Usborne Phonics Readers - 12 Book Set

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How do secondary schools with strong outcomes for struggling readers identify these pupils’ particular reading needs? Teachers and reading support staff also frequently talked to pupils about books and what they were reading. One school leader said that displays around the school were intended to ‘start conversations with teachers around reading’. There is extensive research into early reading difficulties and interventions at primary level, but less with older pupils, who tend to have different needs. Research into the skills profiles of older struggling readers shows that reading difficulties can present themselves in many different ways. [footnote 18] These pupils may have specific needs related to gaps in one or more aspect of reading, such as decoding, accuracy or language comprehension. Other pupils can, on the surface, appear to be managing in class, because they have developed coping strategies which mask their reading difficulties. Schools are less likely to offer these pupils additional help. [footnote 19] Identifying reading gaps and weaknesses Investment in training gave all teachers a level of understanding and insight that meant they could help identify pupils who might need additional teaching, and could use specific strategies to help them in class. Specialist training and development for reading teachers also created a pool of expertise that staff could use for advice and help. Once children can decode words, they then need to be able to read and recognise words and their meanings accurately, and with ease, to become fluent readers. [footnote 10] Fluent reading is described as an extension of decoding, and requires accuracy, pace and expression. [footnote 11]

C Young, T Rasinski, D Paige and W Rupley, ‘Defining fluency: finding the missing pieces for reading fluency’, Issue June, 2020; ‘Report of the national reading panel: teaching children to read’, National Reading Panel, 2000. ↩ Do your children need slow and steady review of their phonics words? (Wildflower Ramblings, A Beka) CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words are progressively learned with delightful, full-colored pictures. The only downside to these readers (and it’s a big issue to note) is that Abeka’s program learns all the vowels in their first little book. Learning the vowels — because they all sound so similar to a child just becoming phonologically aware — is not beneficial for most children. Teachers said struggling readers could see they were improving, and this gave them the confidence and motivation to read more. For instance, in one school, support staff described how one pupil was ‘really proud because he’s moved from being really struggling to being confident enough to read aloud in front of older students.’ The release of this report does not mean that we should let go of “sight words.” Certainly children need to know those too! The core of reading instruction should be based on phonics patterns and methods. Of course we, as adults, do not sound out the words we read; so our goal is for children to commit words to memory for both reading and spelling. But for beginning readers, it is most beneficial to sound it out.

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Training supported an ethos that valued and understood the importance of investing in reading and staff working together to help struggling readers. This culture of collaboration was evident in our discussions with staff. One reading support teacher said: Sometimes struggling readers can fool people into thinking they are fluent readers, others will stumble over words and it is more obvious. Equally you can have a student who doesn’t read well out loud but takes in all the information and understands.

Try and read other books at the same level as your child’s reading book. Look at Reading with Oxford or our free ebook library for inspiration In schools that get safeguarding right, leaders create a culture that safeguarding is “everyone’s business, all of the time”. In this school, leaders seem to have done the same with reading. Everyone we spoke to appeared to view teaching pupils to read – and to read well, with confidence and fluency – in this way. Identifying pupils’ reading gaps

Upper and Lower Case Alphabet Desk Mat

Schools should use assessment to help identify whether problems are related to word recognition, oral language comprehension or a combination of these. [footnote 20] This research explores how some secondary schools use different types of tests for different purposes. It focuses on how they use diagnostic assessments to identify specific areas of reading strength and weakness, and how they match additional help to pupils’ individual reading needs.

I feel like I’m a better reader now. I think because of the help with letter patterns, it makes it more easy to break up and learn more of the words. Diagnostic tests included DiaPhon, Diagnostic Reading Analysis, Test of Word Reading Efficiency and Fresh Start. We also saw how additional help for struggling readers was part of a wider whole-school strategy to improve the reading of all pupils. This meant that as well as additional teaching in the foundational components of reading, such as accurate word reading and fluency, struggling readers benefited from teaching across the curriculum that focused on the vocabulary knowledge needed for comprehension and subject-specific reading. Annex A: detailed research methods

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Another resource that you may consider are the First Phonics Readers from Wildflower Ramblings. I created these readers for my son who struggles to sound out three letters together (h – a – t), but can understand and synthesize two letters being sounded out together (h – a). A Year 11 pupil in another school explained how he went to read one-to-one with an adult when he was in Year 10. This pupil explained how this ‘has helped develop my reading confidence and reading out loud’. For these pupils, confidence and motivation went hand in hand. Pupils felt more confident, and were therefore more motivated to engage with reading, and read more. We sometimes have to put literacy over something else… This is controversial… but we’ve made the ethical judgement as a school that, in terms of access to the wider curriculum, they would benefit more from having that focus.

You can see the progress they’ve made, you see it in lessons when they’re eager to read. It’s beyond the figures – we do what we do to see that palpable result. It’s not necessarily about that number on a spreadsheet or reading age – it’s about them having that confidence. Other schools timetabled additional teaching outside the normal school day. Two schools said they had changed the time of extra reading lessons as a result of monitoring and evaluating their existing reading timetable. Both schools found that teaching sessions before school worked best. One member of support staff described why the school made the decision to change teaching times: The research was approved by Ofsted’s research ethics committee and we got informed consent from everyone we spoke with, including pupils and their parents. What we learned Our analysis of inspection evidence for 30 secondary schools, inspected between September 2021 and January 2022, showed that 28 used reading assessment tests to screen all Year 7 pupils and identify those at risk of struggling with reading. Standardised screening tests, such as cognitive ability tests or reading age assessments, effectively identified the bottom 20% or 30% of readers, based on a chosen cut-off score or according to the gap between pupils’ reading age and their chronological age. They showed pupils who were at risk of not getting a grade 4 in GCSE English. However, schools did not follow up with diagnostic tests to identify precise gaps in pupils’ reading knowledge. Then the children will really start to read! They will learn to recognise the different letters or pairs of letters (graphemes) in a word, say the separate sounds ( phonemes) slowly, then put ( blend) them together. For example, they will be taught that the word ‘boat’ can be separated out ( segmented) into ‘b-oa-t’ which represents the sounds bbb-oh– ttt. They can blend these sounds into the word ‘boat’Inspection evidence shows that schools frequently use reading ages as a measure of reading ability. Reading age assessments measure the gap between a pupil’s actual age and how well they should be reading for their age. Reading age assessments tell schools less than they might seem, because older pupils vary a lot in how they read. [footnote 21] Reading ages can show whether a pupil has a problem with reading, but not what that problem might be. They focus on comprehension and do not look at decoding and fluency, for example. During focus groups, inspectors told us that although schools assessed pupils’ reading, it was not always clear how these assessments were used or what their purpose was. They described how programmes like Accelerated Reader [footnote 31] are regularly used by secondary schools to monitor and assess reading, but said that the information from these programmes was not used systematically in the school curriculum. They may not be massively behind their chronological age with regards to their reading, but it could be their fluency and their confidence in reading. Sometimes we find they can read but it’s extremely slow so it’s about trying to improve the fluency of their reading.