4. Literacy in the primary classroom
KS1/2: Literacy and Enjoyment 1
This 15-minute programme provides an example of the CLPE’s (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education) Power of Reading project in action. We see Catherine Gdula, a Year 2 teacher at a school in Lewisham, South London, working with her class in a range of literacy activities. Classroom footage is interspersed with the teacher’s reflections and with expert commentary from Olivia O’Sullivan, Assistant Director at CLPE.
What follows is an attempt to itemise what seem to me to be the salient features of the practice that is captured in this programme.
4.1 Reading for understanding and enjoyment
The first – very obvious – point is that there is an insistence on the importance of enjoyment and on the connection between affective and motivational factors and understanding. So the emphasis is on the involvement of children in books and in stories, for intrinsic purposes (the pleasure of the text) as well as extrinsic purposes (raising standards).
This point is made explicit in the voiceover, but it is made more eloquently in what we see – in the engagement of the children in books and in conversations about books. Enjoyment is here seen not as a soft alternative to the standards agenda but as an essential precondition for literacy and learning.
4.2 A shared text as the stimulus for varied activities over time
The reading of the text is thus embedded in many different kinds of semiotic work. Children’s classroom experience – their learning – thus becomes coherent; meanings and meaning-making extend over time and across activities.
Vital to this approach is the choice of text: the book has to be a rich enough resource to invite (and reward) the children’s intellectual and emotional engagement with it.
4.3 The power of retelling
Children get to know the story well by retelling it – by making their own versions of the story that they have shared. In this activity, children become makers of multimodal texts, storytellers as well as listeners and readers.
4.4 Shared close reading of text and images
Children’s talk about the images enables them to think about characters’ motivations and feelings, origins and perspectives. The shared text thus becomes a resource that encourages children to draw on all kinds of prior knowledge and experience, to make hypotheses and speculations as well as engaging them in empathetic and imaginative work.
4.5 Reading as performance
The teacher’s reading of the story aloud to the class is presented here as a vital pedagogic intervention. Olivia O’Sullivan describes this process as ‘essential for children to be drawn into a book, to feel enthusiastic about the story, and for all children, whether they can read the book or not, to actually hear the words on the page, read by a teacher who is giving a real tune to the story’. (This point – like much of the pedagogy that is represented in the video footage – is developed in more detail in Barrs and Cork, 2001.)
4.6 A little at a time – and time to talk
Not reading the whole story at one time creates space for the children to assemble and share their knowledge, to make and revise predictions, to inhabit the text imaginatively. Throughout the sequence of activities, we see the crucial role of talk in the development of literacy.
4.7 Inhabiting a role, inhabiting the text
Get them to be that person in the book and it becomes real, it becomes meaningful’ as Catherine Gdula says. What the footage demonstrates, very powerfully, is the developmental potential that is unlocked by imaginative play: drama is a means of entering into the world of the story.
4.8 Shared writing
The teacher uses the children’s ideas in such a way that the diary writing is genuinely collaborative – and simultaneously a product of their intellectual/imaginative work and a validation of it.
Similarly, when the children have been working on their own diary entries, the teacher’s reading of the diaries to the class is a celebration of what has been achieved and a way of enhancing the learning that has taken place.
 
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