Reading is one of the most valuable capabilities that a person can acquire. Every other capability of equal or greater value, such as walking or talking, comes relatively instinctively. In contrast, we have not evolved to be readers. Learning to read is a singular challenge that demands expertise from teachers and school leaders. Thankfully, reading development has been studied for decades. The accumulated evidence, informed by professional experience, can guide us in our aim to give every pupil the best chance of becoming a capable, confident reader…
Reading is the comprehension of visual symbols that represent language. To do this, pupils must develop two capacities that become increasingly integrated as expertise develops – (1) recognising words, and (2) building meaning from those words:
To recognise words on a page, pupils must learn to associate the sounds of our language with visual symbols. (The sounds represented are the smallest chunks of spoken sound that we can categorise, called phonemes. The visual symbols representing these phonemes are letters of the alphabet operating individually or in groups.) Explicit teaching can help pupils to learn these associations and how to use them. This is called phonics. Over time, pupils also associate these visual symbols with units of meaning directly. (Words can be thought of as composed of chunks of meaning called morphemes.) Due to the complexity of our writing system, lots of reading is required for pupils to learn these associations between visual symbols, sound and meaning.
Building meaning from written words uses mostly the same knowledge that is used to build meaning from spoken language: knowledge of concepts that words represent and knowledge of how words interact with each other. This means that developing pupils’ spoken language and their knowledge of the world is key to fostering their ability to read. Building meaning from words is also supported by some knowledge that is unique to written language, including knowledge of how words are presented within texts.
As pupils become more expert at recognising words and building meaning from them, their reading begins to flow. Pupils can reinforce this important sense of fluency through text experience and through rehearsed reading aloud.
Teaching comprehension involves the provision of fascinating, challenging experiences with texts that have been chosen for the breadth and relevance of their content. It also involves awakening pupils to the active, personal nature of comprehension through explanation, modelling and rich discussion.
Pupils learn aspects of reading at different rates. While the same principles apply to all developing readers, struggling readers require targeted teaching that is sensitive to their specific needs, motivation and self-efficacy.
The relationships between teachers, pupils and books is central to the promotion of pupils’ independent reading. Reading aloud to pupils is both a necessity and a privilege.
There are various ways to organise reading instruction. If you keep in mind the ideas outlined above as you construct, implement and evaluate your reading curriculum, then you are likely to give pupils the best chance of becoming capable, confident readers.
Thanks for reading. For those that prefer a visual map to a 500-word summary, just such a visual map can be found here.
And for those of you that would like to read the ~50,000 word version, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading can be found here and at other popular bookshops. All royalties will be donated to the Malaria Consortium, a GiveWell-recommended charity. Massive thanks to everyone who has already bought the book. Even bigger thanks to those who have left a review online. It really makes a difference.
I’m just dropping this into a blog-post as I suspect that this will forever be a work progress, and I’d like it to be kept somewhere accessible in case anyone is interested. The map can be downloaded here: link to visual map
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 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.
So, we’ve established that trying to measure reading comprehension is a non-starter.** From this, we can assume that the results from reading comprehension assessments need to be interpreted very cautiously, especially on the level of the individual pupil.
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 and the world to which it relates 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 content-focused conception of reading comprehension – have asked the same two questions:
“How would we evidence this?”
“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 method of assessment requires you to pretend that reading comprehension is something that it clearly is not, then it’s time to dump that method of assessment. Think instead about how fluently your children read and how 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 assessments may give a very rough idea, but they are not to be relied upon as precise measures of individual progress for all the reasons explained above. It’s time to accept that there are some things that we can measure and other things that we cannot and 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 content-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 content-focused approach to the teaching of reading comprehension aligns with a more accurate view of reading comprehension. It allows teachers to do away with pointless, time-consuming forms of 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 teaching reading, please consider my book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link
All royalties will be going 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.
**** 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.
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 interactswith 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.
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.
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:
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, isteaching 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.
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.
[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.
[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.
If you effectively have no time to dedicate to this goal at present, then get the ball rolling by following these people on Twitter:
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
John Walker is the man responsible for Sounds-Write phonics, and, given this fact, his blog is full of excellent advice for teachers on the subject of early reading: https://theliteracyblog.com/
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:
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.
Where you go after reading this depends on your priorities…
All royalties are going to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well recommended charity.
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.
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.
If you have 5-10 hours and you are most interested in immediate practical applications of research into reading, especially in a 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/)
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 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?”
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
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.
If you have more than 25 hours, here are some further options that are well worth your time:
The Science of Reading podcasts – hosted by Susan Lambert
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/
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.
Bringing Words to Life by Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan
This is a fascinating look at the effective ways of teaching vocabulary
The Vocabulary Gap by Alex Quigley
In Closing the Vocabulary Gap, Alex Quigley argues for a thorough, cumulative approach to teaching vocabulary across schools.
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.
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:
Learn more about the best bets for developing reading fluency from this excellent paper:
(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
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. Now here’s a shameless plug: my book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading is my attempt to summarise the research into teaching from the perspective of an experienced teacher and school leader. I think it has something to offer to trainee teachers, experienced teachers, reading coordinators, school leaders and those teaching reading at secondary schools. All royalties will go to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well recommended charity.
I’m pretty confident that for most of my teaching career I taught reading badly. I assiduously followed whatever structure was handed down from on high – and then ditched it as soon as a new structure was rolled out. As a trainee, I’d read the government-issued Letters and Sounds document, but I didn’t have any idea of how children actually learned to read, which in hindsight seems utterly bonkers. In education we are only ever dealing in best bets, so certainty is always misplaced, but the science behind how people learn to read is arguably the most studied area of cognitive psychology. We should take advantage of that, and this is what I will attempt to do this year.
Here are some key points that I think primary teachers need to understand in order to teach reading well:
Solid
phonological awareness underpins reading. Some children really struggle with
phonics, but make their way towards something resembling fluency through other
means (usually decoding the first few letters of a word followed by excellent
semantic guesswork). In my experience, many of these children eventually come
unstuck as their semantic guesswork increasingly fails when texts become more
complex. (I’ve seen this happen in KS3 with children who have scored well on a
year 6 SATs reading paper.) If a child’s understanding of phonics is weak,
stick with phonics. Even if a child’s grasp of phonics never reaches a high
standard, every small step towards that is a major advantage.
Reading
fluency is an important step between phonics and the skills of reading comprehension.
It needs to be explicitly and regularly taught if the vast majority of students
are to become fluent. Reading fluency can be thought of as consisting of three
elements: automaticity, accuracy and prosody (i.e. fluent readers read quickly,
easily and with the patterns and rhythm of spoken language). Reading fluency is
best achieved through repeated oral reading.[i]
This entails children reading aloud and repeating passages or paragraphs,
consciously aiming for fluent reading. Undertaking this with an adult, while
ideal, is simply not logistically feasible, but reading aloud in dyadic pairs
(described later) is an effective alternative. This is best achieved through
the reading of texts that are somewhat beyond the grasp of the children.
In
order to build up the knowledge and vocabulary upon which their future learning
will rely, children need to read independently and often. However, inculcating
a love of independent reading in children who are not yet fluent is extremely
difficult. It seems to be the case that being a good reader is what initially
causes children to develop beneficial independent reading habits rather than
vice versa,[ii]
though once established the relationship is likely reciprocal.
Comprehension
and inference can be improved through the teaching of generic reading
strategies, but these
strategies have their full impact after a very short period and focusing lots
of attention on these wastes precious time that could be spent on the real
substance of reading, which is…
…vocabulary,
background knowledge and knowledge of syntax. Along with reading fluency,
comprehension is based upon one’s understanding of the words in the text, the
concepts to which the words are directly or indirectly referring and the
structure of the language. Each of these is a huge and diverse knowledge
domain. Due to this, we must understand the importance of text selection.
Children should read a wide variety of non-fiction to develop their knowledge
of the world along with some fiction. (I’d advocate a greater focus on
non-fiction when explicitly teaching reading as children should experience more
fiction when teachers share a chapter book with the class each day.)
The
teaching of spelling rules and morphology is an underrated component of
teaching children to read.[iii]
(Personally, I would add etymology to this mix, but I’m not sure of the
evidence base for this suggestion.)
In contrast, much of the teaching that I have observed (and done) touches on the key points above without ever prioritising them. The reading sessions I have seen instead generally displayed the following attributes:
The texts are chosen to match the reading ability of the children and sometimes the topic children are learning about, but they are not chosen for the explicit purpose of building up children’s knowledge of the world.
The vocabulary and context of the text is sometimes discussed, but it is seen as secondary to the generic inference or comprehension skills that are apparently being developed in the session.
Fluency is rarely the explicit aim. Children may spend some time reading aloud to a teacher or a partner, but this rarely adds up to more than 10-15 minutes of reading aloud per week.
Based on what I have seen, I think a shift in perspective is required: we must focus on developing reading fluency. In addition, we must remember that when children are reading, what is being learned is entirely contained within the vocabulary and knowledge inherent to the text itself. If the text is about volcanoes, then that day’s lesson is about learning the background knowledge and vocabulary relating to volcanoes (along with whatever syntactical structures are contained within the text.) When a child asks where volcanoes are found and the teacher shows a map of the globe with the tectonic plate margins delineated, thatis teaching reading as much as discussing why the author chose a specific simile or explaining how to summarise a paragraph. The ability to read is like an ability to see the images described in a pointillist painting where each person sees a different number of dots on their own canvas: experienced readers have enough dots to comprehend the entire image in fine detail; beginning readers can only see a few dots on their canvas. Tempting though the prospect is, trying to directly teach the ‘skill’ of reading comprehension is like trying to explain what the picture shows as if that will make it actually appear. Doing so has brief advantages, but the bulk of our teaching is better conceived as adding as many dots as we can to the children’s canvasses and spreading these dots as widely as possible.
Here’s how
I will try to achieve that this year:
1. At the beginning of this year, I will hear each child read to find which of them are fluent readers. (As a rule of thumb, I count children’s reading as fluent when they can read aloud at more than 120 words per minute with good prosody from an age-appropriate text and then answer a basic comprehension question.) Where phonics is an issue, systematic interventions will be put into place or whole-class phonics teaching will be implemented if more than 20% of the children require it. If phonics is necessary, this will naturally require familiarity with my school’s phonics scheme.
2. If fewer
than 80% of the children are fluent, as I expect to be the case, I will
undertake daily fluency practice in mixed-ability dyadic pairs (a practice
outlined in some detail in Timothy Shanahan’s blog.[iv])
This entails children reading to one another from a text aimed at the best
readers in the class for 20 minutes in total – 10 minutes each in alternating periods
of roughly 5 minutes. All of the children will read the same text. Sometimes
the paragraph will be read aloud to the children beforehand; other times they
will dive in without this assistance. The children will read designated
passages repeatedly – up to three or four times – aiming for fluency. The listening
partners will keep track of where the reading partner is up to using a ruler
and will be trained to offer support in decoding unfamiliar words. Where
neither partner can decode a word, they will be expected to write it down for
me to discuss later in the session. All students will gain from explicitly
developing their fluency in this way, but the dysfluent will gain the most. The
final 10 minutes of these half-hour sessions will be spent sharing the
knowledge and vocabulary underpinning the text and discussing questions
relating to comprehension, inference and authorial intent. (Where necessary,
some of this discussion will take place before the children begin to read, so
that the fluency practice is bookended by discussion of vocabulary and
knowledge.)
3. If more than 80% of the children are fluent, I will undertake daily fluency practice in a guided group with the few children who are not yet fluent. At the same time, the rest of the class will read longer texts, sometimes in silence, sometimes aloud with a partner, but without the need for repeated reading, something most useful for developing fluency. As before, the final third of the session will be spent discussing unfamiliar vocabulary and the knowledge underpinning the text. There is an argument to be made here that the fluent readers are getting less of my time than those that are dysfluent. While this may be true, it is not to my mind an issue of fairness; the fluent readers can learn while reading independently as long as I discuss the text with them before and/or afterwards; the same is not true for dysfluent readers. If all children reach fluency, we will read a variety of texts together, sometimes in silence and sometimes aloud. At this stage, my key considerations will be mileage (the amount of reading my class is undertaking each day) and content (the knowledge of the language and of the world needed to comprehend the text).
4. Texts
are chosen with variety in mind. Through the school year, children will read
various texts on subjects from across the curriculum, but many that I choose
will go beyond this. Texts might discuss marsupials, hurricanes, Gilgamesh, the
history of flight or Mozart. All of these subjects – and the language and
knowledge gained – adds a new set of dots to that canvas.
5. Beyond reading sessions, spelling and morphology will be explicitly taught. In particular, the explicit teaching of morphology will use words that the class already know to develop familiarity with the patterns of suffixes and prefixes that they will encounter frequently when they read. Word matrices can be a useful way of showing this:
6. I will spend at least 20 minutes each day reading stories to my class. Sometimes I will pause to discuss unfamiliar vocabulary, metaphors, stylistic features, etc, but more often than not the focus will be on the right pace to encourage engagement. The primary aim here will be to associate reading with enjoyment. Anything else is a bonus. [v]
7. I will do everything in my power to encourage children to read at home independently if they are fluent, including recommending books. (@smithsmm and @MissL_Y5 are both great Twitter people to ask for advice on children’s books. I’d highly recommend that you follow both.) For children who are not fluent, I will discuss how parents can best support their children by reading with them at home, including the basics of fluency practice and how to segment and blend words. (Regardless, it’s worth noting here that parental support is necessary for but not sufficient for many children to learn to read. Lots of children can be read with at home every night in a family that values books and still not necessarily becoming fluent readers. Schools must take ultimate responsibility for children learning to read.) Over the longer term, independent reading is absolutely essential. There simply isn’t enough time in the school day for children to build up the bank of orthographic knowledge that is a requisite of mature reading.
And that’s about it. How I teach reading is a work in progress. It is an attempt to align what I’m doing with the vast body of available research and the interpretations of this research made by experts in the field. I’m fairly confident that my views will evolve through the year, and any advice you can offer – or reading you can direct me towards – that will accelerate that evolution would be much appreciated.
I was always jealous of people who could do cryptic crosswords. Observed up close, their completing of each clue seemed like a small act of genius, the answers appearing from nowhere, usually making some sense only in retrospect. I could see that there was a great deal of skill involved or at least I thought so. My attempts to learn the skill of crosswording began with guides to cryptic crosswords, which revealed that there were only a few different ways that a clue can be formed. For example, one clue type involves breaking down a word into chunks and then signaling each piece elsewhere in the clue. Here are a couple of examples:
Quiet bird has a sign on a strange occurrence (10) PHENOMENON (quiet = p; bird = hen; sign = omen; on = on)
Stop! Everyone on the road. (5) STALL (road = st; everyone = all)
I’ve had some experience of musical notation so the fact that the word ‘quiet’ might signify the letter p made sense. However, road signifying st (from street) caught me off guard. “What other crossword abbreviations might I need to know?” I thought. Fortunately, Wikipedia had me covered.[i] I found to my dismay that there were literally hundreds of abbreviations. Not only that, but the Wikipedia list – according to other crossworders – was nowhere near exhaustive, and this was just one type of clue. With each new clue type that I encountered, there appeared to be an entire language of signifiers and abbreviations. On top of this, solving each clue depended utterly on the limits of my vocabulary. What had appeared from the outset to be a single learnable skill was in fact a vast array of overlapping fragments of knowledge. It was like the famous art gallery scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Cameron, a teenager bunking off school, stares deeper and deeper into a pointillist masterpiece and sees the unified scene disintegrate into a multitude of individual coloured dots.[ii]
I know, I know: a truanting teenager choosing to go to the Art Institute of Chicago to contemplate existence in front of a Seurat painting is unrealistic. They’d choose a Rothko. Duh.
I think that my crossword experience can help us understand how to teach other skills that in reality consist of a vast array of overlapping fragments of knowledge, things like inference in reading…
Here is a statement from the national curriculum for year 5:
By the end of year 5,
children should be able to understand what they read by drawing inferences such
as inferring characters’ feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, and
justifying inferences with evidence.
Assuming that this drawing and justifying of inferences is to be performed using age-appropriate texts, a teacher is left with the same one question that they wrestle with most days: how on Earth do I teach this? Far too often, teachers’ understandable conclusion is to model the supposed skill of inference with one text and then have children mimic the skill with another text, one containing language and background knowledge with which the children are already familiar. This is the equivalent of teaching a novice crossworder by showing one clue and its solution and then giving them a clue of their own to solve, ensuring that the abbreviations, signifiers and vocabulary involved are already understood by the novice. In other words, in attempting to evidence a child’s understanding of a generic skill that doesn’t really exist, teachers – through necessity – avoid introducing children to the new language and background knowledge upon which inference is really based. If this all sounds slightly despairing, then fear not as perhaps our crossword example can shed some light on the methods through which we can develop children’s ability to make inferences while reading.
I found that by far the most effective way to learn how to solve crosswords was to place each question and solution side by side. For every clue that proved impenetrable – at first, this was all of them – I went straight to the answer and attempted to understand how it was derived. Sometimes the entire clue made sense; sometimes only parts did. Nevertheless, the more my own internal store of abbreviations and signifiers grew, the quicker I could isolate and understand those that were a little rarer. (Knowledge assists in the acquisition of more knowledge, a relationship that makes initial learning intimidating, but that eventually encourages mastery.) In short, to get better at answering crossword clues, I had to be shown thousands upon thousands of them, each one adding or reinforcing a fragment of relevant knowledge.
The parallels between this experience and learning to infer while reading are clear. Both crosswording and reading inference are the result of countless accumulated experiences of language, remembered and connected. In both cases we must remember that, first and foremost, we are building knowledge of language and of the world, something that has consequences for how we teach reading:
Ensure that your reading lessons revolve around children encountering and understanding *lots* of text. Do not underestimate the quantitative aspects of reading instruction.
2. Ensure children learn from a wide variety of texts, carefully chosen to develop children’s knowledge of language and of the world.
3. Make explicit connections to where children might have seen particular words or concepts before, perhaps in other texts you have read.
4. Ensure children become familiar with key cohesive devices in written language and how they work, specifically connectives and pronouns. (It might surprise you how rarely some children grasp what is being referred to by a given pronoun.)
5. How much independent work is appropriate will depend on where the children are in their learning journey and the difficulty of the text. When first starting out, the balance between independent practice and explicit explanation will strongly (but not entirely) favour the latter. There is much to value in simply explaining the meaning of some text, but children also need opportunities to grapple with meaning independently.
Thank you for reading. Constructive feedback is appreciated.
Primary Colour 