidence-informed approach to reading lessons that schools can then adopt, adapt or use merely as a jumping-off point.

The last thing to say is that I always try to provide a free or cheap alternative to any consultancy work that I do. I do not want schools to spend money they don’t have, and I don’t think I could ever justify earning more than I did as a school leader.

The free version of (1) is available to anyone who works in a state school; just drop me a message via email, Twitter or Blue Sky with any questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them. If things are more complicated (and I’m not too busy), I might offer to follow up with a brief online chat via Zoom.

The cheap version of (2) involves buying my first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, which is designed to help schools understand the key theory behind reading and how it relates to practice: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Teaching-Primary-Reading-Corwin/dp/1529764165

The cheap version of (3) involves buying my second book, Primary Reading Simplified, which is designed to provide practical guidance for every aspect of classroom teaching and whole-school leadership relating to reading. This book goes far beyond just addressing (3), but the core of the book does this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

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Below are testimonials from schools and multi-academy trusts that I have worked with:

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“We’ve absolutely loved working with Chris across our trust. His reading CPD has been a real game-changer, not just for how we teach reading, but for how we think about teaching in general. His sessions are full of practical ideas, grounded in research, and delivered in a way that’s clear, engaging, and genuinely useful.

One of the things we’ve really appreciated is how approachable Chris is. He doesn’t just deliver the training and disappear—he’s been brilliant at answering follow-up questions and offering support whenever we’ve needed it. That kind of ongoing help has made a big difference in helping staff feel confident and supported.

The impact has been clear across our schools. Teachers are feeling more empowered, pupils are more engaged, and the quality of teaching has stepped up a notch.”

– Aimee Tinkler, Head of Education at Diocese of Coventry MAT

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“The impact from Chris’s reading CPD has been superb, really helping to bring to life the EEF recommendations. Our teachers now have a much clearer understanding of how to develop vocabulary in reading lessons, and our pupils now spend much more time engaged in quality reading and discussion activities: with trust averages on the rise, the proof really is in the pudding!”

– Ross Brevitt, Director of Primary Curriculum at Star Academies

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“The training was incredibly practical and gave me immediate strategies to use in my classroom. I feel much more confident in helping my students develop not just their fluency, but also their overall confidence in reading.”

– Sophie Cooksley, EYFS Lead and Classroom Teacher at Rodmarton Primary School

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“Chris provided fantastic professional development that has been highly valued by our schools. He has captured the attention of our teachers through a range of research-informed approaches that he has shown in practice in ways that are engaging and impactful. It’s great to walk into classrooms and see it in action!”

– Jaimie Holbrook, Director of Improvement and Effectiveness at the Enquire Learning Trust

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“Chris’s knowledge of – and passion for – reading is second to none. He has helped us to overhaul our reading curriculum and reading for pleasure with superb results. His advice is so easy to follow and has instilled a new confidence into both pupils and staff alike.”

– Hannah Carvell, Executive Headteacher at Queens C of E Academy

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“Through your support, we’ve been able to provide pupils far greater opportunities to engage with texts in both purposeful and pleasurable ways. You’ve helped create a reading culture where books are not only tools for learning but also sources of joy, curiosity, and reflection. Pupils are now more enthusiastic about reading and are developing into thoughtful, critical, and deep-thinking readers.”

– Sarah Hodge, Headteacher at the Priestley Academy Trust

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“Chris’s training, modelling, feedback and ongoing support has transformed the teaching of reading in our school. Our staff’s knowledge and pedagogy have developed significantly, along with their confidence. As a result, our children are fast becoming the fluent, confident readers we want them to be, and everyone is enjoying reading!”

– Amy Bills, Headteacher at Holbrook Primary School

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“As part of our ‘Year of Reading’ project, we contacted Chris to provide rich, evidence-based CPD around the teaching of reading. This training kickstarted a series of CPD sessions which ran across the autumn term, providing invaluable strategies and resources aimed at helping teachers to improve students’ reading fluency—a key factor in boosting comprehension and fostering a lifelong love for reading.“

We know that this professional development will have a positive impact on classrooms across our ‘Year of Reading’ project.”

– Rachael Scott, School Improvement Lead (Primary) at Corinium Education Trust

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“Chris’s training has had a huge impact on how we teach reading. It was a perfect combination of research-backed information and practical strategies that could be easily and immediately implemented. We have seen improvements in our test scores, and even more importantly, the whole-class approach has brought renewed enthusiasm for the shared joy of reading to our classrooms.”

– Janet Fox, KS2 English Subject Leader at the British School of Paris

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“Chris is a textbook example of how to teach effectively. He commanded the room in such a way that you could hear a pin drop, leading to incredible retention and long-term memory for everyone present.

As a trust, we adopted Chris’s strategies, which have led to significant improvement in children being able to read more effectively. The way he delivered the information meant it stuck! I would recommend his training to anyone passionate about reading and evidenced-based pedagogy.”

– Emma Grice, Executive Headteacher at the Fioretti Trust

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“Chris took the time to tailor his support so that it matched our needs exactly. Chris is incredibly knowledgeable, and the training he delivered to teaching and support staff was clear, precise and very relevant to classroom work. The training has informed our reading strategy and staff have been empowered to deliver high-quality reading lessons that are having a positive impact on learning.”

– Laura Wright, Deputy Principal at Woodvale Primary Academy

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“Chris’s book really spoke to the team and offered lots of positive clarity and ideas which we were keen to explore further. We then engaged him over the year with four online sessions for all teachers in the primary section of our school. It was fantastic, to the point where people would rewatch the recordings he offered and refer to his work regularly, and eventually many ideas were then adapted and embedded into our new reading policy ready to implement next academic year. He was able to break down key concepts into clear areas of focus and respond to our many questions around specific elements. He then remained on hand should we be reflecting on anything specific. I would highly recommend him to any school looking to reinforce best practice, refresh staff’s awareness on key teaching strategies or reflect on up-to-date approaches.”

Aidan Stallwood, Head of Primary at Northbridge International School, Cambodia

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Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch, you can reach me via the ‘Contact me’ tab above or via this link: https://primarycolour.home.blog/contact/

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.

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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.

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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.)

A few months ago, my book about the teaching of reading was published. It was my attempt to distill into an accessible format what I had learned from the research into reading, informed by well over a decade of classroom teaching across the primary phase. I like to think that in most cases I got the balance right between accessibility and complexity. Inevitably, though, there are some decisions that I continue to deliberate. Chief among these was my decision to make the fluency chapter as brief as it is. While I hope I communicated the key messages, I think it might have been worth addressing the subject in a little more detail. That is what I will do in this blog.

The key messages that do appear in the fluency chapter of my book can be roughly summarised as follows:

+ Reading fluency is the flow of words as we read. It can be productively analysed by looking at the components of oral reading fluency: accuracy, automaticity and prosody. (I.e. Are the words correct? Do they move at a rate that allows for unconscious decoding? Does the reading sound like a natural spoken voice?)

+ Fluency is supported by orthographic mapping, a process that allows words to be instantly and unconsciously recognised through repeated decoding. For this reason, the quantitative aspect of reading (i.e. how much decoding is undertaken) is an important factor when considering classroom practice.

+ There is a solid evidence base to suggest that repeated oral reading is a helpful way to support reading fluency. This can be organised in classrooms through the use of short texts, teacher modelling and mixed-attainment pairs.

+ Reading fluency can be assessed and this is a particularly useful measure for understanding reading development.

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And below are the aspects of reading fluency that I wish I had addressed but didn’t. In most cases they are extra bits of information that I decided to remove for the sake of accessibility. In a few other cases, they are ideas that have developed since I wrote the book due to further reading and discussions with colleagues:

1. Oral reading fluency is a useful proxy for reading fluency more generally, but it isn’t a perfect proxy. A small proportion of children will be unable to read aloud fluently despite having developed perfectly adequate levels of fluency in silent reading. This can be the case for a variety of reasons including speech impediments, anxiety, shyness and neurodiversity. This needs to be kept in mind when considering classroom practice and assessment relating to oral reading fluency. A sensitive approach built on a relationship of trust is essential here (as it is in almost every area of teaching).

2. Fluency, by definition, must relate to the flow of something. To my mind, it makes most sense to consider reading fluency as a description of word flow. This means that this construct is tightly linked with word recognition proficiency. But word recognition is a complicated process that interacts with all elements of reading development. For example, we orthographically map words as we repeatedly decode them by relating them to pronunciations stored in our memory, so our vocabulary is implicated in this process. Equally, prosody relies on our understanding of what is being read. Yes, it is possible to read with prosody without complete comprehension. (Read a nonsense poem aloud for evidence of this.) But prosody is impossible without some grasp of the words being read and the sentence structures being employed. In short, while fluency is closely associated with word recognition, the various elements of language comprehension play a role both in fluency’s operation and in its development.

3. Orthographic mapping potentially involves not just the mapping of whole words, but also chunks of words. Imagine you are presented with a neologism, such as ‘antiventic’. Your decoding of this word would be assisted by the chunks of words that you had already orthographically mapped, such as the morphemes ‘anti’ and ‘ic’.

4. Beyond orthographic mapping, students learn about the wider patterns of English orthography through instruction and reading practice, and this also likely contributes to reading fluency. (This orthographic learning can be seen in our ability to recognise less likely spellings of words that don’t exist: ‘cholp’ seems like a reasonable spelling; ‘tcholp’, in contrast, does not.)

5. Repeated oral reading isn’t the only practice that has been shown to potentially benefit reading fluency. In particular, wide reading (sometimes described as continuous reading), in which students read aloud without the repetition of text, has shown itself to also be effective for this purpose in interventions. There is also some evidence that echo reading and choral reading can have positive effects. However, there are other considerations that lead me to advocate repeated oral reading primarily:

(a) Organising paired oral reading without repetition is a much more challenging logistical feat. Ensuring that partners are supporting each other and that the they are decoding accurately becomes far more challenging when pairs have reached completely different chunks of text, as inevitably happens without repetition.

(b) My experience with repeated oral reading has strongly suggested that pupils who are low in confidence gain a great deal from the opportunity to perform a given text after repeatedly rehearsing it. Repeated oral reading gives students frequent experiences of success that are essential to building motivation.

(c) Repetition of relatively short texts allows teachers to focus on aspects of prosody through modelling in a way that is not easy to achieve otherwise.

(d) Without close supervision of where students’ eyes are attending, echo reading can easily become mere echo speaking. This can give a teacher a sense of accomplishment that all students are involved without the students necessarily relating what they are saying to the text in front of them. (That said, using some echo reading as a way to model the prosody of a text before repeated oral reading may well be useful.)

In short, while fluency is in the early stages, it is guided decoding that seems to be the essential ingredient in practices that support reading fluency development. Of the range of available evidence-informed practices, it is repeated oral reading that I have found to be easiest to organise and most effective.

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As ever there is plenty more that I could discuss, but even in a blog (or especially in a blog) the balancing act between accessibility and complexity remains. Thanks for reading.

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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.

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Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21.

Kuhn, M. R., Schwanenflugel, P. J., & Meisinger, E. B. (2010). Aligning theory and assessment of reading fluency: Automaticity, prosody, and definitions of fluency. Reading research

Padeliadu, S., & Giazitzidou, S. (2018). A SYNTHESIS OF RESEARCH ON READING FLUENCY DEVELOMPENT: STUDY OF EIGHT META-ANALYSES. European Journal of Special Education Research.

Pikulski, J. J., & Chard, D. J. (2005). Fluency: Bridge between decoding and reading comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 58(6), 510-519.quarterly, 45(2), 230-251.

Rasinski, T. (2014). Fluency matters. International electronic Journal of elementary education, 7(1), 3-12.

Ardoin, S. P., Binder, K. S., Foster, T. E., & Zawoyski, A. M. (2016). Repeated versus wide reading: A randomized control design study examining the impact of fluency interventions on underlying reading behavior. Journal of School Psychology, 59, 13-38.

Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151-218.

Teaching children to read is complex. There are many things that schools need to get right for their pupils to flourish as readers. However, from observations in schools and discussions with fellow professionals, it is my belief that there are certain elements of reading teaching that are frequently overlooked despite their importance. Here are five questions that in many primary schools deserve more consideration than they are currently afforded:

1. How is phonics monitored?

Every primary school is required to teach phonics systematically. It goes without saying that if phonics is not taught well, then children’s reading will suffer. However, the extent to which children’s phonics progress is monitored through year two and beyond varies dramatically between schools. Often, even those children that pass the phonics screening check return to school in year two having forgotten much of the learning content experienced just a few months earlier. In response, schools should ensure that they can explain where every student is on their phonics journey and have systematic phonics interventions in place for those that still struggle despite thorough, responsive phonics teaching, be they in year two or year six.

2. How is reading fluency taught and assessed?

There are several reasons why children in upper key stage two might struggle to comprehend what they have read, and chief among these reasons is slow decoding that prevents understanding.[i] There is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that repeated oral reading of short texts that are towards the upper limits of children’s current reading ability can support children’s development of the components of fluency, which are essential to reading comprehension.[ii]  Nevertheless, this crucial area is too often neglected in primary schools. In year two and lower key stage two, fluency practice should be a major component of reading instruction, either as standalone lessons or as a regular part of reading sessions.[iii] Either way, it should never be dissociated from the ultimate purpose of reading, and well-chosen texts should ensure that the comprehension undertaken during fluency practice is valuable on its own terms.[iv]

Fluency should also be assessed to allow timely responses to the needs of individual children and classes. Tests of reading fluency such as DIBELS assessments, while something of a blunt instrument, are useful when used in conjunction with teacher judgements, which give context to results.[v]

3. How much decoding do children do each week?

This is arguably the most important and overlooked question one can ask about a school’s reading instruction. It may seem prosaic, but the process of learning to read – in particular the development of rapid word recognition – can be considered as statistical;[vi] our brains are pattern spotting machines, and we rely on vast quantities of information to strengthen and hone our command of the patterns in the English language. This means it is essential that children spend lots of time meeting new text every school day, increasing their reading ‘mileage’. You might be thinking, “Isn’t this obvious?” Maybe it is, but this doesn’t stop some children spending as little as 10 or 20 minutes each week processing text while children in similar schools do several times as much. While children’s fluency is still developing, whole-class reading can ensure that reading mileage is prioritised. (I recommend children and adults take turns to read aloud; rulers and quick word checks can be used to ensure that children are focusing and keeping pace, and struggling readers can explore the text in advance during interventions to support this.) Once fluency is relatively established (100+ words per minute oral reading speed with high accuracy), silent reading followed by text-dependent questions is the most efficient method for children to meet new text.

4. How is vocabulary development supported?

Reading comprehension and vocabulary development reinforce one another. Plenty of time spent reading is essential, but vocabulary development can be best supported in two ways – by teaching children particularly useful words and by revealing to them the etymological and morphological structure of the English language. The first of these requires a rationale for which words to choose, and Beck, Mckeown and Kucan attempt to provide one by considering vocabulary as existing in three tiers.[vii] Crucially, what they define as ‘tier two’ words are those that are rare in day-to-day informal language, but are used across the curriculum (i.e. they are not specific to particular subjects or contexts). By combining the concept of tier two vocabulary with the most common words in the English language, it is possible to compile a list of words that can be introduced to children, either in reading sessions, standalone vocabulary sessions or through ‘word-of-the-day’ style teaching.[viii] In addition, a large amount of the morphological and etymological structure of English can be revealed to children by teaching them key Latin and Greek root words (e.g. acro-, meta-) and by highlighting key morphemes that modify English words (e.g. un-, dis-). While this teaching of vocabulary might seem detached from context, trust me when I say that the context will find you; teach children a tier two word like ‘influence’ or a morpheme like ‘dis’, and you won’t have to wait long for children to notice these in texts and class discussions, much to the benefit of their reading. Ideally, however, tier two vocabulary, Latin & Greek root words and morphological awareness can, and should, be integrated into your wider school curriculum, though this is naturally a task that takes a considerable amount of time and thought, so consider teaching discrete vocabulary lessons in the meantime.

5. Does the rest of the curriculum build children’s knowledge of the world?

Reading comprehension relies on background knowledge.[ix] Put simply, high-quality teaching of science, history, geography, etc, is teaching reading. A curriculum that is coherently structured allows the knowledge children gain to become part of a rich network of understanding that they can use in their reading and beyond.

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Many elements of the teaching of reading are not included above, not least the power of reading aloud to children. These are just the elements that are most frequently overlooked, despite their importance. Whether you’re a headteacher, a reading coordinator or a class teacher, thinking carefully about the five questions above is a considerable step towards ensuring your students have the best chance of learning to read.

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A version of this blog originally appeared in ‘Teach Reading & Writing’ magazine: https://www.theteachco.com/uploads/special-issues/TRW-Issue11-June-20-1.pdf

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[i] National Reading Panel (US). (2000). Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups. The Panel.

[ii] These components of reading fluency can be described as accuracy, automaticity and prosody. Prosody is concerned with the tone, intonation, stress and rhythm of speech – in this case the idea that these allow oral reading to sound natural and comfortable, akin to spoken language.

[iii] For more on fluency practice, see this article: https://www.teachwire.net/news/i-was-bad-at-teaching-reading-but-then-i-found-a-better-way

[iv] Pikulski, J. J., & Chard, D. J. (2005). Fluency: Bridge between decoding and reading comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 58(6), 510-519.

[v] For more on DIBELS assessments: https://dibels.uoregon.edu/assessment/dibels/dibels-eighth-edition

[vi] Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the Speed of Sight: How we Read, Why so Many Can’t, and what can be done about it. Basic Books.

[vii] Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2013). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. Guilford Press.

[viii]For just such a list – or guidance on how to compile one – see this blog: https://primarycolour.home.blog/2019/06/14/tier-two-vocabulary-for-primary-teachers-the-3-4-5-list/

[ix] Kendeou, P., & Van Den Broek, P. (2007). The effects of prior knowledge and text structure on comprehension processes during reading of scientific texts. Memory & cognition, 35(7), 1567-1577.

Like many others, I taught for several years with almost zero knowledge of how people learn to read. Yes, during my PGCE, I was told that phonics was a good thing, and I was given Letters and Sounds to read, but beyond that? Not much. Thus, it was something of a surprise to learn eventually that the science behind reading is arguably the most thoroughly explored area of cognitive psychology and that well-founded recommendations for pedagogy are available for teachers.

Perhaps you don’t know much about the research into reading, but would like to change that. It can be difficult to know where to begin, and time is precious. This blog is my attempt to match a decent course of action to the amount of time that you have available. I’m no expert, but I hope that I’ve read and digested enough to support your first steps into this area of learning. Trust me: if you are someone who teaches children to read, you won’t regret taking the time to better understand this subject. It will make you a better teacher.

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If you effectively have no time to dedicate to this goal at present, then get the ball rolling by following these people on Twitter:

@TheReadingApe

This Twitter account posts about all things phonics and reading. The blogs are concise and informative, with references and further reading for those interested. A case in point: https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2019/06/23/Comprende-Reading-comprehension-a-skill-to-be-taught

@ReadingShanahan

Timothy Shanahan was a member of the National Reading Panel in the US, which was responsible for sifting through the mountains of research into reading and coming up with recommendations for educators. His blogs at shanahanonliteracy.com are always worth reading, and his views are informed by an extensive understanding of the current evidence. This one gives a pretty good flavour of what he does: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/how-to-teach-fluency-so-that-it-takes

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If you have around 10 minutes to spare, I do my best to describe reading development as briefly as I can on the Tips for Teachers podcast here:

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If you have 1-2 hours only, read this overview of the research – Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1529100618772271

I can’t really imagine a more efficient way to get to grips with the subject than reading this. It covers everything from the alphabetic principle to different computational models of reading to language comprehension.

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Where you go after reading this depends on your priorities…

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If you have 5-10 hours and you want to get to grips with all aspects of reading, from phonics to fluency, from comprehension to leading reading across a school, then I’d be a fool not to recommend the book I wrote for precisely this purpose, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Teaching-Primary-Reading-Corwin/dp/1529764165/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=teaching+primary+reading&qid=1621544542&sr=8-3

All royalties go to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well recommended charity.

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If you have 5-10 hours and you are most interested in understanding the history of reading (which is surprisingly relevant to understanding how it should be taught), scientific models of reading and where these might lead in the future, then read this book:

Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg.

Language at the Speed of Sight is an entertaining read that takes a broad view of reading acquisition. You will likely spend considerable chunks of the book thinking, “Do I really need to know this in this much detail?” and “Is this really relevant?” All I can say is that the more I learn about how people learn to read, the more I recognise that subjects like orthographic depth and the historical development of different writing systems are relevant and useful to know.

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If you have 5-10 hours and you are most interested in the initial acquisition of reading and the pedagogical implications, then read this book:

Early Reading Instruction by Diane McGuinness.

Full of references and breakdowns of relevant research, this book gives a grand tour of the science into early reading. It is, in effect, a deeper exploration of most of the subjects explored in the Corrigendum: Ending the Reading Wars paper discussed above. (It is worth noting that I disagree with McGuinness’s conclusions about dyslexia, which are based on the claim that “for a biological theory [of dyslexia] to be accurate, dyslexia would have to occur at the same rate in all populations.” This seems an inaccurate account of how genes and environment can, and do, interact. The definition of dyslexia advocated in Mark Seidenberg’s Language at the Speed of Sight makes more sense to me.) While it is a little dated and contains the odd dubious claim, it remains an excellent introduction into the research on early reading.

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If you have 5-10 hours and you are most interested in immediate practical applications of research into reading, especially in an upper Key Stage 2 and secondary context, then read these two books:

Reading Reconsidered by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway

While at first glance this book seems most relevant to a US context, it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see how the wealth of experience and strategies contained in this text could be applied in almost any setting where children have a solid level of reading fluency. (For more on what I mean by reading fluency, read this: https://primarycolour.home.blog/2019/08/10/how-i-will-teach-reading-this-year/) It is worth noting that this book isn’t directly based on much evidence. (You’ll find almost no references to reading research in the book’s 400+ pages). And some of the book’s practices in particular, such as its version of round robin reading, don’t align particularly well with my interpretation of research evidence. But the actual practical side of working with older, relatively competent readers has very little relevant research, and studies of practising teachers like this potentially offer great insight.

Thinking Reading by James and Dianne Murphy

This short book is one part call to arms for secondary schools who are not yet systematically tackling student’s reading difficulties, one part guide for school leaders and teachers on how to begin to answer that call. It is a perfect companion to Reading Reconsidered for secondary teachers as it addresses a key question that Reading Reconsidered leaves unanswered: “What about the kids whose reading is so weak that they can’t engage with these methods?”

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If you have 5-10 hours and you are most interested in reading comprehension, then read this book:

Understanding and Reading Teaching Comprehension by Jane Oakhill

This book is a readable guide to the research into all the elements that make up reading comprehension – vocabulary, background knowledge, inference, text structure, cohesive devices and comprehension monitoring – with practical recommendations for how these can be taught. However, bear in mind that most of the strategies considered in the book are best taught quickly and explicitly, with little to be gained from extensive instruction. This is discussed here: http://www.danielwillingham.com/uploads/5/0/0/7/5007325/willingham&lovette_2014_can_reading_comprehension_be_taught_.pdf

and here:

https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-on-literacy/how-much-comprehension-strategy-instruction

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If you have 25 hours, then read all of the books mentioned above. While each might not be directly relevant to your context, as a whole they give a broader view of the research behind reading and its implications for instruction.

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If you have more than 25 hours, here are some further options that are well worth your time:

The Science of Reading podcasts by Amplify are pacy interviews about reading science and instruction that traverse all areas of the subject. Guests to far include such luminaries as Tim Shanahan, Natalie Wexler, Tim Rasinski and Emily Hanford. Find it here:  https://amplify.com/science-of-reading-the-podcast/

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Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf

This book covers similar ground to the first section of Language at the Speed of Sight. However, Proust and the Squid provides a more wistful journey through the history and science of reading, along with an engaging and personal (if rose-tinted) exploration of dyslexia and its controversies.

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Bringing Words to Life by Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan

This is a fascinating look at the effective ways of teaching vocabulary.

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The Vocabulary Gap by Alex Quigley

In Closing the Vocabulary Gap, Alex Quigley argues for a thorough, cumulative approach to teaching vocabulary across schools. There are debates to be had about whether a vocabulary ‘gap’ is a useful (or empirically accurate framing), but this doesn’t undercut the practical value of this book.

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Sounds Write – English Spellings: A Lexicon by Dave Philpot, John Walker and Susan Case

This is a detailed discussion and analysis of English spelling from a linguistic phonics perspective.

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Words in the Mind by Jean Aitchison

This is an entertaining and informative guide to the best research on how our mind deals with words and the links between background knowledge and vocabulary:

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Learn more about the best bets for developing reading fluency from this excellent paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328784455_A_SYNTHESIS_OF_RESEARCH_ON_READING_FLUENCY_DEVELOMPENT_STUDY_OF_EIGHT_META-ANALYSES

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Dive into the weeds of comprehension strategies and inference training by reading these papers:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311215549_Activating_Background_Knowledge_An_Effective_Strategy_to_Develop_Reading_Comprehension_Skills

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313687046_Examining_the_Impact_of_Inference_Instruction_on_the_Literal_and_Inferential_Comprehension_of_Skilled_and_Less_Skilled_Readers_A_Meta-Analytic_Review

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49176228_An_instructional_study_Improving_the_inferential_comprehension_of_good_and_poor_fourth-grade_readers

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273162713_Inference_Instruction_for_Struggling_Readers_a_Synthesis_of_Intervention_Research

(It’s worth noting here that some of this research is quite dated; the blog by @TheReadingApe described above is worth reading as context before reading these, as is this blog by @ReadingShanahan, where the sort of inference strategies discussed in the above papers are referred to using the umbrella term “comprehension strategies”: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/comprehension-skills-or-strategies-is-there-a-difference-and-does-it-matter

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There is so much more that I could add, but I hope that the reading material above gives a flavour of the reading research to anyone new to the field.

Feedback is, as ever, appreciated.