The literacy hour is hampering oral work in infant classrooms and failing to develop young children’s thinking skills, researchers believe.

Only 10 per cent of children’s oral contributions to the literacy hour are longer than three words and only 5 per cent are longer than five words, researchers from the universities of Durham, Cambridge and Leicester have found.

Infant teachers are also posing fewer challenging questions - which might develop higher-order thinking - and limiting the length and breadth of class discussion because they are anxious to “cover the ground”.

“In an educational climate dominated by monitoring, inspection and test results, teaching for understanding was regarded as an optional extra, permissible once the learning objectives had been met,” the researchers said.

Ironically, the development of oral ability and thinking skills are two of the national literacy strategy’s main objectives for primary pupils.

The strategy demands that the literacy hour should be “well-paced with a sense of urgency”. But, as Linda Hargreaves of Camridge University and her colleagues point out in the Cambridge Journal of Education, this does not encourage high-quality oral work and extended contributions by pupils.

Teachers told the researchers that they felt frustrated and confused by the strategy’s conflicting demands.

They knew that by maintaining the pace of lessons they were leaving little time for children to develop and expand their own ideas.

“They may come in with something exciting that happened, that they are desperate to share with you, and it sounds very cruel, but sometimes you have to say, ‘can we talk about that later?’ because you’re very aware of your own timetable,” said one of the 30 teachers questioned.

Two weeks ago, a TES poll (“Scrap all primary tests, teachers say”, April 19) revealed reservations among infant teachers about the success of the literacy strategy in raising standards.

Dr Hargreaves and her colleagues have also found that infant teachers mostly pose questions testing factual recall during the literacy hour. Yet the same teachers ask more demanding questions in other areas of the curriculum, which key stage 1 pupils are perfectly capable of answering.

“The literacy hour at KS1 may be seriously underestimating children’s thinking skills,” they told the recent American Educational Research Association Conference in New Orleans.

The Cambridge Journal paper reported that uninterrupted “interactions” of more than 25 seconds between teachers and one child or small group had declined dramatically since the introduction of the literacy hour.

In 1996 these dialogues made up around a quarter of the communication between pupils and teachers during KS2 English lessons. But during the literacy hour this type of communication has dwindled to only 5 per cent at KS2 and 2 per cent at KS1.

Class size also affects the quality of communication. In classes of fewer than 19 children, the researchers found that the incidence of sustained discussion between teacher and pupils more than quadrupled.

More positively, the study suggests that the use of video may help teachers to reflect on their classroom practice and focus on the quality of oral work during the literacy hour.

When teachers analysed their own lessons - captured on video - they often realised that their pupils had already met most of the curriculum targets, so they felt freer to allow children time to reflect and respond.

After studying her lessons, one teacher decided “to listen to what someone’s got to say instead of cutting them off straight away, as if to say ‘yes, that’s the answer I want but I’ll finish it off for you’.”

‘Pedagogical Dilemmas in the National Literacy Strategy: primary teachers’ perceptions, reflections and classroom behaviour’, by Eve English, University of Durham, Linda Hargreaves, University of Cambridge, Jane Hislam, University of Leicester. Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol 32, No 1, 2002.‘How do elementary school teachers define and implement interactive teaching in the national literacy hour in England?’ by Linda Hargreaves, Janet Moyles, Anglia Polytechnic University, Roger Merry, University of Leicester, AS Fred Paterson, National College for School Leadership, Nottingham, and Veronica Esarte-Sarries, University of Durham.Presented at the American Educational Research Association conference 2002, New Orleans