Research School Network: Supporting Reading in Secondary Classrooms By Will Smith, Deputy Director of West Somerset Research School

Simple adaptations to everyday practice that will help struggling readers

If you are reading this, then I probably don’t need to spend time convincing you how critical it is for a child to need to be able to read. Whatever phase or subject, reading is fundamental. Another thing I probably don’t need to tell you is that many of the students in your classroom will have gaps in their vocabulary and will struggle with reading comprehension, and that this will be a significant barrier to their success.

I also won’t spend too much time on the causes. Again, we are probably all aware of how being from a disadvantaged background means you’ll know fewer words than someone who isn’t. When we have a class in front of us on a Thursday afternoon, there is little we can do about the root causes of disadvantage, or the fact that there were lockdowns, or that some of our students will have done whatever they could to avoid reading the books that were sent home from Primary school.

Instead, so we can get on and focus on coastal erosion or the Weimar Republic or whatever else it might be, let’s think about things we can do in the classroom that:

a. Supports struggling readers and

b. Doesn’t take a huge amount of time, effort or energy.

Reduce the cognitive load of reading tasks

The Working Memory can hold between 4 – 7 bits of information. If it can process these bits of information, connect them with stuff in the Long Term memory and create new schemas then hey presto, we have learned something. However, if the working memory is overloaded by there being too many new or extraneous bits and pieces, the working memory can be overloaded, it will struggle to make connections with the Long Term Memory and learning will be limited. (more on cognitive load here).

Now, apply this idea to reading. If a student is reading something new, be it a new word, new idea or a complex sentence, then the reading will have high cognitive load and processing it will be a challenge. If a reader cannot read a word fluently, has to stop to break the word up into parts (de-cod-ing), then it limits the capacity of working memory. This act in itself may prevent the sentence being processed. If I’m reading with my six year old and she has to stop to think about an unfamiliar word, then she’s more likely to struggle to tell me about the sentence it was in. My six year old is more likely to encounter unfamiliar words because she’s not been reading long. But the same principle applies to anyone who is reading and forced to stop and grapple with new or complex vocabulary or syntax.

It is likely, your subject will be presenting new content and new vocabulary. Throw in a few other words that they don’t know and all of a sudden any reading becomes a real challenge.

We can manage this challenge by:-

- Activating prior knowledge.
Bring forth things that already exist in the Long Term Memory making it easier for our students to make connections.

- Use images
Talk through an image before delving into the reading. Use an image or diagram with no text. Be careful though, images and diagrams with text alongside can again place unwanted burdens on the working memory.

– Pre-teach vocabulary.
New words need to be introduced prior to reading. It only takes a few minutes to run through a glossary of new terms.

- Use retrieval practice for vocabulary
Yes, I know you covered it last lesson but chances are they’ve forgotten it. A quick quiz on the words you’ve introduced previously would be a great way to start your lesson and increase the chances of them being retained for next time. Also, revisiting prior learning, identifying gaps in understanding, cementing new concepts will all help reduce the cognitive load of reading.

– Insist on silence
Let’s say you’ve a handout that your class will be using for the lesson. They’ll be referring to it and completing other tasks and people will be working at their own pace and discussing their findings etc. This is likely to create a noisy classroom – a productive, busy sort of noise, but noisy nonetheless. This noise will create extraneous load, it will place strain on the working memory – other stuff going on and to listen to that is not related to the sentence they’re focusing on – and make reading for our less able a real challenge. If there is something you want them to read, create the conditions for them to be able to do just that. A few minutes of silence to read the handout before they begin could make a real difference. Also, if you’re reading something, don’t insist they follow along. They can either listen or read themselves, not both.

Teaching Reading Independence

Last year I asked one of my year 8 classes what they thought good readers did. They, perhaps not surprisingly, said things like ​‘read lots of big books’ and ​‘know lots of big words.’ When I asked them about the sorts of skills readers had such as decoding and inference and so on, they had little clue. Our challenge as teachers then is to make reading skills that are often tacit, explicit.

At The Blue School we are trialling Reciprocal Reading (read more about it here). The aim of this approach is make those things that good readers do clear and obvious to all. For example, if I come across a word I don’t know, I Iook it up. Once I’ve read something, I will think about the important points and generate questions. A less skilled reader is less likely to do this and so these skills need to be taught, modelled, practised and supported. Scaffolding is also crucial – you’ll need a plan as to when to encourage your students to self-scaffold and when to take away the support.

Technology can also help a great deal. A visualiser is a great way to model reading skills. Whether it’s annotation, or skimming and scanning, taking notes from a source, deconstructing questions, using a glossary, try to demonstrate how to cope with difficult reading tasks. Don’t assume that just because your student has a laptop that they know how to use the ​‘define’ feature of Google docs. Again, remember to do this with a view to students becoming self-sufficient.

Have a policy

Decide how you will support reading as a department, or as a school. Make it an explicit part of your practice and stick to it. Make sure everyone sticks to it too.