Teach Secondary 13.5

31 teachwire.net/secondary Relearning reading W hy should we persist with a strategy that is plainly failing students and teachers alike? Every year, without exception, a mass cohort of learners will find themselves ploughing through past papers and hoping against hope that this time, those resit scores will go in their favour. But what if there’s a fundamental void in their learning which has yet to be fixed? What if – as is the case for a significant proportion of post-16 students – it’s actually a critical absence of decoding and deciphering skills that’s preventing them from conquering this next phase of their academic life? We are, of course, talking about reading. Specifically, I want to highlight here the need for us to embrace the ‘re-learning of reading’, and to let go of those learned assumptions that there’s a particular age and stage at which students should have the opportunity to undertake reading as a subject matter within their school career. Adestructive cycle With vulnerable readers, as well as those who, for whatever reason find themselves on a race to improve, there’s no single benefit to be had in tasking or testing them– not if they lack the skills required to read the words placed in front of them. Without reading skills, learners can’t possibly hope to realise their ultimate potential. Instead, they become locked into a demoralising and destructive cycle of failure that they and their teachers have to experience time and again – but if an appropriately resourced intervention could be added to their pathway, this can be easily fixed. Reading interventions for older learners, centred on explicit instruction, can rapidly enable students to not only read for knowledge, but to also apply knowledge. It can gift students the perfect package of being able to recognise a word, decode it and then comprehend that word in different meanings and contexts. Rather than feeling blinded by words and reading structures, learners can be empowered to weave together a series of word recognition skills – such as phonological awareness, decoding and sight recognition – while simultaneously developing important language comprehension skills like verbal reasoning and vocabulary structure. Profound transformations For schools and any other settings striving for a ‘literacy culture’ spanning multiple subject areas, this is golden. These kinds of interventions can instil in students a newfound confidence to explore word usage in any area of the curriculum. Whether it be in science, maths, geography or indeed English literature, they’ll suddenly be able to accurately interpret what’s being tasked of them, break down words in a way that makes sense and craft meaningful responses. Teachers benefit from this too. The cycle of despondency that comes from putting this year’s pool of students through their resits can instead be replaced with the professional satisfaction that comes fromwitnessing a rapid and effective relearning of a core skill, which in turn expands their learners’ aspirations and potential opportunities. Given the prospect of such profound transformations, why would we not adopt interventions like this? True reading comprehension Without true reading comprehension, without the fluency and vocabulary recognition that committing to short and powerful re-learning interventions can achieve, we’ll forever be at risk of sending youngsters out into the world who may well scrape through their exams, but still find themselves perpetually limited in life by their reading skills. No-one should be resigned to such a fate. Before our students leave our charge, we have the chance to embed reading skills which will enable them to not just flick through books of their choosing at will, but also write a CV, comprehend medical notes, be more savvy when booking holidays, submit entrepreneurial business bids and become the innovators, observers and analysts upon which our world relies. It’s up to us to overcome our own ingrained thinking. Relearning reading can be simple to adopt, yet hugely far-reaching in its impact. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sarah Ledger is a former head of English and deputy headteacher and now the CEO of the literacy intervention provider Lexonik; for more information, visit lexonik.co.uk or follow @LexonikST Sarah Ledger explains why engaging students in the process of ‘relearning reading’ isn’t just a wise use of time, but a moral imperative... TEACH SECONDARY SPECIAL LITERACY I N A S S O C I AT I O N W I T H