Teach Primary 18.8

www.teachwire.net | 61 subtly interlinked knowledge and strategies that are developed over years, inside and outside the classroom. Tests usually struggle with such complexity, and they offer us only pale approximations of the authentic reading process. A key answer for me is to step back from the test format itself and aim to appraise successful readers and skilled reading. The biggest misconception about the current iteration of the SATs standardised reading assessment is that practising lots of short texts, and answering questions that retrieve information and summarise ideas, improves your reading ability. But doing this can steal so much curriculum time that pupils aren’t doing the wide reading necessary to actually become skilled and knowledgeable readers. The fundamental problem is that you don’t become a skilled and knowledgeable reader by undertaking pale-imitations of reading comprehension tests. That occurs when you read widely. You summarise, but you talk about texts in a dynamic way that lets you read on and on. The elements of success There is no one solution to complex reading, but I think there are five key interlinked elements, which I have outlined in the panel on the right. To do all five well needs planning and time. It probably needs the space created by not imitating the assessment over and over. In short, if practising the assessment stops you doing lots of 2, 3, 4, and 5, then just stop. It is fool’s gold!. Back to Madagascar Let’s return to streaked tenrecs. The pesky little blighters that beset our young readers. These cute little creatures offered a vehicle for a compromised assessment that captures a partial picture of reading comprehension ability. And yet, you’ll struggle to find an assessment that does a much better job. We probably shouldn’t pay streaked tenrecs, or the reading SATs format, too much of our attention. Instead, let’s read and read and read... about animals, and rainforests, and biomes, and brilliant characters. If we focus on doing that, we’ll be improving reading in ways that are more effective, long lasting, and meaningful than merely aping the assessment format. TP 1 Get ‘learning to read’ right It all starts with early reading experiences, good phonics instruction and developing pupils’ phonemic awareness. They need to lift the sounds from the page until it appears effortless. 2 Bridge to comprehension with reading fluency Children need lots of practice of reading aloud and fluency. Happily, this builds nicely on phonics approaches, and bridges to plenty of quality book talk that develops comprehension. 3 Do lots of wide, rich reading The recent focus on curriculum has foregrounded how children learn by building knowledge and connecting those schemas in helpful networks. The key here is reading lots of ‘Goldilocks texts’, which are neither too hard nor too easy. I think we need to step away from the worksheets and five paragraph texts; children need to read full books. If they overlap in ‘reading clusters’, so much the better. Only then will pupils make the connections and deal with the complexities that stick long in the memory. 4 Teach strategies for tricky texts When you are reading a ‘Goldilocks text’, you need to be strategic: questioning, clarifying, summarising. These strategies don’t need to be over-taught; they should be focused on the text at hand, steering some rich book talk as a helpful scaffold. 5 Cover explicit and implicit vocabulary It can be very useful to explicitly teach vocabulary like ‘deforestation’ and ‘population’. These are high-value words that initiate lots of connections and schemas of knowledge. In addition, by teaching a small number of words explicitly, we help foster a curiosity for words. 5 STEPS TO BETTER READ I NG “You don’t become a skilled and knowledgeable reader by undertaking pale imitations of reading comprehension tests” Alex Quigley is the author of Closing the Writing Gap. A former teacher, he is now the head of content and engagement at the Education Endowment Foundation, alongside his personal writing and training for teachers. solution, proposed by some experts, is to jettison reading comprehension assessments altogether. Perhaps we could replace them with reading fluency assessments, which are a handy proxy for reading ability. But what if we then forget to emphasise the meaning of the language? We may unintentionally create a focus on speed reading and oral reading, but miss a vital focus on comprehension (which would hamper the test’s validity). Reimagining the tests There is no easy answer for getting the right reading test format. Reading is a complex skill, comprised of a wealth of T EACH PR I MARY SAT S SPEC I A L I N AS SOC I A T I ON W I TH