In the light of a recent national Ofsted report on supporting pupils struggling with Reading, our school has been doing work on each subject department's approach to texts.
As a department, we have thought about the texts, tasks and strategies we use with learners, and how we make them accessible to pupils with different reading ages.
Here's a summary:
Pupils with Lower Reading Age:
Pre-engage with pupils on cultural knowledge, including knowledge of local places and activities.We have pupils who don't know where Cromer is or don't know what a Leisure Centre is.
Integrate Listening and Reading – teacher reads text aloud and pupils follow the text.
Use the key words/pictures/actions/sounds to support phonics throughout KS3.
Use similar texts with variations. Including revisiting texts and language from previous units.
Use parallel texts in English and French to ask pupils to find words.
Strategies of using the Questions (in English, multiple choice, gap fill etc)to make the meaning of the text accessible.
Identify topic vocabulary. Identify powerful non topic / high frequency vocabulary.Identify grammar features.Use these step by step strategies to build up precise understanding of the meaning of the text.
Texts with very high % of known words and grammar which pupils are readingin order to practise recall and see the language modelled.Including structures which are revisited across topics.
Integrate teaching of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing.
Pupils with Average Reading Age:
Check prior cultural knowledge.
Use key words to reinforce phonics and anticipate problems when reading aloud or “silently”.(Pupils should still pronounce words correctly in their heads!)
Strategies of using the Questions to access the meaning of the text.For example the order of the questions helps locate the position of the information in the text.
Use texts with similar language but with the information structured differently.
Use parallel texts in English and French to ask pupils to find new wordsincluding where the structures or word order are different.
Build knowledge of powerful non topic language and grammatical forms to access precise meanings.
Analyse the quality of texts as models for improving their own writing.
Texts with high % of known words and grammar which pupils are readingin order to see the language modelled. Including structures which are revisited across topics.
Integrate the teaching of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing.
Pupils with Higher Reading Age:
Read texts in order to access new cultural knowledge.
Use texts to introduce new vocabulary for pupils to deduce from context and co-text.
Use reading aloud to check fluent phonics.
Strategies for dealing with texts with more unknown words or structures,to be deduced from the construction of meaning.
Expect pupils to process known words including powerful non topic wordsand grammar features to read precise meanings.
Encourage pupils to take responsibility for noting down and using new words in their own work.
Use some authentic texts or modified texts.Or texts designed for reading for information or pleasure, not just as models of language.
I would be interested to hear what MFL teachers think about this and whether it fits with how you use reading. Hopefully there's something of a continuum of strategies from scaffolded to independent which teachers can deploy flexibly to support and encourage learners.
But this comes with an important corollary...
Following the controversial Ofsted "Research Review" in Modern Languages, we have retreated from authentic texts or even modified texts. We have decreased the use of texts for information or reading for pleasure, and instead we use texts to rehearse and model the language we expect pupils to be learning to speak and write. We create texts using a high percentage of language pupils know. And we don't expect them to make cognitive leaps in deducing meaning, supposedly beyond their "novice" level. We have been told that learners arrive at meaning by parsing known words and grammar, and require texts where over 90% of the words are known. We were worried that we were labelling pupils with higher literacy levels as "good at languages" and pupils with weaker literacy as "bad at languages". As a result, we have changed our assessment texts to make sure they simply test pupils' knowledge of language they have learned.
Looking at the profile of our learners, and the strength of reading in our school, I think we are going to have to re-introduce texts which pupils read for meaning: to find information, to learn new things, and for pleasure.
You may like to look at this post on Teaching Reading for Pleasure in the 1990s for comparison's sake.
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