Inside the Literacy Hour

Learning from Classroom Experience

Ros Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134518739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The National Literacy Strategy is at the heart of the government drive to raise the standards in literacy in schools. Based on a research project conducted in classrooms during the first year of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS), this book provides a practical analysis of the ways in which successful teachers have implemented the Literacy Hour. Taking a reflective approach, it chronicles how teachers have changed their attitudes and practice over the first year, and questions why these changes have occurred. With various descriptions of teachers' practice and examples of children's writing throughout, this is an in-depth, yet down-to-earth reflective analysis of effective literacy teaching. Ros Fisher looks in detail at issues such as; improving the teaching of literacy; researching classroom practice; children's learning in the Literacy Hour; changing practice at Key Stage One and Two and mixed age classes and literacy for four-year-olds.

1 Improving the teaching of literacy

Introduction

The quest to raise standards of literacy is long-standing and widespread. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, if not before, educationalists have debated and experimented to discover the best way to teach children to read and write. The complexity of this endeavour is shown by the fact that the debates and the experiments continue. Recent initiatives world-wide have gone beyond previous attempts to describe methods (e.g. whole language versus phonic approaches) and now major teaching programmes have been introduced which adopt combinations of approaches in which both the content and the structure of the lesson is prescribed. The Early Years Literacy Programme in Victoria, Australia (DEET, 1997, 1998, 1999) involves a 2-hour teaching period with defined elements. Success for All (now called Roots and Wings) (Slavin, 1996) entails a 90-minute block of teaching and is currently used in many schools around the world. The NLS in England with only 1 hour of literacy teaching is now used in most English Primary (4–11) schools. All three claim large measures of success in raising literacy standards.

The NLS has aroused a good deal of interest around the world as a large-scale national initiative to raise standards of literacy. Initial results look promising, but test data conceal the detail. The research described in this book was undertaken over the first two years of the NLS in England. Twenty teachers were observed once a month teaching the literacy hour and interviewed twice in the first year. Twelve of these teachers were observed and interviewed again at the end of the second year. These data provide the opportunity to examine in depth what was happening in classrooms during the literacy hour.

In the first part of this chapter I want to consider where the renewed urgency to raise standards has come from and what kind of view of literacy this reflects. The raising of standards implies the measurement of those standards but herein lies a tension between the attainment of quantifiable outcomes and the recognition that there is more to being literate than that which can be measured. Within the opportunities offered by literacy lie attitudes and abilities that are not easily assessed. I want to recognise the difficulty of assessing literacy but acknowledge that, if we are to move forward in the search for improved teaching, we have to use all the means we can to judge efficacy. With this in mind, I want to examine the literature about the effective teaching of literacy. We can learn a lot from this but must not let it lure us into a simplistic view of teaching and learning. These are complex processes that involve an intricate interaction between teacher, learner and what is learned. I shall conclude the chapter by examining the model of teaching proposed by the NLS, drawing together ideas about teaching and learning and considering how the NLS attempts to combine these.

It is not my intention to provide a critique of the literacy strategy. This book offers evidence to contribute to its evaluation. Whether the NLS turns out to be a straightjacket or ‘highly flexible framework’ (Beard, 2002) time has yet to tell. Views of educationalists vary but it is teachers who have to work with it and who have to make sense of the rhetoric written about it. This chapter considers some of the background theory and evidence that influence current ideas about the teaching of literacy.

Raising literacy standards

There has never before been a major national initiative to enable all primary teachers to learn the most effective methods of teaching literacy and how to apply them. . . . It will be the most ambitious attempt ever in this country to change for the better teaching approaches across the entire education service.

(DfEE, 1997: paras 26/27)

This statement set the agenda for the introduction of the NLS in all English primary schools from September 1998. The NLS was based on the National Literacy Project (NLP) which had been introduced two years earlier in twenty-three local education authorities around England to raise standards in areas where results from national tests showed these to be lower than average. The NLS set the target that ‘By 2002 80% of 11 year olds should reach the standard expected in English for their age (i.e. Level 4) in the Key Stage 2 National Curriculum tests’ (ibid.: para. 1). Despite the fact that there was, at that time, no evaluation of the effectiveness of the NLP, the newly elected labour government decided to go ahead with full-scale implementation.

Looking carefully at the statement above, we can see that there are several implied values lying behind what was said. In particular, these suggest that there is a need to raise literacy standards and that the way to do this is by improving teaching. Furthermore, in the rhetoric associated with the launch of the Literacy Strategy, the setting of national targets whereby to measure the ensuing improvement clearly defined the parameters of literacy and what is seen as improvement in literacy. The setting of these targets implies a view of literacy as something that can be measured by end of year tests. It is clearly not as simple as this, success or failure of this initiative to develop an effective pedagogy will only be evidenced by the adults of the future – how effectively they can use literacy for their own purposes and with how much satisfaction they pursue their own literacy interests.

Standards of literacy, today even more than in the past, represent a high status, high stakes issue. The literacy demands on adults in the electronic age become ever more challenging and governments increasingly link high standards of literacy with economic growth. In a recent report on the education sector, the World Bank (1999) asserted education to be one of the best investments as return from education expenditure outstrips many investments in physical capital.

In Great Britain, the General Household Survey for 1995 showed that university graduates were likely to have higher salaries and were less likely to be unemployed. The report concludes that ‘those with the greatest income were those with the highest literacy skills. . . . People at the lowest levels of literacy were more likely to be on a low income’ (Office of National Statistics, 1996). There can be no doubt that the need for individuals to achieve high standards of literacy is increasing. And this is not only an economic imperative on a national scale but also an individual exigency at a very personal level. Literacy is one of the key tools for success in today's world and also an unparalleled means of recreation and personal discovery.

Evidence of the need to raise standards

There is general agreement that some youngsters leave secondary school with insufficient standards of literacy to enable them to lead a full life, but this is where the agreement ends. The extent and nature of the problem is a topic of continuing controversy. Listed below are some of the views that are expressed as part of this debate.

• Standards of literacy have fallen over the last 50 years.

• Although the highest achieving children in school in the UK are as good as children anywhere else in the world, there are more children here who do not reach an acceptable standard than there are in other developed countries.

• The demands of literacy have increased in recent years making previous standards inadequate.

• In order to raise standards we need to reform schools and teaching methods.

• The existence of such a large number of underachievers owes far more to poor standards of living than to poor teaching.

The opening chapter of a book that is essentially an analysis of practice is not the place to review in detail each of the preceding propositions. In brief, although there is no universal agreement on the opinions outlined here, there is some compelling evidence. Brooks (1998) reviewed the trends in the literacy of school children in the UK from national surveys undertaken between 1948 and 1996. He concludes:

The major feature of the national results throughout UK is their great stability over time; most comparisons reveal no change, a few show a rise, even fewer show a fall. Fastening on isolated instances of a fall in average scores is to misrepresent the facts; and there is certainly no warrant for the repeated claims of decline – though there is always a case for improvement.

(Brooks, 1998: 3)

This review also supports the proposition that, compared to other developed countries, there is a significant proportion of children who have poor literacy skills. This feature of international comparisons was noted as early as 1960 as well as in 1970 and again in 1996 (ibid., 1998).

Certainly, economic changes have resulted in literacy being an important skill in almost every employment context. Whereas there used to be a demand for many workers to staff production lines, now few jobs have no need for some use of literacy. In personal life, despite the concern that the electronic age will lessen the reading of books as recreation, the information explosion that has resulted from the World Wide Web and other aspects of the world today mean that everyone needs to be literate to get the most from their daily life. Thus the accessibility of information and written language in a range of forms means that literacy demands on every member of society have grown and it is increasingly difficult to thrive without a level of literacy that is at least adequate for life today.

If we recognise this growing need for a larger number of children to achieve their potential as literate adults, we must agree that we should look to how literacy is taught to raise standards even if it is not the standards that have fallen but the increased demands that give rise to this imperative. There is evidence that shows that low standards of literacy are associated with low standards of living (Gorman and Fernandez, 1992). Surely though, this is no reason for complacency but gives greater incentive to find ways of helping individuals overcome disadvantage by raising their achievement in literacy?

Thus I would argue that, although standards may not have fallen across the board, there is a need for increased levels of literacy for all children. In addition, although social disadvantage may make it more likely that children achieve lower standards, this does not have to be the case. There are schools and teachers who succeed, even against the odds, to help children develop as confident and effective readers and writers. There seems to be no real evidence that the teaching of literacy before the introduction of the NLS was poor but that it has been more effective in some schools and classes than others. We need to learn what we can from these teachers and these schools. Yet the question remains as to how possible it is to transfer effective practice from one context to another.

Effective schools/effective teachers

This concern to identify what it is that makes some schools or some teachers more effective than others is an alluring one. Indeed findings from school effectiveness studies in the 1980s and 1990s question the assumptions from the 1960s and 1970s that social background determines academic achievement. Research such as the Junior Schools Project (Mortimore et al., 1988) showed school factors to be four times more important than factors such as gender or home background. Although home background is acknowledged to play an important part in children's subsequent achievement, schools can and do make a difference. Some have found that the impact is greater for primary schools than secondary schools (Sammons et al., 1993) and for children with low attainment on starting school (Sammons et al., 1995).

Scheerens (1992) in a meta-analysis of the international evidence from school effectiveness research identifies two widely accepted characteristics of school effectiveness:

• Structured teaching, which involves making learning objectives explicit, a well-planned sequence, regular testing and immediate feedback.

• Effective learning time which includes use of whole class teaching as this maximises the time pupils have with the teachers’ attention, focus on a particular subject and the importance of challenge and praise.

Beard (1999) in a retrospective analysis of the principles underlying the NLS draws on evidence from both school effectiveness research and inspection reports. He argues that the importance afforded in the NLS to direct teaching, high-quality interaction and focused teaching are all supported by research in the UK and worldwide (Mortimore et al., 1988; Scheerens, 1992; Reynolds, 1998). Indeed, the National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching itself asserts that the most successful teaching is discursive, interactive, well-paced, confident, ambitious (DfEE, 1998: 8). These features of successful teaching figure in many studies of teacher effectiveness.

Discursive and interactive are features mentioned by Brophy (1986) and Borich (1986) in the USA. In Britain, Mortimore et al. (1988) found that children performed better the more communication they had with their teacher about their work and where teachers used higher order questioning. The pace of lessons has also been found to be an important feature of effective literacy teaching. Medwell et al. (1998) found that the lessons of effective teachers of literacy were all conducted at a brisk pace with regular re-focusing of children's attention to the task at hand. Confident teaching, in which teachers have a clear understanding of the objectives, relates to the relatively new area of enquiry into the effect of teachers’ subject knowledge. Medwell et al., considered the importance of subject knowledge for effective teachers and found that, whereas effective teachers did not necessarily have an explicit knowledge base, they used their knowledge implicitly in their teaching. In effect, these teachers’ knowledge base was their pedagogical content knowledge. Finally, ambitious teaching, where teachers have high expectations of pupils, is generally agreed to be a factor in successful teaching (Borich, 1986; Mortimore et al., 1988; Ofsted, 1996). Thus the description of teaching proposed by the NLS represents what research into school and teacher effectiveness has shown to be associated with effective practice.

However, interpretation of the words used to describe teaching can vary. Questions have been raised about the nature of interactive teaching. Many researchers (Galton et al., 1980; Edwards and Mercer, 1987; Alexander, 1992) emphasise the understanding and skill that is needed to create high quality interaction. Wells (1999) points out that ‘high quality interaction’ means different things to different people. For those concerned with ‘cultural reproduction’ and the achievement of predefined goals it means a style of discourse in which the teacher leads pupils in a triadic dialogue of initiation, response and some sort of feedback. Although this can challenge and extend thinking, it is ultimately a controlling strategy leading to pre-determined outcomes. On the other hand, he argues that those who criticise triadic discourse and consider high quality interaction to be a more equitable process in which the teacher refrains from a litany of questions and allows the child to adopt an initiating role are more concerned with the empowerment of learners. Thus, reliance on findings from school effectiveness research promotes a particular model of teaching and learning, which may be successful in achieving short-term gains but could be less effective in developing lifelong attitudes and flexible literate behaviour.

In addition, Reynolds (1998) argues that, whilst the NLS reflects many of the effectiveness factors identified by research, there is growing evidence of ‘context specificity’ in the actual factors associated with learning gains with different groups of children. In other words, different approaches may be more appropriate in certain contexts than others. This gives rise to the question as to whether the NLS, which presents the same model to all teachers in all primary schools, can be uniformly effective in all contexts. Alexander et al. (1995) point to a range of other features from the literature that are important in effective teaching. These can be summarised under the heading: pedagogical flexibility. This includes features such as the ability to provide a bridge between what the learner already knows and what is taught (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978; Bruner and Haste, 1987). Also important is the teacher's possession of a broad repertoire of organisational strategies and the ability to deploy these flexibly and appropriately (Gipps, 1992; Alexander, 1992).

Large-scale reform

It is one thing to identify features of practice from schools and teachers who are known to be effective, it is another matter altogether to set about trying to change the existing practice of all teachers. Fullan (1999) in a review of the factors that can contribute to the success of large-scale reform acknowledges the difficulty of implementing and sustaining change across a large number of schools.

. . . ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Improving the teaching of literacy
• 2 The research project
• 3 Inside the literacy hour classroom
• 4 Learning to read in the literacy hour
• 5 Learning to write in the literacy hour
• 6 Changing practice at Key Stage 1
• 7 The literacy hour at Key Stage 2
• 8 The literacy hour in mixed-age classes
• 9 Four-year-olds and the literacy hour
• 10 Teachers and the literacy hour
• 11 Implications for research, policy and practice
• Appendix I: interview schedules at the start and end of the year
• Appendix II: observation schedule for literacy hour
• Appendix III: observation schedule for target children
• Appendix IV: questionnaire and interview schedule at end of the second year
• Appendix V: ethics protocol
• References
• Index