Lindsay Pickton reflects on the challenge of building confident readers.
Reading for Pleasure has become a timetabled item in many schools. And this is a good thing. However, to take pleasure in the performance of any complex skill requires proficiency in that activity, as well as interest and desire. Children who, by the junior phase of their education, are clearly falling behind in their reading ability, are almost certainly lacking in proficient skill, and may not have the interest and desire to push through the hard work of actually learning to read better.
There’s evidently a circularity here: if you’re good at something, you’re more inclined to do it, and this increased practice leads to improved skill, and so on. In many cases, that early achievement in reading hasn’t come from nowhere, either; children who start with a stronger vocabulary and sound comprehension—often from the good luck of being read to from an early age—not only acquire phonic knowledge faster; they seem to transition from decoding to automaticity faster, too.
None of which helps the 7-11 year-olds who are falling further and further behind, due to the opposite action of the circle described above: the lower their skill-level, the less inclined they are to practise, the further they fall behind. To make matters worse, let’s remember that the junior-age regular readers are not just building reading fluency—they are also growing their vocabulary, which enables better comprehension. They’re also developing a sense of how text and sentence structures tend to work, which again supports comprehension. And their general knowledge grows, which—you guessed it—also helps them understand better.
For me, the big takeaway from all of this is that you get good at the things you practise. This is such an obvious fact in all learning that I believe we don’t say it enough (I’d have it chiselled into the walls of staff rooms, if not classrooms). It’s the key to helping those ‘falling behind’ readers in the junior phase: yes, we must support their learning of reading skills like decoding, but they won’t achieve speedy word-reading—let alone fluency—without a lot of practice, and for this, we have to work on interest and desire.
A major block in achieving this is the self-esteem hit that accompanies falling behind your peers in any skill. In reading, we may even make this worse when we talk often of reading for pleasure—how lovely it is, how we should all be doing it, in fact how we must be doing it, because it’s so important… What must it feel like to hear your teachers talk like this, if you’re one of the children who finds reading too hard to be enjoyable? Do you think the grown-ups are talking nonsense? Are you just baffled? Are you starting to think that there’s something wrong with you?
Step one, I believe, is to be honest: this is going to be hard work, but if we put the time in, it will be worth it. Getting buy-in to this is crucial, but hard on those children who don’t come from a home-life that values reading. How do we show them that the effort will be worth it? Read to them—the loveliest, most stimulating, funniest, thrilling stories, hilarious and moving poetry, and fascinating non-fiction. This provides the goal—work at it, and you can have all this for yourself. And of course, reading to children builds vocabulary and general knowledge, enhancing comprehension. It also provides a model for fluent reading that many children lack. Reading to children should accompany the teaching of reading skills for all children; they work as converging prongs that lead to independent reading.
Then there’s resourcing their independent reading practice. The books we provide need to be at a level that’s matched to their abilities, so they can experience success…but, historically, this has led to a major conflict between ability and interest, which potentially kills desire. I’m talking here about junior-age children having to practise on infant-phase books—almost certainly an exercise in tedium and humiliation. I’ve even known 8 and 9 year-olds having to travel physically to the Infants to get their next book. I bet they just can’t wait for ‘reading for pleasure’ time.
The concept of ‘high-low’ books—in which the interest level is high and the required reading level is low—is not new, and has always been an attempt to unpick the problem illustrated above. Some are designed specifically to support children with dyslexia, using supportive fonts and page-colour; others use familiar characters but place them in more age-appropriate contexts. I’ve witnessed great successes using such schemes.
These books look distinct from the books that other 7-11 children are reading, and for some children, this can be an issue. This was the first thing that appealed to me about the concept of Oxford University Press’ ‘Rise’ books (part of their new Readerful library). These books are definitely ‘high-lows’—the reading level, word count, sentences-per-page and so on are carefully and progressively structured, while the content and illustration-style are age-appropriate through the junior years—but it was the idea that they should look and even feel like junior books that caught my attention.
Books for 7-11 year-olds have a spine that can carry the title, author and publisher, but scheme books are so thin they tend to be stapled. And weirdly shiny. When a 9 year-old is reading a scheme book, it looks and feels different from the books read by her or his peers, and the child is constantly reminded of their difference, which can be humiliating. High-lows—especially the earliest levels—have to be thin, because they don’t have many words in them. This can be solved by putting two books in one (along with jokes and thinking-points), instantly fattening-up the book to make it look and feel junior-appropriate. They can even have a matte finish, in the modern style, too.
Picture books and graphic texts aimed at older primary readers play with fonts, for emphasis and often comedic effect; scheme books aimed at early-stage readers have tended to avoid this for fear of confusing the word-reading process for struggling decoders. Rise books do use playful fonts, instantly making the text look junior-appropriate; they do so carefully, using targeted typography actively to support understanding while ensuring legibility is clear.
There are additional features, too, that help in the building of good reading habits: they have ‘stop and think’ and ‘read this if…’ pages at the beginning, encouraging the kind of thinking that regular, confident readers go through automatically when they pick up a new book. They have light-touch understanding check-ins, which keep the focus on reading for meaning—important because so many slower-progress children view reading as merely reading all the words—plus the (terrible) jokes, mentioned above, that provide a little reward at the end of a book and also encourage the kind of sharing and book-talk in which avid readers engage without a thought. Interestingly, they even have a short piece at the end of the book—a poem or a tiny bit of playscript—related to the main text, which encourages repeat reading aloud, ostensibly for fun but also because repeat read-alouds help in the development of fluency.
High-low books don’t need to replace the teaching of reading, nor reading to children, both of which are vital. They aren’t created with independent reading in mind, because you get good at the things you practise. They are attractive and enjoyable, age—and reading-level appropriate, and are thus a powerful tool in the building of desire. Mastering fluent reading is vital, and if we neglect the independent practice aspect, the children we target our support towards won’t make the progress we want for them. If we can feed the interest, build the desire, with the right resources, we can give those children a taste of that virtuous circle, as their reading leads to better skills, which leads to more reading…and eventually, improved life chances.