Research School Network: Improving Secondary Literacy Guidance Report Available now!

This long awaited guidance report is finally with us! After the success of the KS1 and KS2 Literacy Guidance Reports, practitioners across our region have been regularly asking us when will the secondary document be available and it’s fantastic to be able to share that it is now available from the EEF website.

It’s jam-packed full of practical recommendations and tools for practitioners and links well to the KS1 and KS2 guidance report, showing how the evidence base keeps on moving. Practitioners across the phases shouldn’t miss out on a chance to delve into its pages. So many practical suggestions that have implications across all phases about how we teach literacy as a disciplinary subject, how we practically support teaching in knowing how to support vocabulary development and how to support our learners to face the complex task of writing.

Here are our top 5 messages not to be missed! But don’t take us at our word – download your own copy and see what other golden nuggets there are to take away and improve our teaching of literacy. 

The Simple View of Writing (page 19) offers a good framework for understanding the challenge of writing on working memory and what we can do to unpack the demand.

Page 20 offers a range of practical suggestions to break down the process to support our learners:
• Providing word-level, sentence-level and whole text level instruction• Ensuring that students understand the subject specific connotations of Tier 2 vocabulary
• Explicitly teaching students planning strategies, such as how to use graphic organisers
• Helping students monitor and review their writing,
• Removing over time assistance from the teacher and supporting students to become increasingly independent

Prioritise Vocabulary Teaching

We talk so often in education about the importance of vocabulary and addressing the vocabulary gap – page 12 offers a fabulous summary of a range of practical ideas to make this a reality.
Promising ways to promote targeted instruction of academic language in the classroom include:
• Exploring common word roots
• Undertaking ​‘word building’ activities,
• Encouraging independent word-learning strategies
• Using graphic organisers and concept maps to break down complex academic terms in visual ways to aid understanding.
• Undertaking regular low-stakes assessment, such as quizzes, to provide multiple exposures to complex subject specific vocabulary, before applying this vocabulary in use
• Consistently signposting synonyms so that students recognise how some Tier 2 vocabulary items can enhance the accuracy and sophistication of their talk and writing in the subject domain.
• Combining vocabulary development with spelling instruction.

Develop Students’ as Strategic Readers to Support them Accessing Academic Texts
Page 15 links well to reading strategies promoted in the KS2 Literacy Guidance Report around explicitly teaching reading comprehension strategies.
• Activating prior knowledge
• Prediction
• Questioning
• Clarifying
• Summarising
This comes from a wealth of evidence both in terms of reading and metacognitive approaches to learning as a whole. Reciprocal Reading is one example of this approach. The challenge is to embed these strategies across departments to support students in translating their skills and understanding across subjects, maximising their chances to universalise over needing to re-learn similar ideas in different subjects.

Provide Structured Opportunities to Talk
The Accountable Talk framework highlights the importance of accountability to:
• Knowledge — for example, by seeking to be accurate and true;
• Reasoning — for example, by providing justifications for claims; and
• Community — for example, listening and showing respect to others. (Page 27)
Importantly, the framework encourages teachers to think about the subject specific features of discussion. For example, in seeking to make students accountable to knowledge during a debate, a religious studies teacher could prompt speakers to refer back to quotes from key texts. Likewise, the teacher will be prepared to step in to correct misconceptions that arise as the debate develops.5

Page 29 offers practical tips for developing metacognitive talk into the classroom, which focuses on the processes of learning, and on dealing with barriers to learning.
• Teachers modelling
• Deliberately sequencing talk activities alongside reading and writing tasks
• Using sentence starters and prompts
• Selecting questions that are open-ended, well-suited to discussion and allow opportunity for authentic student response
• Setting goals and roles
• Using wait time to develop students’ responses
• Giving precise feedback relating to different elements of accountability
• Considering how to promote high quality talk as part of departmental and whole school training

Promoting Disciplinary Literacy
In all the points above, the challenge of embedding the ideas and approaches across a whole school and a range of subjects presents itself consistently. Recommendation 1 looks at this and acknowledges that while secondary teachers are likely to have experienced a significant amount of training focused on literacy, or been asked to support new whole school literacy initiatives, many teachers feel ill-equipped to improve literacy outcomes in their subject area.

Some practical suggestions on page 8 include:
• Auditing existing literacy practices, attitudes, and resources in school — involving both teachers and students; this could include an evaluation of existing literacy policies and roles such as the literacy coordinator;
• Creating subject specific literacy plans, rooted in the discipline, that address barriers to accessing the curriculum related to reading, writing and communication;
• Supporting teachers to define effective reading, writing, and talk in their subjects; for example, history teachers might discuss what reading strategies are deployed by historians to appraise historical sources;
• Evaluating the quality and complexity of existing reading materials in school, assessing the degree of academic challenge such texts pose to our secondary school students as they progress through school; relating this to baseline data of students’ reading ability, and;
• Ensuring that the development of disciplinary literacy is coherently aligned with curriculum development — for example, in Art, that the development of drawing skill is paired with teaching students how to make high quality annotations utilising specialist vocabulary.

For your own copy of the guidance report, click here:
http://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/improving-literacy-in-secondary-schools.