Research School Network: Building reading skills at KS2 and KS3 Supporting students with reading strategies

Annabel Brown

We know that the ability to read is an essential life skill used throughout our years in school and in the workplace. Poor readers struggle to read independently and therefore read less: consequently, these students do not pick up vocabulary as quickly and those also from disadvantaged backgrounds can potentially start school having heard or seen 30 million fewer words than other children their age (Hart and Risley, 2003). This obviously then makes school challenging place to be, leading to poor examination grades and reduced life chances. The EEF report the lifelong consequences of poor language development:

• Five-year olds with poor vocabulary are three times more likely to have mental health problems as adults
• And are twice as likely to be unemployed in adulthood
• 65% of young people in young offender institutions have communication difficulties
• Children from low-income families lag behind high-income counterparts by 19 months in vocabulary
  

This year Sandringham Research School have been working collaboratively in various partnerships to support students’ literacy and one of our projects led us to dive deeply into the KS2 and KS3 EEF guidance on reading, to examine which reading strategies most support our learners in accessing the ever-increasing demands of the curriculum and to allow them to go on to have better life chances.

Our analysis led us to examine five key challenges when tackling reading in schools:

1. The changing policy agenda 
2. Understanding who has responsibility for teaching reading (not just English and primary teachers)
3. Ensuring assessment is used to monitor student progress in reading so that teachers are using data rather than making assumptions about students’ abilities.
4. The increasing demands on students reading ability, to access the curriculum
5. The challenge of meeting the needs of all readers, including those who struggle and more able readers.

Ofsted reported in their recent Secondary publication ​‘Now the whole school is reading’, that in schools with the most effective reading strategies:

• Senior leaders prioritise reading
• Schools accurately identify gaps in reading knowledge
• Staff are trained in teaching weaker readers
• Leaders share information about struggling readers with staff (including interventions and how to approach lesson planning)
• Schools had procedures to monitor the teaching and impact on struggling readers

But what can teachers do in the classroom to directly support our students reading abilities?

EEF guidance breaks down reading into two strands, ​‘Word reading’ and ​‘Language comprehension’. It’s well worth watching their short video about the reading house to familiarise yourself with the building blocks that support reading comprehension as illustrated below.

At Sandringham we have a whole-school priority of reading, and our most recent Inset day focused on how we can support our students to improve their reading in all subjects.

Five evidence-based strategies that will support students’ reading comprehension:

1. Assess the reading ability of our students

With careful consideration and assessment, we can identify how good our students are at word reading and reading comprehension and we can begin to categorise students into the quadrants below to offer personalised support for all abilities of readers.

2. Activate students’ prior knowledge

Support students to access the text you are approaching by activating their prior knowledge. Delve into vocabulary that they have seen before in lessons that will make the writing more accessible to them. Ask questions that will remind students of the knowledge they already have:

• What do you know about the setting of this story?
• What have we learnt about this in our science/​topic lesson?
• Can you make a link to other texts we’ve read? That’s right, you learnt about this in Year X.
• Before we start reading what do you remember?

3. Clarify students understanding of texts

It is very easy as a teacher to think that reading a text once will consolidate our students’ understanding, especially in the time constrains we have to cover the curriculum. The research shows that clarifying students’ comprehension after reading through re-reading, questioning and annotating will help to transfer the knowledge into their long-term memory. The EEF suggest that teachers:

• Keep a careful eye on what’s happening. If you get lost, look for the words or phrases you’re unsure of.
• It helps to go back and re-read if we’re not quite sure what happened or why.
• Let’s annotate any words of phrases we’re unsure of in the text.

4. Summarise the texts

Summarising a text succinctly supports pupils to focus on key content in the text. This supports teachers with comprehension monitoring. Tools like WordSift.org can help teachers to identify the key vocabulary used in their texts and use Word Clouds and other visual representations of texts to support students’ summaries. The EEF recommend that teachers can suggest the following:

• To really enjoy this text, it is important to take a summary away after each chapter.
• Your summary could be five key words.
• A summary could be a quick picture with some annotations.
• A post-it note summary can help you take our story home so you can share it with a grown up in your house.

5. Use guided reading strategies in lessons

Finally, supporting our students by modelling great reading, in-turn helps improve our students’ reading ability. I have outlined 5 strategies below and there are more to be found in the EEF guidance.

1. Teacher-led modelled fluent reading: The intonation we use in speech is incredibly important to support students’ comprehension of texts. It allows teacher to demonstrate to students how to enhance the meaning of a text through pitch, pace, tone, and even through the use of pausing.
2. Choral reading: This can improve students’ reading fluency through asking a class or group of students to read aloud a passage simultaneously.
3. Echo reading: Can be done with just a sentence or a word to ensure accuracy in pronunciation.
4. Guided oral reading instruction: fluent reading is modelled by an adult or fluent reader and then the student is asked to read back the same passage in the same way. This strategy is most effective when appropriate feedback is given to the reader.
5. Repeated reading: when students read aloud a short passage repeatedly until they are confident with the vocabulary and reach a competent level of fluency.

Details about the benefits of these reading strategies can be found on this poster Closing the Gap: Useful Reading Approaches from Alex Quigley’s website.

You can find out more about supporting students reading and literacy development in the EEF’s Improving Literacy at KS2 and Improving Secondary Literacy Guidance Reports.