It is now time to consider what teaching approaches can teachers utilise to support pupils who are struggling to access the reading house. Without unlocking the doors of the reading house, pupils will be shut out of accessing the curriculum and ultimately limit their success in school.
The challenges for a struggling reader
A pupil in my Year 5 class is struggling with Chapter 4 from Ross MacKenzie’s ‘The Nowhere Emporium’.
At this point in the story, we flashback to Edinburgh in 1878. Here is a snippet from a dialogue between two unknown characters:
The most obvious problem that my pupil is likely to display here is language comprehension. She might not have the vocabulary to understand meaning. ‘Asylum’, ‘stigma’ and ‘condition’ may prove unfamiliar to her. However, whilst comprehension might be the most obvious problem, it does not automatically follow that comprehension should be the main focus of intervention.
Perhaps the issue can be located in the ‘word reading’ wing of the reading house?
So, I need to dig deeper into why my Year 5 pupil is struggling. Can she accurately decode? Does she not read with the required fluency? If I were to only address my Year 5 pupil’s language comprehension needs without careful diagnosis, then I might run into trouble when she attempts to read other challenging texts.
This is the difficulty primary educators face in planning and modelling literacy instruction. Outside of whole-class reading lessons, it feels like we need to decide whether our sometimes-scant resources for intervention should emphasise ‘word reading’ or ‘language comprehension’.
For secondary colleagues, this task is equally challenging, and indeed there are further sticking points as we consider literacy instruction and intervention in the context of resourcing, specialist teacher knowledge, and the so-called vocabulary ‘jump’
Structured interventions for struggling readers
Schools should focus first on developing core classroom teaching strategies that improve the literacy capabilities of the whole class. With this in place, the need for additional support should decrease. Nevertheless, it is likely that a small number of pupils will require additional support in the form of high quality, structured, targeted interventions to make progress.
Recommendation 7 of the EEF’s primary and secondary literacy guidance reports suggests we use high-quality, structured interventions to support struggling students. Knowing the underlying components of reading, how they build on one another, along with how they must come together to enable reading comprehension, is a critical first step for planning effective literacy provision.
The reading house allows us to illustrate these components of reading, and in doing so, we find a potential tool for guiding diagnostic assessment within and across lessons.
It is a possible starting point for training that builds teachers’ expertise around the different aspects of successful reading. Taken together, the rooms of the house can offer teachers a useful overview of the different aspects of reading to be assessed – and addressed – within lessons and intervention.
The EEF guidance also suggests that the ‘What works for literacy difficulties?’ guide is a helpful resource, alongside EEF evaluations of literacy programmes.