Perhaps a little late to the party but I finally got around to reading Alex Quigley’s ‘Closing the Vocabulary Gap’. While focused on a British state school context, the big questions Quigley raises should be at the forefront of all English departments and a useful reorientation point for teams considering text choices and reading/literacy strategies for the coming academic year:
What vocabulary do our students need to know, understand and use to be successful in school and beyond?
How challenging are the texts that we expect students to read and understand?
How do we foster a culture of reading in school?
How do we encourage children to be avid readers beyond the classroom?
Our department is certainly in a position to be asking ourselves these questions anew, especially when it comes to fostering a culture of reading. In the scramble to ‘gain back’ that loss of teaching time post-pandemic, we were more focused on skill development and application, with an intent to ensure that our students were best equipped to return to campus.
This coincided with some decisive changes to our KS3 literature
offering. We recognised the need for more diverse voices and perspectives that reflected our students’ backgrounds and took inspiration from guidance laid out in the Runnymede School Report (more on this in a future blog post). We swapped in some newer, more ambitious texts (Chinese Cinderella, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crossing), completely replanned our poetry units and the teaching got underway.
At the end of each unit we reflect on its efficacy as a team. One of the more significant questions raised recently has been, ‘are we giving our students enough time, in lessons, to hear modelled reading?’ The honest answer is no. We assume our students are completing assigned reading at home but this is by no means a universal. Extensive research has shown that students benefit from being read to and often, as teachers, we misjudge the tension between curriculum demands, time management and giving classes some much needed space in which to - quite simply - read aloud and hear others doing the same.
I loved Quigley’s mention of FRED (Fathers Reading Every Day) as a means of encouraging parent input. We have a similar system to the Reading Role Models in place and that has led to students choosing increasingly challenging texts, straying away from those easier options that would otherwise lead to limited vocabulary and comprehension development.
Technology offers another powerful tool by which we can track student reading ages and vocabulary acquisition. There are numerous platforms that offer tailored packages, similar to Accelerated Reader that give students autonomy over their development but also allow Library departments to track literacy levels. The danger here is that we generate data for data’s sake but this could help to generate a rationale for more targeted intervention with certain groups of students.
In short, building time into the curriculum (lower KS3 especially) to allow for modelled reading, generating a school wide reading policy that makes best use of various aspects of the school community and carefully selected technology suites can make a difference to vocabulary acquisition, application and comprehension.
Comments