Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

•What happened in the pages that you read today? •What happened to the main character? •What key ideas or information have you learnt? •What questions do you now have about the story or the book you’re reading? This exercise can serve as a good homework task, but could also encourage students to read aloud to others (parents, siblings) at home. Further into non-fiction Beyond subject-specific activities, non-fiction can sometimes be overlooked when recommending book to students that they might enjoy, based on their interests. Try creating a mini-survey for your students to complete, which could include questions such as: •What are your favourite hobbies outside of school? •What is your favourite topic to talk about with your friends? •Who do you see as an inspirational person? The information submitted can be anonymous, giving students the opportunity to express themselves freely. Once you have gathered their responses, search mainstream and independent news sites for interesting articles that will strengthen students’ knowledge of key events and people around the world. You can also organise some quick reading games to test students’ ability to distinguish real stories from fake ones. Examples of this might include: •Having students read just the headline of a news story, and then write the story themselves, without any other information to go on. How does their invented story compare to the genuine original? •Reading a profile or extract from a biography of a famous figure. • Finding a social media post from a reputable individual that students must then interrogate. What THREE questions about the post would students ask the individual if they could? Activities like these will hopefully encourage students to become more critical readers of the text they read online. Tools for testing The strategies detailed so far are just some of ways in which you can build in time for reading. Some TS readers may be in roles that present opportunities to devise whole school reading strategies. What follows are solutions and platforms that some schools are currently using to positively impact upon students’ reading abilities. The assessment facilities these platforms provide can be used throughout the year to track reading progress across all year groups, and could be particularly helpful when preparing for the government’s incoming Y8 reading assessment. Accelerated Reader A reading assessment tool that’s most effective when you’re clear as to the suitable age ranges of the books held by your school library. AR enables students to be quizzed on the books they’ve read and be tested on their reading skills. The results fromAR can then be used to identify what might be holding your struggling readers back, and ensure that the right students receive appropriate support. York Assessment of Reading Comprehension (YARC) YARC assesses students’ fluency in their reading. It’s a form of reading assessment best completed on a one-to-one basis, but it can require some degree of time investment. If you’ve picked up on issues with students’ reading fluency across a particular year group, YARC could provide you with a workable means of finding out why. Lexia This literacy learning programme can be a good intervention for Y7 students who might be struggling to sound out words and need support with phonics. The Lexia programme is a wonderful option, but do consider how your primary feeders are teaching phonics, since this may provide you with a springboard for better supporting young readers who have phonic gaps. Whichever strategies and literacy assessments you end up using, think about the data you want to gather on students’ reading. Carefully consider what you can do with this data, and how it could be used to improve students’ levels of reading engagement. When trying to ‘fix’ the reading deficit in a school, a multi-pronged approach is what you’ll usually need when targeting struggling readers. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meera Chudasama is an English, media and film studies teacher with a passion for design and research, and has developed course content for the Charted College of Teaching WHATABOUT AUDIOBOOKS? There are now plenty of ways in which students can hear literature – from short stories read aloud on YouTube, to Spotify subscriptions that enable access to a whole range of published audiobooks. Try listening to an audiobook together in the classroom, with or without the written text, and see how students feel and react to being read to. Your school could even invest in ePlatform (eplatform.co/gb ) – a service that can grant students access to your school library services online, while also making a range of audiobooks available to them. “Secondary teachers are increasingly encountering students unable to read subject-specific content” 39 teachwire.net/secondary L I T E R A C Y