Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction

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In addition, time in literacy lessons was often spent analysing a text with few writing skills being taught. This became increasingly evident when I looked at work in pupils’ books and talked to children about links in the curriculum.

Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with teachers, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction. Reading fiction and non-fiction

This involves texts that are over 50 years old and feature vocabulary and syntax that is vastly different and typically more complex than texts written today.

Teachers read to children but it wasn’t consistent across year groups and books were seldom finished. Reading widely and often increases pupils’ vocabulary because they encounter words they would rarely hear or use in everyday speech. Reading also feeds pupils’ imagination and opens up a treasure-house of wonder and joy for curious young minds. Redesigning our reading curriculum It’s all very well saying that reading was on our school development plan, but what was it that we wanted to change? We knew why we had to have it as a focus, but needed a clear whole-school picture. Shanahan’s point is that reading aloud is valuable insofar as it improves students’ reading fluency, which is strongly associated with comprehension (e.g. see the EEF’s most recent guidance on literacy at key stage 2). But, Shanahan argues, students need large volumes of practice to improve reading fluency – taking turns one-at-a-time is ahighly inefficient way of providing this. At the time I was teaching in Y4 and identified that while we were using texts in literacy, we weren’t giving children opportunities to read a book without having to keep stopping and analysing it.After spending time in classrooms and holding discussions with teachers, it was clear that we didn’t have a consistent whole-school approach to reading. We decided that reading needed a dedicated, non-negotiable space in the daily timetable. Distinct reading and literacy lessons Our vision was to prepare pupils for university and college, where they’ll mostly be reading non-fiction articles. Overhauling the way we taught reading had been on our school development plan for a long time, but other things became a priority and it kept on getting pushed further down the list.