Rethinking English teaching for dependent readers

The kids we fail – the national picture

National results in English tests have remained largely static for a while. Under the previous system of assessment at the end of KS2, results levelled out at around 80% of students achieving the required standard in reading, and the numbers of students achieving a ‘good’ pass at GCSE have remained between 60 and 65% for a number of years. Whilst there are measures in place to prevent large changes in exam results between cohorts, these figures still suggest that we have a large proportion of students completing KS4 unable to read and/or write proficiently. Within this group, a very small number have significant barriers to learning, but many more have simply been allowed to pass through secondary school without any development in reading skills, and in fact 20% have them have regressed or failed to progress to the point that having “passed” in KS2 they now “fail” at KS4. Whilst these external tests provide fairly crude measures, it is clear that nationally we are failing a good third of the student population during their time at secondary school, and it doesn’t just have an impact in their English exams. Without good reading skills, pupils struggle to access many of their exams, to the point where poor reading can mask their proficiency in their other subjects. It is imperative that we both understand why this happens and try to do something about it.

Learning to read

Students learn to read in several stages. The vast majority of primary schools are very good at teaching decoding, the first stage, where students learn the correlation between letters and sounds and apply this to texts of increasing levels of difficulty. However many students struggle with the next stage where texts become more challenging and students are asked to focus more on the meaning and interpretation of texts. In the US, this is often referred to as the “4th grade slump” – a well-documented stagnation in progress - when students move from learning to read to reading to learn.

Reading ability at this second stage is not only dependent on the fluency of students’ decoding skills, but on their vocabularies and general and contextual knowledge as well. By the time students reach secondary school, the expectation is that students have mastered this second stage and lessons are taught accordingly. Students who struggle often become experts at masking their difficulties since not being able to read well is often casually attributed to a lack of intelligence. This is exacerbated by the fact that the process of reading is almost entirely invisible - a child who struggles with reading is not aware of the strategies that a more fluent peer is using to help them make sense of texts.

For students who are stuck in this dependent stage, this means: - They can decode phonetically, and read a text aloud, but they can’t often comprehend what they read. - They have limited vocabularies so many words are unfamiliar. - They also have limited contextual knowledge so that even familiar words are not comprehensible in certain contexts, and they can’t make inferences. - They have limited experiences of text types and genres. - They also have no basic strategies to use to help them comprehend texts when the meaning is not immediately obvious eg, self-monitoring comprehension, re-reading, etc... - They are not aware of the concept of an internal dialogue with a text – the visualising, questioning, predicting, clarifying, re-reading and summarising that independent readers do.

They therefore have significant difficulties in independently interpreting texts. In addition, where students are clearly unable to read well, the tendency for teachers is to ‘retreat from print’ where other methods – audio-visual/technology- based/teacher interpretations - replace the need for students to read. In a desperate race to deliver the curriculum, teachers often have neither the time or expertise to support those who are finding texts a challenge.

In English lessons

As English teachers, we are very focused on teaching the higher-level reading skills: language analysis,synthesis, evaluation etc... and quite rightly, since these are the skills that are formally assessed in the GCSE and A-level exams. However, for students who are unable to read well, this fails to address the skills gap between learning to read (decoding) and performance at a higher level. If we want to significantly improve the numbers of students who are successful at GCSE, we therefore need to address the pedagogy of the classroom to reflect the needs of this specific group of learners.

Take these examples:

Conventional Language teaching in Year 11 often focuses around the question types and how to address them. We then use models and scaffolds to show students what could be said about a text, then push them towards independent analysis.

Danger areas for teaching dependent readers

Mistaking comprehension of carefully explained teacher analysis for the ability to carry this analysis out independently. A good teacher can make even very complex ideas about a text clear to students, and this can be very useful, for example when teaching Literature texts or working with pre-prepared materials for assessment. However, this masks students’ inability to read and analyse texts independently in an unfamiliar context. Where students can’t recognise the text type and genre, have no background knowledge about the topic, and are faced with large chunks of unfamiliar vocabulary, dependent readers struggle with basic comprehension, let alone analysis.

Assuming a scaffold will fix the problem. Scaffolding is very useful for helping students hit certain assessment criteria in their written responses, but it does not fix the problem of HAVING NOTHING TO SAY IN THE FIRST PLACE. This fact is concealed in class by the heavily scaffolded reading of the extract students are analysing, but becomes quickly apparent when you read their independent exam responses.

Both of these teaching strategies are often employed when we look at typical Language exam preparation lessons.

Conventional model of teaching the reading section of exam papers

• Teacher revises question types, usually once at the beginning, then again as each question is addressed.

• Teacher reads text (or students read text, get stuck, teacher helps them out by talking through it).

• Teacher models what to find in text and students copy down annotations.

• Teacher models each question type and provides a structure.

• Students attempt to complete provided scaffolding using teacher’s ideas

• Students receive feedback and further scaffolding to improve their work.

• Teacher attempts to remove scaffolding and students perform badly.

• Students’ confidence is dented, the teacher is frustrated.

• Teacher goes back to beginning and reteaches unit.

The effects of this kind of teaching is clear in students’ responses in the mock exams. They resort to technique-spotting but are unable to analyse the effects of the techniques they’ve identified in the absence of any understanding of the text, or link what they find to the question. Alternatively, they write nonsense in the form of a PEA/PEEL/PETAL/PEARL paragraph, or give up and write nothing.