If you ask secondary teachers whether they think it’s important for children to read for pleasure, most will obviously respond in the affirmative. In fact, according to a recent YouGov survey, nine out of 10 said it was “essential” - only 3 per cent disagreed.
Ensuring that varied and frequent opportunities for reading exist across the curriculum is undoubtedly important. It should go without saying that we need to plan deliberate encounters with rich and diverse texts that will inspire young people’s imaginations.
But when it comes to a secondary school reading strategy, perhaps it serves our students better if we start with the proposition that reading is about empowerment rather than pleasure.
Unfortunately, many secondary students aren’t skilled readers. According to the YouGov survey cited earlier, two-thirds of secondary school teachers think that the reading ability of average and below-average readers tends to stall at key stage 3. This cohort of potentially “invisible but struggling” students accounts for 49 per cent of all readers - and while their reading may seem superficially fine at Year 7, progress often slows in later years.
One way to address this is to develop reading strategies focused on the core purpose of ensuring that all children become fluent readers - not at the expense of championing reading for pleasure, but as the means of enabling it.
Our primary aim should be creating skilled readers who can navigate the complexities of the world around them, and have the power to choose what they read. As fluent readers, young people can make decisions about the texts they lose themselves in - be that complex tomes or easy-readers; graphic novels or editorials; comics or encyclopaedias.
Improving students’ reading fluency will have positive reverberations across the curriculum - and there are some straightforward strategies that teachers can easily adopt to get started.
1. Promote ‘expert readers’
Many teachers believe, with the best of intentions, that having students take it in turns to read short sections of text aloud will provide much-needed practice for struggling readers.
In reality, though, this approach tends to knock the confidence of less-skilled readers and fails to provide others with an opportunity to improve their fluency by listening to how words and sentences should be pronounced. It’s better to get struggling readers, and the class as a whole, to listen to fluent, expert readers so everyone can benefit from the cues of intonation and derive meaning from them.
2. Focus on ‘disciplinary voice’
Every discipline has a particular vocabulary and discourse - a distinct way of talking. It’s important that students have a chance to practise reading with this disciplinary voice, so create opportunities for them to rehearse the different types of reading that are required by different subjects.
Echo and choral reading are great strategies to experiment with in the classroom - they needn’t consume huge amounts of time within a lesson, and the repeated reading will also serve to consolidate reading comprehension.
3. Avoid definition overload
It’s also important that students are immersed in as much background knowledge of a particular subject as possible if they are to become fluent readers. Of course, in selecting high-quality texts, there is a danger that teachers may overload struggling students with too many unfamiliar words. So, restrict explicit vocabulary explanation to two or three keywords per lesson.
For the remaining vocabulary, juxtapose an easier synonym to follow directly after it. Weave this as naturally as you can into your reading aloud of the text. In doing so, you’re providing clarification without the constant interruption of word speculation and explanation.
4. Draw on reading data
Finally, make sure that teachers of all subjects have access to, and are given time and support to make sense of, whatever data your school has on reading.
To make significant, wide-scale improvements, it’s crucial all staff understand what reading needs they are supporting within their subjects. What is the data telling you about your students and where are the discrepancies? Keep using it to monitor progress.
Beth Morrish is director of literacy strategies (secondary) and professional learning lead at Meridian Trust
