The Reading Ape

So, you’re going to teach children to read…

Learning how to read is the single most important skill a child develops in primary/elementary school. Being able to teach children to read is the single...

The complexities, challenges and difficulties of learning to read do not start on a child’s first day at school.  Considerable development will have occurred before any formal instruction begins.

LANGUAGE EXPOSURE AND EARLY READING

Prior to formal instruction, children begin to develop an awareness of print before the age of four and although utilise logographic cues (Frith, 1985) have been shown to be aware of letter changes...

For skilled readers, silently reading text feels no more demanding than listening to an audiobook and in many ways can be easier: passages can be reread, and unknown words’ spellings may indicate morphology and give clues to meaning.  This automatic process, whereby the working memory is liberated to concentrate almost entirely on the meaning the author was attempting to convey contrasts with the stuttering, painful progress of...

The purpose of reading, according to Elder and Paul (2006:3) is to ‘figure out what an author has to say on a subject’.  This ‘figuring out’, or reading comprehension as we know it in schools, has become a proxy for reading ability and the manner in which reading ability is assessed and measured (see Tarjinder’s excellent post here).  As such, the teaching of reading comprehension as a skill became ubiquitous throughout the last...

‘The question for teachers is no longer “look and say” or phonics. Instead, the question is which phonics programmes are most effective’, stated Nick Gibb in 2019 (Hazell, 2019).   It would, therefore, seem an appropriate time for all DfE approved phonics programmes to be rigorously assessed through randomised controlled trials and the most efficacious one selected and standardised across all schools in England.

There m...

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a good reader will make predictions whilst reading a text.  As a result, predicting has cemented itself as an essential reading comprehension strategy and pupils are thus encouraged to predict or guess what might happen next in a text and teachers encouraged to promote prediction.

It is, thus, perhaps surprising that this fundament of reading pedagogy is founded on very little re...

The point of mastering the procedural knowledge of decoding text, recoding text, practicing decoding to facilitate the word superiority effect (Reicher, 1969) to ensure decoding automaticity and the further practice and knowledge and vocabulary harvesting that permits reading fluency is to be able to understand the meaning that an author wishes to communicate.  Reading fluency gifts the working memory the release of capacity to...

With a quarter of ten and eleven year-olds in England unable to read to the expected standard (DfE, 2018), and with the majority of those children now having had phonics instruction for two years of their initial schooling perhaps Glazzard (2017) is correct when he asserts that if a child has received phonics instruction from aged five to seven and is still struggling to read then more phonics instruction is irrational; somethin...

Systematic phonics instruction has been described as the nearest thing to a silver bullet for the development of literacy.  With all the economic and social ills associated with illiteracy (detailed here), it would be a brave person who would deny the weight of research in its favour.  There remains considerable resistance to this form of instruction from the teaching profession (detailed here) but also a number of high-profile...

‘The question for teachers is no longer “look and say” or phonics. Instead, the question is which phonics programmes are most effective…’ (Gibb, 2018). The English Schools’ Minister’s assertion that the reading wars have been won by the relentless barrage of research undermining ‘look and say’ approaches may not be strictly true – the rear-guard anti-phonics battles being fought in Australia by academics, the pervasiveness of ‘B...