| Reading
"My first and greatest liberty was that of being able to read everything and anything I cared to"
(Dylan Thomas, 1961, in Crystal, 2000, p.105).
Catching up on practice
Most underachieving readers have not read enough. Because they made a poor start in the early years, they lost confidence, and did not practise; consequently, in what soon became a vicious cycle, they fell further behind (Clay, 1991, p.209).
By Y7, low achievers have commonly accumulated a substantial backlog of missing practice (Sylva and Hurry, 1995, p.2), poor fluency, low confidence, even an active dislike of reading. If they are not to lag still further, this backlog needs urgent attention - before the curriculum accelerates out of reach, and the demands of non-narrative texts (the norm for most subjects), simply overwhelm them.
Effective schools have often tackled these clustered problems with paired reading initiatives in which:
- texts are individually differentiated (e.g. by colour coding)
- helpers (adults or older pupils) are trained
- the pairs meet more than once per week
- records of progress are kept and monitored
- the initiative is of fixed duration (e.g. 14 weeks)
- a diplomatic enthusiast rigorously oversees the scheme.
Similarly directed and effective initiatives have included:
Paired reading, or similarly principled initiatives, are suited to underachieving and registered pupils alike.
Catching up on skills
For the just same reasons (as above), rapid progress in skills is equally urgent. One-to-one support in class has many virtues, especially with regard to behaviour, attention, and organisation; they seldom include rapid progress in reading skills. Moreover, in-class support carries the danger of creating dependence, quite the opposite of the outcome required. The BSA survey evidence suggests that intensive tuition, in small groups or individually, works best. This entails the provision of withdrawal teaching, or extra-curricular tuition.
The group for catching up on skills may be smaller than for practice alone (above), and will certainly include pupils with relatively severe difficulties; they will often be best served if they are helped, in a co-ordinated fashion, by both initiatives.
The BSA survey evidence suggests that the principles needed to underpin an effective reading-skills intervention include:
- an integrated approach to reading and writing
- phonological development
- word recognition
- spelling
- comprehension
- intensity
- a frequency greater than once a week
- scrupulous record keeping
- tutor training.
Exactly these principles underpin the Catch Up programme, designed at Oxford Brookes University, for which secondary school units are now available (www.catchup.org.uk). The highly successful Reading Recovery™ programme, available only in primary schools, has long shown these principles to be right.
Backing up reading
What has been the subject of a concentrated focus needs to be sustained for the long term. Particularly when most of a new cohort underachieves, it may also be important for all pupils to practise more, and to create a school-wide reading culture. Successful initiatives have included:
- reading in registration
- library outreach projects
- reading reward programmes
- readathons
- foyer displays
- SSR (sustained silent reading)
and many others. Their success lies not in being good ideas, but in the effectiveness with which they are managed and sustained.
 
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