Belleville Wix Academy

Reading

‘Reading to Learn’ – Understanding texts

‘The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension’

Article Image

Comprehension is introduced from Nursery and Reception through our 4-strategies and 6-steps reading pedagogy, based on Reciprocal Reading, to enable ‘Reading to Learn’. As children become more fluent and automatic readers, the amount of time and focus on understanding increases.

 

Triggering Prior Knowledge

This prepares the reader for engaging with a text by:

  • Summarising prior learning/concepts.
  • Foregrounding new texts with an understanding of concepts or facts that will aid understanding of the reading to come.

 

Predict

Enabling the reader to anticipate what will come next in the text, based on:

  • Prior knowledge
  • Structure of the text
  • Content of the text
  • What has been read previously

 

Read

Children read independently at their own pace, either:

  • Silently or to themselves
  • Teachers can hear an individual read-aloud
  • Reading can be done as a whole class

 

Clarify

Clarifying enables the learner to deal with difficulties of:

  • Unfamiliar vocabulary – words/phrases
  • New or challenging concepts
  • Where meaning is lost

The best clarification comes from the children – some words seem obvious to teachers but that is irrelevant for a child to whom it is not obvious.

To establish meaning, we may re-read a sentence or passage now that the children understand the language.

 

Question

Children are encouraged to be active in the reading process by asking questions about the concepts and themes that they are intrigued or confused by.

  • Teachers (and increasingly, the children themselves) ask questions about the text that they have just read.
  • The teacher should invite different ideas and suggestions to questions.

Comprehension of the text can be assessed through the questioning stage

 

Summarise

The summary identifies the main or most important point in the section that has been read:

  • It gives an indication of the reader’s understanding.
  • Encourages the reader to sift main ideas in own words.
  • Sets up prediction for the next section where they will return to predicting.

Article Image

‘Learning to Read’ – an additional/alternative to phonics

Phonics is the primary strategy for word reading. Other strategies are also taught to all children to build fluency (and as 15% of English words are not phonically decodable) – this also gives an alternative to phonics for those children who do not learn to read in this way.

Examples of strategies:

Sight word flashcards

Picture cues

Skip and return

If I know . . . sent, then I know . . . bent, went, tent, spent, scent

Use your root words

Words inside words

Vowel sound switch (from long to short ‘a’ sound)

Compound words

Syllable rules

Syllables contain only one vowel sound

Vowel teams stay together

R-controlled vowels stay together (ar, er, ir, or, ur)

Syllable strategies:

Divide after a prefix rewind

Divide between two middle consonants pumpkin

Divide before consonant –le rumble

Divide after the consonant when the nearby vowel is short planet

Divide before a suffix teacher

Divide between double consonants furry

Divide after a long vowel sound acorn    pilot

Divide between two compound words sunshine

Sense check

Article Image

‘Learning to Read’ - building fluency and accuracy

Fluent and accurate word reading (at letter, word, sentence and text level) reduced the cognitive load for children so they can focus on comprehending meaning. Fluency and accuracy are built through:

Appropriately pitched text difficulty

Hearing correct models

Re-reading (after guidance and feedback)

Echo reading – adult models reading a word or sentence, child repeats

Pre-teaching – work out difficult words before reading (speed words)

Precision response – missing pronouns, prefixes, suffixes, what/that

 

Reading Progression

Download our Q1E Trust Reading Progression Document 

Find out more about Reading Enrichment at BWA