Closing the Reading Gap

Alex Quigley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000046670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Our pupils' success will be defined by their ability to read fluently and skilfully. But despite universal acceptance of reading's vital importance, the reading gap in our classroom remains, and it is linked to an array of factors, such as parental wealth, education and book ownership, as well as classroom practice. To close this gap, we need to ensure that every teacher has the knowledge and skill to teach reading with confidence.

In Closing the Reading Gap, Alex Quigley explores the intriguing history and science of reading, synthesising the debates and presenting a wealth of usable evidence about how children develop most efficiently as successful readers. Offering practical strategies for teachers at every phase of their teaching career, as well as tackling issues such as dyslexia and the role of technology, the book helps teachers to be an expert in how pupils 'learn to read' as well as how they 'read to learn' and explores how reading is vital for unlocking a challenging academic curriculum for every student.

With a focus on nurturing pupils' will and skill to read for pleasure and purpose, this essential volume provides practical solutions to help all teachers create a rich reading culture that will enable every student to thrive in school and far beyond the school gates.

1Introduction

If you can read this, thank a teacher.

Anonymous

As you begin to read this book – word by word, page by page – with seeming effortlessness, you are in fact enacting one of the greatest inventions, and achievements, in human history.

Take a moment to process that fact, as you sit reading on the settee in your pyjamas, or as you ride the train on the way home from work. Enacting this everyday magic is something that you likely take for granted, given that it is so much part of who we are and what we do. Plucking a book from our bookshelves and reading it can prove a daily, near-automatic act for the majority of adults.

In what amounts to only a mere sliver of our evolutionary history – a paltry few thousand years – we have developed our ability to read. As a result, it has propelled our civilisation into modernity.

And so, now, for a mere 250 milliseconds, you will fixate on each word you read – before sweeping automatically from left to right – then near-instantly processing these inky marks into sounds, then transforming them into a rich web of interconnected meaning. That meaning will be plundered from a vast store of knowledge accrued over a lifetime that you’ll unlock with apparent ease.

Indeed, a whole world of knowledge will be stored in an hourglass of black print on the page. It all feels at once near magic and, well, something so … natural.

Reading can feel like our birthright, with our bookshelves becoming an integral part of who we are, shaping our very sense of identity.

Take a moment now to recall your first memory of reading.

For many of us, ruminating on the word ‘reading’ can unlock potent memories of reading in the cosy lap of a loved one. For me, it evokes a hazy image of my father reading to me at my bedside. Early reading, whether it is in a parent’s lap, on the carpet in the classroom, or a snug reading corner, gently but indelibly imprints upon us the mould from which will cast a lifetime of communication in the world. It is why reading can prove both intensely private and public, part of our daily lives in the world, as well as being part of our intimate inner world.

Beyond powerful personal experiences, reading will prove the master skill of school, unlocking the academic curriculum for our pupils. Though the majority of children will go on to learn to read, it will not prove as ‘natural’ as we think. Yes – many will read fluently and make rapid reading gains, often regardless of the quality of instruction in the classroom – but this will not be the case for all. For too many children, reading is not a right that they acquire with anything like ease. This reality can crash into our consciousness when our pupils struggle to read in our class, or sit an exam, and are barred from understanding words and concepts that we assume every child will know.

For many children in England, their reading ability is steadily improving,¹ yet there are also critical markers to indicate fundamental reading gaps for our pupils that can cut at the very fabric of our society. For example, only 73% of pupils leaving primary school reached the expected level for reading in 2019.² Put simply then, one in four children will not read well in school and likely beyond. This reading gap between primary and secondary school can see many pupils unprepared for the changing demands of academic reading in secondary school and with too little time to catch up.

We also know that children of all backgrounds who were read to regularly by their parents at age 5 perform better in maths, vocabulary and spelling at age 16, compared to those who were not read to at home.³ A Department of Education poll of 2,685 parents also revealed that only a third (31%) of children are read to at home daily.⁴ And so, before a child ever sets foot in our schools, with each library that goes unvisited and each story character that goes unmet, the reading gap is opened. If it grows during schooling there is the threat of damaging consequences for individuals and our society.

Small, daily acts of reading matter. Reading gaps can open quickly and near imperceptibly. Research in the United States by Jessica Logan and colleagues,⁵ from Ohio State University, calculated that children who were read to daily (around five children’s books) would hear well over a million more words (an estimated 1.4 million more) than their peers who were not read to daily. This isn’t everyday talk – this is hearing those rare words from books that offer an extra-special value for early language development. Just contemplate the difference for a child’s readiness to learn having had so many more rich conversations and shared reading experiences.

These glaring societal issues that relate to reading, along with the gargantuan financial figures that attend illiteracy, can simply feel too big and too abstract to grasp. For me, it is the image of an empty bookshelf that gives me pause for thought. Research by the National Literacy Trust reveals the depressing statistic that 1 in 11 children and young people said that they did not have a book of their own at home, with the figure for disadvantaged children rising to 1 in 8.⁶

Take a moment to visualise that empty bookshelf for one or more of those children.

Reading habitually and seeing reading as a pleasurable, fulfilling and motivating activity matters.⁷ Put succinctly, 14-year-olds who read often and independently know 26% more words than those who never read.⁸ Consider the consequences of that writ large in our classrooms.

In simple terms, able readers read more independently. The reading rich get richer, the reading poor get poorer. This is unsurprising: when you can do something well, it usually is more enjoyable. Given that children’s reading ability determines how much they read,⁹ as teachers, if we can improve the teaching of reading, then we are likely to increase our pupils’ reading ability and how much they read for pleasure.

Regardless of how many books are on the shelf at home then, we can impact how well our pupils read and how much they go on to read. Even small victories can have a significant impact on the school lives of our pupils.

For every pupil in our care then, we are beholden to fill their school day with the richness of countless books, helping them access a wealth of powerful reading experiences, so that they can be buoyed by the world of imagination and knowledge offered to us by possessing the capability to read successfully.

The reading challenge

The school day is typically crammed full of academic reading: from young children reading about magical journeys at story time to teenagers reading dense textbooks. The habitual act of ‘learning to read’, and going on to ‘read to learn’, is an ever-present part of school life, both inside and outside of the classroom. For those pupils who lack reading skill, being confronted with reading failures so frequently is a sure-fire way to diminish their enjoyment of and will to engage in school.

For too many, the academic code of school remains inscrutable. Each time they read, the mental bandwidth they expend can prove draining. By stark contrast, for almost every teacher, and for almost all of our successful pupils, reading is an accessible, fluent act that offers a great deal of pleasure, while simultaneously offering us a vital tool to learn. We can prove so expert at reading ourselves that it can be hard to recognise and address the challenges faced by our novice readers.

Try reading the following sentence:

Every teacher is of course an expert reader, but that does not necessarily mean we are experts in how to teach reading successfully.

Just consider for a moment the mental effort you had to exert to comprehend this mirror sentence. In an instant, it can make us mindful of both how skilled we are at grappling with reading challenges, but also how challenging the act of reading can prove for many of our pupils. For those who don’t easily map sounds on to letters, cohere patterns, follow reading conventions and speedily draw upon a vast wealth of background knowledge, reading can be an arduous act.

Our brains have developed such a rich knowledge of reading that it doesn’t rēคllฯ ɱαƚƚҽɾ 𝘪𝘧 ЩΣ яєα∂ wðrЧ with ᖇᗩᗪIᑕᗩᒪᒪY ᕲᓰᖴᖴᘿᖇᘿᘉᖶ fonts, or in upper or LOWER 𝕔𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕤, we can still readily comprehend what we read. Even faced with reading words without spaces – which was the norm only a few centuries ago – wecanmakesomesenseofwhatwereadandconquersignificantbarrierswithalegionofskilledstrategies.

Cracking the special code of reading mere blots of ink can be too easily assumed by those that possess this knowledge. Indeed, the strategies that we deploy in a millisecond can remain inscrutable for too many pupils in our classrooms.

Every teacher can readily recall the painstaking experiences suffered by pupils who more obviously have significant reading barriers, usually leading to a strong desire to better understand how they can help. And yet, more commonly, it is the daily act of reading in the classroom, undertaken by the majority of our pupils, where small, hidden gaps in knowledge and understanding occur. It can be as minor as tripping over a few words, not grasping a phrase or failing to visualise and really grasp an important scientific process being described in dense, technical vocabulary. Over time these marginal, concealed gaps in reading comprehension aggregate into the very difference between academic success and failure.

Take the following couple of sentences from a national assessment:

There wasn’t the slightest breeze to cool the skin or make even a baby-finger crease on the surface of the sea. The Louisa May floated like a toy sitting on a glass table.

‘An Encounter at Sea’, 2017 KS2 SATS reading paper

This opening passage from a recent SATs reading exam paper managed to trip up many a 10-year-old. For us, as expert readers, in an instant, we can visualise the scene. We bridge the setting of the sea with the name “Louisa May” as that of a ship. Our word knowledge combines with our grammar knowledge – synchronised deftly with our deep knowledge of stories and their patterns – to make sense of the description. We sweep across the gap between sentences, bridging between “sea” and “the”, by drawing upon a world of knowledge and ample reading skill. In truth, we do this with consummate ease.

But what about the many pupils who don’t take the subtle grammatical cue to infer the name of the ship? Are they further hampered by the poetic style that silkily combines similes and metaphors to evoke the scene? Can they decipher a “baby-finger crease”?

Perhaps they spot the article ‘the’ and unravel the simile, thereby ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A history of reading
• 3 A scientific eye on reading
• 4 Reading comprehension
• 5 Reading barriers
• 6 Reading in the subject disciplines
• 7 Practical strategies for closing the reading gap
• 8 Next steps
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index