Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction

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Shanahan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, and has led the US Government’s National Reading Panel. Recently on his blog, he fielded aquestion about the effectiveness of whole-class reading approaches, where one student reads aloud while their classmates follow thetext Our end-of-KS2 results have been above the national average for many years and children were reading, so change didn’t seem urgent.

We found the Open University’s whole-school development resources really useful during this stage. Whole-school reading Secondary Year 6 leavers - Covid-safe transition activities and ideas It's been a chaotic year but Year 6 children still deserve the best ending to their primary journey To fit our school’s context and our pupils needs, we adapted his suggestions, enabling us to include a more diverse range of text types. But what texts would pupils read? We wanted to challenge our children so classic texts were an obvious choice, but when we set about designing a whole-school reading spine that teachers would use to select their class novel, we realised that most of the texts we’d considered were written by white British authors. This involves texts that are over 50 years old and feature vocabulary and syntax that is vastly different and typically more complex than texts written today.Discussions about whole-class reading can be muddied by terminology. Names for whole-class reading include ​ ‘Round Robin Reading’, ​ ‘Popcorn Reading’ and ​ ‘Control the Game’. The latter is advocated in Doug Lemov’s popular ​ ‘ Teach Like aChampion’ series and, most recently, his book ​ ‘ Reading Reconsidered’. We knew that the children in our school start significantly below where they should be in terms of speaking, listening and language development. We carried out a staff survey, asking questions about how often teachers read to their class and which text types they chose. We also surveyed pupils and asked then if they enjoyed reading, which types of texts they liked and if they read at home. Shanahan’s point is that reading aloud is valuable insofar as it improves students’ reading fluency, which is strongly associated with comprehension (e.g. see the EEF’s most recent guidance on literacy at key stage 2). But, Shanahan argues, students need large volumes of practice to improve reading fluency – taking turns one-at-a-time is ahighly inefficient way of providing this. In addition, we decided that reading lessons would be separate to literacy lessons, with word reading and comprehension taught in the former, and writing skills taught in the latter.

In the national curriculum, the programmes of study for reading at KS1 and 2 consist of two dimensions: word reading and comprehension (both listening and reading). All pupils must be encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum.For Shanahan, preferable alternatives include reading in pairs, where students alternate after each paragraph, choral reading, where students and teachers read the same section of the text simultaneously, and repeated reading, where students read the same passage multiple times. In all cases, Shanahan argues that students read more and have greater opportunities to improve fluency, citing studies reviewed by the US National Reading Panel (NIHCD, 2000