: Reciprocal Reading: Making the Implicit, Explicit Jake Howcroft, Cornwall RS ELE reviews strategies to support pupils in building positivity around reading.

Having scoured and searched for hours, you saunter into period one with the gem of an article that is not only appropriately pitched but also acutely relevant to your course. Inevitably, this will prompt inspiring discussions that will challenge deep academic thinking, expand students’ command of tier-three vocabulary and broaden their cultural capital. A hush drops in the class as, enthralled, they ravenously tear through every word while you patiently wait for sparks to fly. You chuck out one of your carefully prepared explorative questions; however, instead of the thoughtful insights you were anticipating, you are steamrollered by the infamous, dreaded three words – ​“I don’t know”.

Your comprehension questions have fallen flat and the students now stare blankly at you – lost, confused, frustrated. Rather than racing through complex concepts, you find yourself firefighting, trying to engage students, desperately seeking out the obstacle that has prevented them from accessing the text. Did the students struggle with the concepts? Were the tone and vocabulary inaccessible? Did the students have low resilience, poor reading fluency or were they simply not engaged with the learning? There are a litany of factors that prevent students from engaging with challenging texts but it is our role to support them, foster independence and teach strategies to persevere with reading.

As the EEF Guidance Report on Secondary Literacy outlines, ​“literacy is the key to academic success” with over 120,000 disadvantaged students entering secondary school below the expected standard of reading. It is therefore imperative that in our lessons, not only do we expose students with opportunities to read a range of academic texts, we also have to make these experiences of reading successful. As the Matthew Effect outlines, building positivity around reading engenders a greater love of reading which in turn will allow catch up to take place. Once we have students with low literacy feeling successful in class reading the texts we have carefully selected, we can start the process of supporting our disadvantaged students to thrive at school.

The EEF’s teaching and learning toolkit directs teachers towards metacognition as having a ​“high impact for very low cost, based on extensive evidence”. Before writing an essay, tackling a complex scientific enquiry or approaching the majority of activities in our lessons, we regularly ask the students to reflect on the skills required and to evaluate their progress. We expose how we think, to model the strategies that provide us with the answers and responses that we want students to create. Why would this be any different when reading a challenging text? As skilled readers with extensive experience, the degree of automaticity in teachers makes it difficult for us to reflect on the skills we regularly use to understand and grapple with difficult texts which in turn makes it hard to model what ​‘good reading’ looks like.

A tool that we can use to guide students to explicitly work on the skills of critical reading is to use reciprocal reading roles as proposed in the EEF Guidance Report ​‘Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools’. Reciprocal reading involves breaking down the activity of reading for comprehension into multiple roles to allow students to view reading as a skill with multiple aspects that can be individually honed. The skills can be initially be broken down into four roles:

• Clarifier – identifying challenging phrases, sophisticated vocabulary or complex concepts to explain.
• Summariser – breaking down detailed extracts into concise, clear explanations by identifying relevant information.
• Predictor – making connections in texts to identify the relevance of the extracts and to use the information learned to make predictions related to the broader context of the subject.
• Questioner – framing questions to check for understanding and to develop critical reflection on the concepts within.

These roles can be framed in multiple methods, typically as individual, differentiated roles shared out within a group who enact these roles whilst reading a passage. According to the EEF teaching and learning toolkit, productive talk can contribute toward six months of additional progress; therefore, facilitating and scaffolding opportunities to engage in structured discussions around reading will likely have a meaningful impact. By providing explicit expectations of the reading roles and assigning them to individuals in groups, students can scaffold the reading process for each other whilst also deepening each other’s understanding of disciplinary skills within each subject. The differentiated range of roles allows students with low literacy to work with confident, avid readers. Allowing all students to discuss what they have read, whilst also modelling active reading skills to each other, can both develop reading competence and the comprehension of essential content.

Alternatively, these roles can be framed as lesson activities that model the reading sequence as pre-reading, active reading and post-reading. This can involve encouraging students to engage in predictions before reading by scanning texts for individual words, interpreting headings and discussing images embedded within them. Clarifying can take place as an active reading strategy in the form of scaffolded comprehension questions that: target potential misconceptions; support connections to prior learning; and decode challenging vocabulary. Summarising can be both an active and post-reading strategy with text marking, highlighting or categorising information leading into summary writing. Similarly, questioning lends itself to both active reading and post reading tasks with explorative, open-ended questions during the reading process or activities afterwards where students respond to or craft their own questions. Providing students with opportunities to engage in these activities in teacher-organised tasks can serve as a preparatory step before students independently enact these roles in groups.

Finally, it is important to note that reciprocal reading roles can and should be adapted to meet the disciplinary reading requirements for individual subjects. An English student is asked to read in a different manner to a geographer, historian and scientist. For example, an English student is likely to question writer intention and the connotations of language whereas a Historian is likely to question the utility of a source and the relative significance of evidence. We should therefore guide our students in their enactment of these roles towards the way we read as experts in the subject.

By making the process, conventions and skills of reading explicit, clear and predictable within our subjects, we can begin to nourish the inspiring conversations we dream of when selecting texts for our students to read.

EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit – Oral Language Interventions: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/oral-language-interventions

EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit – Metacognition: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/metacognition-and-self-regulation?utm_source=/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/metacognition-and-self-regulation&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=site_search&search_term=metacognition

EEF Guidance Report – Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools: https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/eef-guidance-reports/literacy-ks3-ks4/EEF_KS3_KS4_LITERACY_GUIDANCE.pdf?v=1705777561


EEF Guidance Report – Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning: https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/eef-guidance-reports/metacognition/EEF_Metacognition_and_self-regulated_learning.pdf?v=1705896348


Matthew Effect Blog: https://learningspy.co.uk/learning/the-matthew-effect-why-literacy-is-so-important/