Teach Reading and Writing Issue 19

52 | www.teachwire.net understanding texts is where the joy and reward lies in reading long-term. What is prosody? Schwanenflagel and Flanagan Knapp refer to it as ‘the music of reading aloud’, highlighting the many parallels which can be drawn between prosodic reading and music. It is the rhythm we bring to words through phrasing chunks of meaning within sentences; the variation in tone, pitch, volume and speed. As experienced readers, we use prosody as a strategy for understanding what we read. Think of a time when you have read a challenging text – perhaps academic research, a medical letter or something legal. It is likely you found yourself applying prosody, emphasising key words and amping up your phrasing, to help you to unpick its meaning. The techniques we deploy as expert readers are the same strategies we want our struggling pupils to have at their fingertips. So as teachers we must be equipped to support our readers with applying prosody at the point of reading. It’s likely you can think of a number of pupils who, T he recent update to the DfE’s Reading Framework, re-published in July 2023, contains a welcome section on the development of reading fluency, highlighting its importance in allowing reading to develop at a whole text level. The document rightly makes multiple references to accuracy as well as automaticity, stating that these are key to enabling children to read and understand texts. So far, so good. Yet, buried within the 171-page document, prosody is only briefly mentioned twice, with little exploration of its meaning or significance. There are three components to reading fluency: accuracy, automaticity and prosody. Accuracy provides the foundation – readers must be able to decode words on the page accurately to be in with a chance of understanding them. Automaticity tells us that readers should be able to read words on the page at a pace which allows the brain to focus on understanding. Mastering all three aspects of fluency – especially the lesser-mentioned prosody – allows us to support comprehension to flourish. Prosody is obvious by its absence in many conversations about reading fluency. If we miss this vital component, we run the risk of developing expert decoders, rather than expert readers. Decoding is of course necessary, but when reading a text that is challenging for them, announce each word in isolation, as if they were reading a shopping list. They trundle through words without awareness of how they should be grouped together into phrases with meaning. These pupils may also ignore the phrase boundaries marked on the page with punctuation, and read through them without a second thought. Their reading has become an act of decoding, so making meaning from the text is not one of their goals. Take a look at this extract from Jackie Morris’ Ice Bear, with punctuation removed. It is transcribed from a pupil who joined the HFL Reading Fluency project, and who was struggling to apply prosody at the point of reading. Read it aloud, pausing where each slash is. What do you notice? Words/ held/ a magic a word/ spoken in chance/ a wish/ or/ a whisper/ would hold a magic/ that would shape the world/ into this world they/ were born in/ the dark months/ when the cold/ and the wind/ turned water/ to stone/ Did you notice how difficult it was to make meaning? Did you spot that the phrasing became less accurate as stamina waned? Words were read in isolation and the meaning and beauty of the passage was lost. When asked questions about the text, the child struggled – as they had focused solely on lifting the words from the page. They, and many like them, needed strategies to support them in building their prosody. What can we do to address this? An expert model is a good place to begin: someone reading the text aloud in a way that clearly demonstrates pausing at phrase boundaries and emphasising certain words. Echo reading can be a great tool to support those who need help with prosody. Alongside that, text-marking helps to make phrase boundaries visible. Ask the children to make a simple mark on the page to show where the phrase boundaries will be, and use these as a reminder to take PROSODY Let’s prioritise One component of reading fluency has been sadly overlooked in recent government guidance, says Juliet McCullion “If we miss this vital component, we run the risk of developing expert decoders, rather than expert readers”