What We Need To Know About Reading In Secondary School #1
How were you taught to read?
Can you remember anything about the process? What about learning to
talk? Can you remember that?
Most people will have little or no memory of the process of
language acquisition beyond those cute stories we are told about the words we
could not pronounce. I wanted a “big R” for my birthday. Turns out, I had seen
a violin in a music shop window, and I was trying to say guitar”!
The acquisition of a first language – sometimes called a
“mother tongue” – seems to be a natural process which the human brain has
evolved to undergo. All the evidence suggests that unless a child is deprived
of linguistic input in the critical period up to the age of 5 or 6, they will generate
grammar. Even silent children who do not speak will have a complete grammar by
the time they are about 3 years old.
The same is not true of reading and writing – those are not
natural skills and we have to be taught them. The good news is that, unlike
language acquisition, there is no maturation barrier – it is never too late!
Winning the literacy lottery
If you are reading this, then it is likely that like me you
won the literacy lottery. I had two articulate, literate parents, a house full
of books and access to the public library every week. I did not have a specific
learning difficulty with regard to reading such as dyslexia. Not every child is
so lucky.
I know that I went to school at the age of 5 in 1975 (there
was no Reception class back then), I could recognise and write my own name, I
knew the alphabet and could read the books in the book box with relative ease.
Reading was part of the culture I grew up in. There were
books in the house – quite a lot of them – and my brother and I had all the
classics of the age. I grew up with Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, The Ladybird
books, Janet and John and The Beano. Later there were the short stories of Ray
Bradbury, novels by Jane Austin, my mother’s Georgette Heyer historical
romances and magazines like ‘Jackie’ and ‘Just 17’.
I grew up surrounded by words: my mother, a teacher herself,
talked to me non-stop apparently and my engineer father read to me every night
without fail. He continued to do this, even when I could read myself. He read
me the Hobbit. When I wanted him to read me “The Lord of The Rings” I got short
shrift! Instead we listened to the radio play version on Radio 4 together.
As a successful reader with adult competencies, it is hard
to imagine NOT being able to read. Once you can do it, it is impossible not to.
Look around you at any text with writing on it and try not to read it!
The Lottery ‘Losers’
It has taken a good deal of mental effort on my part to put
myself in the shoes of the child struggles to read, but if I am to be the
teacher I want to be for my students, this is something I MUST do because a
quarter of our children cannot read well enough to be successful at school.
25% of children in England and Wales do not reach the
expected level of reading skill by the end of KS2. In 2019 it was 73%.
25% of 15-year-olds have a reading age of 12 years or under,
which means they cannot access the GCSE syllabus adequately.
According to a DfE
poll , only a third of children are read to daily at home.
1 in 8 disadvantaged children do not own book.
If you have no books in your house, nobody reads to you or
with you at home then you are not going to see yourself as part of a culture of
readers.
Young adults entering the world with poor literacy are
disadvantaged in every way possible – and it is not their fault.
Why is reading so hard?
As I said before, it takes some mental effort to put
ourselves in the shoes of a struggling reader so allow me to take you into
their world.
Can you read this?
If you are a scientist or a mathematician, then you may
recognise some of the Greek letters but even then you are probably missing a
vital component: the relationship between the letters (the graphemes) and the
sounds (the phonemes).
Try again with this version of the same text in Old English
(c.900 AD):
Now we can make some connection between the graphemes and
phonemes, although some are unfamiliar. We might even be able to recognise some
words.
Does it help if I tell you it is The Lord’s Prayer?
Here it is in Latin:
At least now we can decode it - read it out loud even if we cannot understand
every word.
Trying to read these versions of the Lord’s prayer takes us
close to the experience of learning to read. The first struggle is to decode
the text – to match the letters or groups of letters to sounds.
The next is to comprehend the text – and in order to do
that, you need an appropriate vocabulary and fluency in your
reading. This takes daily practice and lots of input from expert readers, so it
makes sense that a good chunk of the two-thirds of our children not being read
to daily and the 1 in 8 disadvantaged children with no books at home are going
to struggle.
The ones that DO succeed are down to the skill of our
Primary colleagues.
How Are Children Taught To Read?
There is an ongoing debate about how to teach reading in
Primary schools, but the dominant methodology in England and Wales is synthetic
phonics. It is not perfect – for reasons I will
Synthetic phonics separates the sounds in a word and then synthesises
them – this is called segmenting and blending – we used to call
it “sounding out” the word.
Step 1 is to teach children the consonant
sounds and the short vowels. These can they be blended into CVC words (consonant vowel consonant). J,
V, W, X, Y, Z and Q are taught later than A,B,C etc. as they are less common.
C-A-T spells
Z-I-P spells
This is not so easy
as it sounds. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but there are 44 sounds they can make, so letters are combined
to make different sounds.
Step 2 is to teach the combinations of letters
called digraphs (two letters make one sound) so we can read
CHIP SEE MASH SOCK
and THIN
Step 3 focuses on blends – these are common
letter combinations where you hear all the sounds
Primary teachers call these blends or consonant clusters.
There are lots of them. Some come at the start of words (such as step,
clap, frog, and street). Some come at the end (such as end,
lamp and best). Some words have blends at both ends (such as
blend, stamp, and crank).
Step 4 is the big leap. Long vowels in English can be made
by combining letters into vowel digraphs. Each long vowel can be made by more than
one vowel digraph.
SEE SEA
PAY PAID
HIGH PIE
To further understand the complexity, think about the number
of sounds ough can make
·
Tough
·
Through
·
Bough
·
Cough
·
Thought
·
Hiccough
As well as digraphs, there are trigraphs and quadgraphs
to encounter before a child can decode the English writing system.
Phonics though, only takes a child so far. There are many,
many words which cannot be decoded using phonics called sight words, tricky
words or sometimes exception words.
For example
·
What is a female sheep called?
·
What do you call a piece of land surrounded by
water?
·
What is four times two?
·
What do you walk down in a supermarket or
church?
All this, and the child has not learned to read because
reading is more that decoding. Reading is comprehension which
requires vocabulary and fluency.
How does this impact on me as a secondary phase
teacher?
Remember the 25% who did not read well enough at the end of
KS2 and the 25% of GCSE candidates with a reading age of under 12? They are in our
classrooms, unable to access the texts put in front of them independently. And
they are not just the children diagnosed with dyslexia – they can be difficult
to spot sometimes because the majority of them will look like readers much of
the time:
·
they are silent and looking at the book when
asked to read
·
they can read the words aloud when asked to do
so
·
they join in with Q and A
Appearance are deceptive though. More frequently than you
might think, we have students who do not know all of the long vowel digraphs in
Year 7; students do not know the alphabet well enough to use an index; students
whose lack of fluency means that they do not understand what they have decoded;
students whose gaps in vocabulary make comprehension very difficult and
students who cannot skim and scan a text.
Go back to the experience of trying to read ‘The Lord’s
Prayer’ for a moment. Did it help when you knew what the text was by the way?
It probably did a little – as then you have a frame of reference for what you
are looking at. You might now the prayer by heart having said it daily at
school or as part of a church service. If you have no frame of reference for
the prayer, then it helps very little.
Here is the prayer one more time in Modern English. Look at
it from the point of view of an 11-year-old who is unfamiliar with it – or even
knows it by heart but does not have the background knowledge to understand its
meaning.
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.
Amen
In his book ‘Closing the Reading Gap’, Alex Quigley talks
about the ‘Arduous Eight’ features of complex texts which make them hard to
read. For most children, it is not the decoding of texts which is the biggest
barrier to understanding, it is these eight features.
In order to read and comprehend the prayer you need a lot of
background information, an understanding of abstract imagery and a familiarity
with non-standard syntactic structures. It may be short, but it is full of complexity:
Father – a metaphor..
Heaven – an abstract concept
Kingdom – an abstract concept
Will – an
abstract noun
Daily bread – a metaphor
Sin – an abstract concept
Temptation – an
abstract concept
What can we do to help?
12 things to definitely do…
Do make sure you know who is likely to struggle in your
classes. Those with diagnosed difficulties such as dyslexia.
Do watch for the signs of someone struggling – don’t be
fooled by that compliant head’s down pose.
Do reduce the amount of text presented at one time – some
children benefit from covering part of the text up to make it less
intimidating.
Do chunk texts that you produce so they are more manageable.
Do read texts aloud to children. It is vital that children
have fluent reading modelled for them.
Do re-read texts so children can process different things on
different readings – or you read once and then have different voices read parts
out.
Do give independent reading a purpose – instead of “read
this” say look for X in this text.
Do pick out key or unfamiliar vocabulary and talk about it
and around it to help build schemas.
Do ask lots of questions to check understanding and make
sure everybody “gets it”.
Do use dual coding and images to support reading.
Do teach key concepts before asking them to read about them
(ses the ‘arduous eight’)
Do use Loom videos or other methods to record explanations
rather than writing long instructions.
And 3 things not to do…
Don’t dumb down your content, and don’t dumb down the texts
you put in front of children. I teach children with reading ages of below 10.0
in Y7 and Y8 – some as low as 7.0 - and we read (and enjoy) Charles Dickens,
William Shakespeare, and Arthur Conan-Doyle. They are entitled to access to the
full richness of the curriculum. This is about reducing the extraneous
cognitive load that reading represents for some children.
Don’t assume children have the same cultural capital and
“hinterland” for texts as you. They don’t. (see further reading)
Don’t set lots of reading-heavy work for cover lessons for
weak readers – without your expertise they are likely to take very little away
from it except that they are not good at your subject.
Don’t expect weak readers to read independently at home when
they can’t do it in school. So many HL tasks start out “Read this and…” If you
spend 30 minutes decoding, there is not time for the activity.
Further Reading
More from Alex Quigley
‘Closing The Reading Gap’ and ‘Closing The Vocabulary Gap’ by
Alex Quigley (Routledge)
Alex Quigley’s blog https://www.theconfidentteacher.com/
More on phonics
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/the-alphablocks-guide-to-phonics
More on supporting weak readers
https://researchschool.org.uk/durrington/news/supporting-struggling-readers-at-secondary-school/
More on Hinterland
I have done a lot of reading lately about reading - how very meta. This blog is me thinking aloud and explaining what I think I know to myself as much as to anyone else!
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