Literacy teaching in the primary years
Regular one-to-one
interactions between the teacher and child, even of less than a minute, can be
highly productive in helping children learn to write in the early stages,
provided that they are based on close observation of what the individual child
is doing and understanding.
(Geekie et al., 1999)
Combined with carefully planned whole class experiences of shared story
writing, and the development of routines involving aids such as letter cards,
alphabet guides and 'useful word' banks, contingent
instruction, where teachers help children to realise their meaning-making
intentions while aiding their independence, enables children to develop
productive strategies for setting their words down on paper.
While much can be learned in larger group situations, only one-to-one encounters
offer the opportunity for the teacher to really engage with an individual
child's developing understanding of how to go about the complex business of
writing. But paradoxically, such
encounters do not have to be lengthy to be profitable.
Implication
As well as teaching them how to lead whole class or group practices such as
shared writing, we should teach our student teachers to observe individual
children closely, to engage with them and to support them in the use of
strategies that will increase their confidence and independence as writers.
Children have the power,
especially where they are trained in group work, to help each other forward in
their literacy learning.
(King and Robinson, 1995; Mercer, 2000; Pressley, 2006; Savage and Pompey,
2007)
Mercer.s work with small groups of primary children trained to listen to each
other and give reasons for their statements, shows conclusively that even young
children can provide the necessary support for each other to move beyond their
current sphere of competence, to work within their 'zone of proximal
development' (Vygotsky, 1979), resulting in each achieving more than they would
on their own. A focused, generous and
disciplined approach to talk is the key to group success.
Also with primary children, King and Robinson have shown the value of literature circles, where a group of
children undertake to read the same book and meet together in the classroom to
discuss it. Supported by their own
journal entries in which they have recorded their ideas about and responses to
the section of the book as they were reading it, the children bring their
concerns and ideas to the literature circle, where together they deepen their
understanding of what the text is about, how it relates to their own lives and
other texts and what it means to them. Reading is 'deprivatised'
and made a social act, part of the social fabric of the classroom.
The relationship with the teacher may also be modified, in that the practice is
based on the idea that although there may be many wrong readings of a literary
text, there is no one right reading.
Children in literature circles often make perceptive observations about
aspects of the text not previously noticed by their teachers.
Implication
We
should give our student teachers productive experience of working in groups,
particularly to deepen their reading of literature, as well as teaching them
techniques for developing group-work in their classrooms. We should also prepare them to respect
children's perceptions, while not accepting everything they say uncritically.
A more democratic
classroom in which students play a greater part in decision-making can promote
a higher level of reasoning and more effective reading.
(Nystrand et al., 1997; Chinn et al., 2001; Pressley, 2006; Pompey and Savage,
2007; Slavin et al., 2008)
In a complex and penetrating US
study, Chinn et al. contrast two kinds of literature discussion in 4th
grade classrooms (9-10 year olds). They
compare the two types of discussion principally in terms of the amount of
teacher and student talk, the character of teacher and student questions and
the cognitive processes involved in the student talk.
While Collaborative Reasoning is a
relatively unambiguous term, Recitation
may be taken to refer to various activities, but, in the research referred to
here, it is used to denote teacher-dominated interaction involving the
presentation of information by the teacher, and questioning of students. These two instructional frames differ in
terms of four dimensions - all concerned with the making of key decisions. These are: who decides the stance the
discussion takes, who has interpretive authority, who will control turn-taking
and who chooses the discussion topics.
The teachers in the four classrooms involved (all rated as good), were
initially videotaped using their habitual Recitation format. They were
video-taped again, after a seven week supported initiation into Collaborative
Reasoning.
The analysis of the transcripts shows the Collaborative Reasoning format to be
dramatically more productive of student talk, in terms of the length of each
discussion, the rate of words spoken per minute (111 as against 66) and the
proportion of both words and turns spoken by the students. Meanwhile the teachers. questions decreased,
as did the proportion of assessment questions asked, while there was an
increase in the proportion of open-ended questions and questions challenging
the students to substantiate observations.
Students made many more elaborations and predictions in the
Collaborative Reasoning classes, they provided evidence at 10 times the rate of
the Recitation classes and 'were much more likely to articulate alternate
perspectives' (Chinn et al 2001, p. 398). After commenting that the teachers'
and students' inexperience in Collaborative Reasoning may have inhibited the
students from producing more extended utterances, the authors conclude .The results of this study suggest the
possibility that giving students greater control over interpretation,
turn-taking and topic may generally enhance engagement and elicit a high rate
of using beneficial cognitive processes..
(Chinn et al., 2001, p. 408).
It is also instructive to approach this subject from the angle of successful
literacy teaching. Nystrand and colleagues
set out to explore the patterns of interaction that were characteristic of
highly effective English lessons at the secondary level (Nystrand et al.,
1997). Their findings led them to a
conclusion similar to that of Chinn et al..
In their observations of some 450 lessons in 112 eighth and ninth grade
classrooms, the largest study of classroom discourse carried out at that time,
they were concerned to identify the most important qualities of instruction
that .helps students understand literature in depth, remember it and
relate to it in terms of their own experience. (Nystrand et al. 1997,
p.2). They found most classrooms
dominated by the recitation format, while a small proportion functioned in a
more open and collaborative way, which the authors term discussion and which is very similar to Chinn et al..s
collaborative reasoning. These classes
operated at a markedly higher cognitive level than the recitation classes and
their students were correspondingly more successful in tests of their literary
understanding.
The authors conclude:
- we could explain the
relative effectiveness of different instructional activities only when we
examined the ways teachers and students interacted as evidenced by authentic
questions, uptake and especially discussion.
(Nystrand et al. 1997, p.57)
More recent surveys of studies at elementary level bear out this cognitive
superiority. Surveys of studies
identifying effective strategies for teaching comprehension have shown that
they tend to involve collaborative learning through such approaches as
reciprocal teaching and peer-assisted learning techniques (Pressley, 2006,
Pompey and Savage, 2007).
Using valid achievement measures independent of the experimental treatment
involved, Slavin et al. (2008) recently carried out a meta-analysis of 33
studies (all of which used randomised or matched control groups in
interventions lasting at least 12 weeks) of four types of approaches to improve
the reading of middle and high school students. They conclude that:
- most of the programs
with good evidence of effectiveness have co-operative learning at their
core. These programs all rely on a form
of co-operative learning in which students work in small groups to help one
another master reading skills and in which the success of the team depends on
the individual learning of each team member.
(Slavin et al., 2008, p. 309)
By contrast, the effects of computer-assisted instruction in
this meta-study were small.
Implication
The
principal mode of classroom interaction should be something closer to
collaborative reasoning rather than recitation (teacher-dominated presentation
of information, and question and answer).
This means modelling such teaching ourselves, sharing the
decision-making on important issues with our student teachers and developing
ideas through discussion rather than delivering pronouncements.
Boys tend to underperform, but that this can be remedied by good whole
school policies and practices involving assessment and target-setting, a lively
culture of literacy and effective intervention for lower achievers, as well as
specific practices aimed to stimulate and support boys.
(Bynner and Steedman, 1995; Frater, 2000a; Moss, 2000; Graham, 2001; UKLA,
2004; Warrington and Younger, 2006; Kelly and
Safford, 2009)
The underperformance of boys is not confined to literacy, nor to the U.K. It is a real and complex problem. However, this should not lead us to
stereotype all boys as less literate than girls. There are many effective and committed boy
readers in our schools as various surveys show us (e.g. PISA 2000). We should recognise and learn from them. The problem tends to be most marked in boys
from non-bookish backgrounds.
Providing boys with information texts does not provide an adequate answer. Moss
has shown us that very many underperforming boy readers have mastered the art
of using information texts to give the impression to their teachers and fellow
students that they are reading, while they are actually looking at the
pictures, and ignoring the verbal text.
Fiction is resisted by many boys, in part at least, because fiction
texts too readily reveal the level of a reader's competence.
Frater has shown us that the minority of schools where there is no clear gender
divide in terms of literacy differ from other schools not so much by such 'boy
friendly' practices as emphasising male role models, or foregrounding
non-fiction, but instead by carefully thought-out policies and imaginatively
carried out practices for literacy teaching in general. These include close attention to assessment
and target-setting, so that teachers have a clear knowledge of what their
students can and do read and write, and also share with them clear expectations
about what they are learning to do. The
lively culture for literacy learning which characterises the successful schools
may include such practices as literature circles and writing journals, which
encourage and support children in their attempts to explore topics in a
sustained and purposeful way, in situations where they can collaborate with
others and are not penalised for 'getting it wrong'.
Schools successful in reducing or eliminating the gender gap in literacy also
have carefully thought out and implemented intervention programmes for those
who lag behind the others in their literacy learning. These programmes attend to all aspects of
learning to read and write, not just those to do with phonics and spelling.
Talk appears to make a special contribution to boys' success in literacy
learning. Graham shows the value of
giving children the opportunity to write in companionship with others. Drama, visual approaches and multimodal and
online text creation also appear to recruit boys into engaging with literacy
(UKLA, 2004; Kelly and Safford, 2009).
Implication
Given careful and imaginative teaching, many boys can and do achieve in
literacy; many can be drawn into 'the literacy club'
Effective
teachers of literacy have developed a coherent philosophy towards literacy,
involving substantial attention to meaning, are readers themselves and
demonstrate 'that language and literacy are interesting, pleasurable and
purposeful'.
(Medwell et al., 1998; Frater,
2000b; Cremin et al., 2008, 2009)
Literacy teaching and learning are hugely complex matters, not amenable to simple
solutions. There are literally thousands of
experimental studies that try out teaching styles and texts. Very many of these fail to take account of
the Hawthorne effect the difference made by the novelty of the approach or the
materials. Teachers may be affected:
they are often given special training in the experimental approach, but this is
rarely provided for teachers in any control group. Sometimes the experimental group is very
small, and so any difference from the control group may be the result of normal
fluctuation of factors outside the intended experiment.
Often
the measures used to indicate teacher effectiveness are very narrow, with a
high emphasis placed on word recognition and much less attention given to the
construction of meaning. Where meaning
is involved at all, it is likely to be assessed through a comprehension test of
literal meaning, on a mundane passage giving little scope for inference,
deduction or critical evaluation. These
tests are thus often much less searching and challenging than those used to
assess the progress of children in England on the National Curriculum,
or those used internationally in the PIRLS study (Mullis et al., 2007).
However, more interesting results have been obtained from studies of what
effective teachers actually know and do.
The study reported by Medwell et al. (1998) was commissioned by England.s
Teacher Training Agency (TTA), to investigate the knowledge and understanding
that distinguished effective teachers of literacy. These effective teachers were identified by a
process involving their Head Teachers, their local inspectors and their
children.s results on National Curriculum tests. They were matched with mathematics
co-ordinators, taken to represent a range of levels of competence in literacy
teaching.
The investigators found that what distinguished the effective teachers from
their colleagues was not what official sources had claimed, their knowledge of
syntax and phonology and the spelling patterns of English, but instead it was
their possession of a clear philosophy of literacy teaching, their
foregrounding of whole texts in all aspects of their literacy teaching, and
their knowledge of children's literature.
These teachers certainly attended to the mechanics of reading and writing
such as phonics and spelling, but did so with the clear and explicit aim of
making meaning through whole texts.
Whereas the research reported by Medwell et al. was carried out before the
introduction of England's
National Literacy Strategy, Frater.s study (2000b) surveys teachers whose children's test
results demonstrate that they are effective teachers of the NLS. This survey, carried out by a former Chief
Inspector for English, showed that the most effective teachers worked with
whole texts at the forefront of their planning and teaching. Those who followed the NLS guidelines more
closely, were less successful, even in terms of their children.s success in the
National Curriculum tests. The interest,
enthusiasm and persistence of children taught in text-focused classrooms was
also evident.
However, as Cremin et al. have shown, primary professionals tend to lean on a narrow repertoire of authors, poets
and picturebook creators. A subsequent phase of the same project showed that
teachers need support if they are to develop children's reading for pleasure,
and enhance their involvement as socially engaged and self-motivated readers
(Cremin, 2009).
Implication
As well as familiarity with ways of teaching the mechanics of literacy, a
thorough knowledge of and commitment to children's literature are necessary for
effective literacy teaching. Student
teachers also need to develop a coherent philosophy of literacy teaching, a
clear understanding of the rationale for recommended classroom practice in terms
of what the processes of reading and writing involve, how children can use them
and the differences these uses can make to children's lives.
. Powerful reading
lessons can only be taught through powerful texts.
(Meek, 1988; 1996)
Margaret Meek, whose name is widely known to primary teachers of literacy in England, has
never made the mistake of seeing or presenting literacy as simpler than it
is. Her research, largely conceptual and
book-based, is also illumined by subtly penetrating observations of children.s
encounters with texts. She draws on an
exceptionally rich knowledge of literature, philosophy, the psychology of play
and literary study to inform her interpretations of the understandings children
can make of texts, from their earliest experiences of sharing books,
onwards. She argues and demonstrates
that not all texts are equal: rich meaning-making requires rich texts. The best children.s texts resonate through
their use of powerful language and visual images to explore powerful themes,
and establish subtle and complex relations with the reader.
What is
not said may be as or more significant as the words on the page. In picturebooks, such as Burningham.s Come Away from the Water, Shirley, an
apparently banal verbal text may be given enormous significance by the visual images. Through engagement with (not mere exposure
to) such rich texts, children learn to shift perspectives, 'to become both the
teller - and the told' (Meek 1988, p.10).
They learn that reading is an elaborate game with rules, that the
printed word can offer satisfying complexities of meaning making through which
they may explore other possibilities and other relationships with the world
than those provided by first-hand experience alone.
Her work on reading for information is less well known, but equally penetrating
and thought-provoking. She calls into
question the conventional division of texts for children into fiction and
non-fiction, and also the terms, such as 'information retrieval', that are
routinely used to denote what readers do.
She is concerned that children should have access to books of high
quality, arguing that 'really expert presentation of ideas, and the information
they generate, engages the imagination of learners' (Meek, 1996, p. 9). As ever, she presents the demands of reading
in ways that are the product of great thought and understanding, but appear
fresh, and immediate, yet with the weight of an enduring validity. In this spirit she recognises that many
information texts require, in addition to the linear reading of much fiction, a
.radial reading. that spreads out from the unfamiliar subject matter to the
reader.s related experience of life and other texts.
Implication
Effective
literacy teachers need first-hand experiences of the proliferation of meanings
to be made from powerful texts, and the pleasures of engagement. A wide knowledge and personal enthusiasm for
texts will help the children they teach enlarge their own capacities of making
meaning and pleasure in the process.
Complex
picturebooks have many important literacy lessons to offer children.
(Doonan,
1983; Nodelman, 1984; Lewis, 1990; Sipe, 1998; Arizpe and Styles, 2003; Sipe
and Pantaleo, 2008)
Recent decades have seen an extraordinary flowering of the picturebook. Over 25 years ago, Doonan drew attention to
the complexity of the visual images in many such texts. But picturebooks contain more than
pictures. Far from simple, many of these
multimodal texts offer child and adult readers layers of meaning in both the
verbal and the visual text, and also in the interplay between the two. 'Intriguing fusions' such as Anthony Browne's
Hansel and Gretel and Maurice
Sendak's Outside Over There have
fascinated students of semiotics as well as domestic and primary school readers. Nodelman, among the first to examine the
picture/text interaction, demonstrates that 'reading' the pictures has to be
learned: much about them is conventional rather than literal representation.
Lewis regards many modern picturebooks as metafictions
on a par, in their refusal to take for granted how stories should be told, with
such adult texts as Calvino's If on a
Winter's Night a Traveller, or Fowles' The
French Lieutenant's Woman. Sipe sees
the relation between the verbal and visual text in picturebooks as synergy.
Others use the term postmodern for
texts that have stretched our conventional notion of what constitutes a
picturebook, as well as what it means to be an engaged reader of these
texts. Arizpe and Styles have researched
children's responses to and ideas about such texts, finding that while most
children have an appreciative awareness of many of the processes involved in
reading and writing postmodern or metafictive
texts, younger children investigate the pictures more thoroughly than their
older schoolmates. But there is still an
important role for the classroom teacher: concluding a study of primary
children's understandings of the processes of reading and creating metafictive
texts, they state:
The
children's critical comments and observations suggest how their metacognitive
skills can be developed and built on in order to help them become more critical
and discerning readers.
(Arizpe and Styles, 2003, p. 125)
From a range of perspectives, the authors in Sipe and
Pantaleo's edited collection critically examine and discuss postmodern
picturebooks, and reflect upon their unique contributions to both the field of
children's literature and to the development of new literacies for child,
adolescent, and adult readers.
Implications
Picturebooks have an important role to play in literacy education, not just
in the early stages of learning to read, but all through the primary school.
Where collaborative talk
is encouraged and supported, rich texts can be shared with young children in
the classroom in ways that allow them to develop important ideas about reading
and literature.
(Sipe, 2007).
Sipe's close analysis of the discussion and activity around teachers' 'read
alouds' in first and second grade US classrooms shows clearly how young
children are capable of developing complex literary understandings that extend
well beyond the conventional components of narrative of plot, setting,
character and theme. The literary
understanding he shows children to be developing is a social construction. He presents it through an analysis that draws
from theories of semiotics, visual aesthetic theory, schema and cognitive
flexibility theory as well as a range of theories from contemporary literary
criticism. Sipe argues that:
The literary understanding of young children
consists of five facets: the analytical, the inter-textual, the personal, the
transparent, and the performative, which are each characterized by different
stances, actions and functions. These
five facets constitute the enactment of three basic literary impulses: the
hermeneutic impulse, the personalizing impulse, and the aesthetic impulse.
Literary understanding is the dynamic process whereby these three impulses are
activated and synergistically interact with each other.
(Sipe, 2007, p. 271)
Implication
Particularly when reading aloud in the classroom, student teachers need to be
helped to value children's multifarious responses to text, to support a rich
variety of meaning-making and not confine them to recitation - that is to
teacher-dominated interaction involving the interrogation of students -
concerning the conventional components of narrative.
Engaging and effective
beginning literacy instruction is an intense balancing of skills instruction
and holistic literacy experiences, in a well-managed, motivating classroom
setting..(Pressley, 2003 p.14).
(Wharton-McDonald et al. 1998; Pressley et al., 2001a; Pressley et al., 2001b;
Pressley, 2003)
Analysis of studies of children learning to read and of the task of reading
show the unbiased observer that learning to read requires attention to both the
purpose of the activity - making meaning - and the conventions of our writing
system - the complex spelling patterns of English. Both must be attended to if children are to
learn to read accurately, fluently and with understanding. Neither is sufficient on its own. Balanced literacy instruction appears to be
what enables young learners to make most substantial progress in the complex
process of becoming literate. According
to Michael Pressley, this:
- involves explicit, systematic and completely thorough teaching of the skills
required to read and write, in a classroom environment where there is much
reading of authentic literature - including information books - and much
composing by students.
(Pressley, 2003 p.2).
Pressley argues that many advocates of extreme positions have
taken up the term 'balanced instruction' without changing their views, and use
it to denote either meaning-focused instruction that includes the explicit
teaching of the mechanics only when the learner demonstrates a clear need for
them, or instruction that includes attention to meaning only when children have
passed through the gates of phonics and spelling. He repudiates both these
positions.
From a base of evidence of successful classrooms gathered by
himself and others (Wharton-McDonald et al., 1998; Pressley et al 2001a;
2001b), Pressley concludes that the most effective early literacy teachers
engage children in a more sustained and significant way through:
- teaching all the time, in a variety of groupings, incorporating
literacy teaching in instruction in other curriculum areas, balancing skills instruction with holistic
experiences, covering as many as 20 skills an hour, some planned and others in
response to children's needs;
- employing a wide range of tactics to motivate, choosing stories
and classroom activities of real interest to the children and encouraging them
to see their successes as the product of their efforts.
Pressley observes that it is not at all easy to transform an ineffective
teacher into an effective one. But he
does conclude his seminal paper by urging all elementary teachers 'to become
more like the most engaging and most effective elementary teachers' (Pressley,
2003 p.24). He presents six aims which
all should adopt:
- to create a strong balancing of skills instruction and holistic
literacy experiences;
- to make strong connections between reading, writing and content
learning;
- to
teach a lot;
- to scaffold
students, monitoring them as they read aloud and write, providing mini-lessons that move them along;
- to do
everything possible to motivate and to communicate high expectations, while encouraging children to become
self-regulated;
- to have
a management plan, although this may be less important in a busy, motivated classroom.
This research neatly complements the work of Medwell et al., cited above, in
that Pressley's concerns are the actions of the effective teacher, whereas
Medwell et al. were primarily looking at the knowledge effective teachers bring
to the classroom. It also complements
the work of Chinn et al. and other investigators into classroom interaction
cited above, who have shown the superiority of collaborative reasoning over
teacher-dominated recitation. Together
these various studies show us what goes on in successful literacy-learning
classrooms.
Implication
This is
a hugely important study for all those involved in preparing student teachers
to teach children to read and write. We
must help them avoid extreme positions, on the one hand, and a lacklustre or
perfunctory approach on the other. We
need to enthuse our student teachers, while helping them to become observant,
rigorous and balanced, if they are to help children become effective users of
literacy.
 
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