Literacy at Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1

g. Reading schemes

Few reading schemes in use in primary schools today offer as narrow an experience of the written word as those that were prevalent twenty-five years ago. But all schemes that are based on the idea of systematically grading the text in terms of the spelling patterns introduced, inevitably use a language that is more restricted than the language of the picture books and other texts that teachers share with young children to promote their pleasure in the written word.

Some schemes are still based on stereotyped views of family life and the mistaken idea that short words and short sentences make for easy reading. This may result in text that is both unrewarding and difficult for young children to read, because of its remoteness and artificial-sounding language. However, because of the complexity of the spelling patterns used, many ‘real books’ – texts written, published and bought with children’s enjoyment as the prime aim – may be frustratingly inaccessible to young readers.

It can be useful for student teachers to make close comparisons between texts in terms of the language used (syntax as well as vocabulary) and the stories presented. It is vital to train our student teachers to observe children reading different kinds of texts, to see the support the texts provide and the problems the children encounter.

You can ask your student teachers to examine a range of texts (both scheme and non-scheme) in terms of:

the ‘naturalness’ of the language;
the complexity and range of the spelling patterns;
the accessibility of the story;
the satisfaction the text is likely to produce.

You could also ask them to observe children’s responses to a similar range of texts in school.

Miscue analysis

Miscue analysis (Goodman and Goodman, 1977) can be of great value here. Student teachers who carry out a miscue analysis begin by complaining about the laborious nature of the process, but later tend to remark how it really makes them attend to what the children are doing as they try to make independent sense of texts. They also remark how such an analysis clearly shows that some texts are more supportive of children’s efforts than others.