On the weekend a newspaper article appeared with ‘Researchers say students would benefit from ‘mandated reading for pleasure’ at school.’ This was part of a study showing boys underachievement in primary school, particularly from Year 3 on.
This is not new news, reading achievement from Year 3 to Year 9 has declined for decades. It is one reason so much money and effort has been funnelled into Middle Years programmes.
As schools begin to implement effective practice in the early years it becomes more apparent that reading practice for Year 2 and beyond needs to be looked at. And improved. Reading for pleasure isn’t the answer though.
If you are asked what is the one thing you want students to take from your reading lesson what would your answer be…?
Most teachers I ask, answer along the lines of inspiring a love of and passion for reading. I understand that but it is a terrible answer. Just as mandating reading for pleasure is a terrible conclusion to our reading results and won’t result in improving reading.
That answer though is why so many classrooms have self-selected independent reading as part of their reading instruction each day. If this happens for 20 minutes a day that is 2 hours a week, and 80 hours a year. This for a teaching practice that doesn’t improve reading. The idea of reading for pleasure hasn’t worked to date and won’t even if mandated.
Independent reading as a practice is important though. Students need to read every day, not just in reading lessons, they need to work hard at understanding what they read, they need to talk and write about their reading…every day.
Below is some typical data of what happens to a cohort of students as they progress through school. If you look carefully students who are great at reading become worse, those that are adequate become at risk of not reading effectively. This begins to happen from Year 2. (In case you are wondering the missing data exists because of the non reporting semester due to COVID.)
While each reading lesson needs to improve decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, from Year 2 it is comprehension that dominates planning, and assessment. There are two problems with this.
One, fluency and vocabulary (including morphology), are not given the importance and time they deserve, and two, how to teach comprehension is poorly understood.
Comprehension is often broken into parts and taught with short, easy to read text. The focus is usually on one of the strategies of predicting, summarising, visualising, questioning or making connections. Skills such as inferring and finding the main idea also get muddled into the mix.
Professor Timothy Shanahan has an excellent overview of comprehension that I recommend starting with. It is an overview that you need to read a number of times to absorb the messages. He has a series of articles, here and here, that describe some of the problems with self-selected independent reading.
If you, or your school, can teach explicitly and use a subject focus for science and humanities then independent reading can quickly become directed independent reading. Directed because the teacher decides the year/grade level text that all students will read. It is important that all students read the same text so that all students can contribute to talking about it.
If your NAPLAN and cohort data show some of the same patterns as above then I suggest you look at changing three of your independent reading sessions, three lessons that can be explicit, build knowledge and reading, allowing you to also focus on decoding, fluency and vocabulary and demanding students use text evidence to answer, support and challenge questions.