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Understanding a child’s reading journey
Since the launch of the English Hub initiative in 2018, the profile of phonics and early reading in schools has grown.
Recent reports from OFSTED (Telling the story: the English education subject report and Strong foundations in the first years of school – GOV.UK) have highlighted the positive impact this has had in schools and how early reading is a priority for many. But what happens next?
A child’s journey through early reading would involve the following elements:
- Learning the alphabetic code
- Attributing sounds to symbols (grapheme-phoneme correspondence)
- Putting sounds together to say words (blending)
- Developing meaning of words
- Understanding the order of words and how they create meaning (syntax)
- Learning patterns of language and common words/phrases used in texts
- Understanding how punctuation is used in text
- Developing a fluency and rhythm to reading
- Gaining meaning from what they have read
This is not an exhaustive list but an example of how we develop as readers. At some of these initial points, a child’s reading may be laboured and staccato. They may not recall words they have read previously or they may be so focused on cracking the code that they lose track of what they have read. This is all part of the learning curve and the reasons why it is necessary for them to have repeated practice until they are confident and fluent in their decoding.
At this point, we are ready to tackle other elements that will make a child a reader.
The first focus is likely to be building fluency. This is not just about reading with greater speed, but also about reading with accuracy:  speed + accuracy = fluency. It is also about getting the right tone, pitch, rhythm and intonation in your reading. How do you keep a listener engaged? How do you know which points to emphasise? How does the punctuation guide you? This needs to be explicitly modelled to children – not only through hearing adults read but also through explicit instructions and opportunities to practise. There is much to think about in terms of fluency so this progression document is a good starting point and can guide you in terms of strategies and aims.
There are many activities that schools use to develop fluency but it is important that the reading of extracts at pace does not detract from the ultimate goal – a love of reading.
This brings us onto the notion of comprehension (the ability to understand something) and the need to consider how we develop these skills. When we teach comprehension, we cover areas such as inference, retrieval, vocabulary, sequencing, structure and prediction. Within this there can be progression in terms of our questioning and modelling of how to analyse a text. Often, we can leave this to chance and may fall back on asking the same rote questions – who was your favourite character and why? To ensure pupils develop deeper understanding, we need to plan this carefully and ensure that all areas of comprehension are covered (but not all at once).
Pathways Literacy follows a mastery approach: focussing on a particular skill and applying this to the text over a number of sessions rather than having a large range all in one go. This allows pupils to truly understand what they need to do when answering different styles of questions.
Of course, we have statutory testing and a national curriculum and we know that we are guided by this in what we teach. All of this helps us to understanding the craft behind storytelling (which in turn can support writing) as well as opening up discussions about texts and further building our understanding of the world (and people) around us. It’s worth remembering too that statutory testing was removed at the end of KS1. We still have to teach the curriculum but are less bound now by the thought of preparing younger pupils for a test – we can therefore focus more on exploring texts for enjoyment and to develop a love of reading. Have you responded to this in your teaching or are you still creating formal comprehension sheets for pupils to fill in?
When we think about what we want for pupils, we are looking to teach the skills they need initially to access books and then enough confidence and practise to encourage a love of reading. We can all cast our minds back to being taught a new skill – the nuts and bolts of it. But how many of us stuck with it? We drop it if it becomes too hard or if we haven’t kept up with our practice. We might not have others around us who value the skill and can be role models or cheerleaders. We might also not know why we are doing this anymore, know the challenge or what we are reaching for.
Now, apply this to reading. We started by addressing the teaching of skills but it is the rest we need to focus on. How do we move those early readers on to become advocates for reading and to develop a lifelong relationship with books? Practise, opportunity, understanding, discussion, goals, purpose and support are all the elements we have thought about: things we need to bear in mind as pupils move from Y1 through school.
If you’d like to talk to us about your reading curriculum, get in touch or browse our book reviews for some new ideas to share with your class.
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