Research School Network: What is literacy? Because of the size and complexity of literacy we need to attend carefully to what aspects are most relevant for our setting

Literacy.

What does that word mean to you? I’m confident that whatever it means to you is not quite the same as for your colleague down the corridor, and certainly different from the school down the road. That’s not to say there won’t be similarities and cross over: definitions are likely to include reference to reading, writing, speaking and listening. But then we could start the process all over again.

Reading.

What does that word mean to you? It’s going to differ markedly depending on the phase you are teaching. Your strategies (if you have any explicit ones) for guiding reading will have been influenced by a myriad of factors including: who trained you; any engagement with research; the approaches of the schools you have taught at; and of course your own beliefs and self-efficacy around the act of reading.

And by the way, how difficult is reading? As expert, confident readers we tend to forget about the sheer amount of time and effort it takes to learn this vital skill until we are confronted with reading that takes us out of our comfort zone: just read this abstract and reflect on how you’re feeling afterwards. The reading we are asking pupils to do is likely to make them feel everything you are feeling now and more. How do we support them through this?

Next, writing.

What does that word…or perhaps that’s enough for today!

The point is this: literacy is a vast, complicated but utterly vital component for children’s education. It begins at (or even pre-) birth and develops both inside and outside the classroom. Because of its size and complexity we need to attend carefully to what aspects are most relevant for our schools and settings, and invest the relevant time to construct a coherent approach. There are tools that can help us funnel and filter our literacy efforts. We can use Scarborough’s reading rope to begin to consider which strand we might focus our efforts upon (recommendation 2). We can look at reading strategies (recommendation 3) that include:

- prediction
- questioning
- clarifying
- summarising
- inference
- activating prior knowledge

But then we need to ask what they actually look like in a classroom? What expectations and time pressures are we placing on staff when considering a new literacy approach? What training have we planned to support them? How will we know if our new approach is any better than what we are doing already?

Ultimately, how can we get to a place where ​‘literacy’ (or at least a constituent strand of it such as ​‘reading’) does mean the same thing for you as it does for your colleague in the room next door?

Our attempt to help grapple with what literacy means and looks like for practitioners is our 3 day literacy course. We will use the EEF’s Guidance Reports that cover Early Years to Secondary as our starting points to guide us into all things literacy and allow attendees to select the most pertinent focus for them. Just as crucially delegates will be given the time to develop an implementation plan for when they return to school.

Find out more and book your tickets here.

Or email mh.​jones@​huntington-​ed.​org.​uk for further information.