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Social and Emotional Health: A Whole School Response
Phil Stock, Director, explains how SEMH principles can help develop a caring and supportive culture and reduce pupil absence.
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by Greenshaw Research School
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As part of the Greenshaw Research School Developing Reading Series, Dr Jessie Ricketts, Head of the Language and Reading Acquisition (LARA)research lab at Royal Holloway, University of London, delivered a fascinating webinar exploring the relationship between reading, oracy and vocabulary.
As the webinar progressed, it became increasingly clear that now more than ever, we need to consider how best to support our students’ reading development, particularly the disadvantaged who will perhaps have been most affected by school closures.
Despite the urgent need to focus on reading and oral vocabulary development in early adolescence, Ricketts acknowledges that there is in fact very little research into this area, with much of the existing research focusing instead on early reading development.
So, what does the existing research tell us about reading development in early adolescence and how can we use this information to support teaching and learning in the classroom?
Being able to read effectively hinges on two key components: word reading (being able to read words accurately and fluently) and comprehension (understanding the meaning of the texts being read). These components are known as the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer 1986) and Ricketts defines them as essential in contributing to a student’s reading success.
In the early stages of reading development, she highlighted that the focus is on phonology (what words sound like) and semantics (what words mean). Ricketts suggested that there are many ways of thinking about word knowledge and that we can explore these in the classroom in the following ways:
Ricketts argued that vocabulary is about a lot more than simply placing a label on an object and creating a mapping between the two, although in the early stages this is of course important as young children point to words and label them.
She also explained that once we start learning to read, we then also begin to add visual word knowledge to our memory store of words. For example, we add orthography (written form of words) to what we know about phonology and semantics. She identified that we have a stored knowledge of words that we can use in different ways: understanding words, speaking words, reading words and spelling words.
Word knowledge is described by Ricketts as being ‘a building block for reading and oracy’ and that once reading is secure, it provides important opportunities for learning new words. This is referred to by Ricketts as ‘a virtuous circle’, referring to the work of Pamela Snow (2016):Language is literacy is language.
During the webinar, Ricketts shared some of the key messages from the Aston Literacy Project, which tracked reading and vocabulary progress in the same children as they moved from primary to secondary school (Year 5 to Year 8).
Interestingly, the research identified that there is in fact progress in vocabulary and reading between primary and secondary and that there is no current evidence of a primary/secondary slump, which is often assumed to be the case. Ricketts explained that progress measures were found to be very similar to those that you would experience during a normal summer break. In contrast, reading comprehension did not experience the same growth during the summer holiday, as seen in the graphs below.
The project also measured Tier 1 vocabulary and curriculum relevant vocabulary and found that in terms of everyday vocabulary, there appeared to be progress across transitions and summer holidays. However, with regards to curriculum specific vocabulary, growth was demonstrated more so when students were in school.
Tiers of vocabulary are championed by Ricketts as being a useful distinction in thinking about the kinds of words that we want and need our students to know. The importance of Tier 2 vocabulary was also highlighted by Ricketts in Bridging the Word Gap at Transition, where she suggests that if we’re going to teach words at school to pupils, then it’s Tier 2 words that we need to teach, because they are the words that are really going to help pupils operate across different topics.
This finding also raises the question as to the potential impact that recent school closures may have on students who had challenges with reading beforehand and whether this will indeed result in a further widening of the disadvantage gap. These concerns are also illustrated in the recent work carried out by Oxford University Press (OUP) and the Centre for Education and Youth (CfEY) who state that 92% of teachers think school closures (due to Covid-19) have contributed to a widening of the word gap.
Dr Ricketts also had other suggestions to support in the classroom which include:
We are now looking forward to hearing more from Dr Jessie Ricketts with regards to her future research on exploring the use of incentives and rewards to promote reading and the development of a co-designed intervention to motivate and engage readers.
Amy Carlile, Evidence Lead in Education
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Phil Stock, Director, explains how SEMH principles can help develop a caring and supportive culture and reduce pupil absence.
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