I’ve dug deep into students’ knowledge and reading comprehension over the summer. There is a lot of great research taking place in the States. But they do knowledge-rich differently over there compared to England.
In England, our knowledge rich curricula have been developed by subject specialists with the aim of developing great subject knowledge. In the US, the aim has been to develop great reading comprehension background knowledge.
Trusts and schools (primary and secondary) in England have developed many thoughtful, coherent curricula . Compared to 10 years ago, our pupils have a much better understanding and appreciation of the world they live in. In the US, they’ve developed the Common Core curriculum. This is excellent, but not used with great fidelity in many schools (where it has been used the outcomes are excellent – see this research).
I don’t think our approach has led to the reading gains we’re seeing in the US. I think I know why.
Because the US focus has always been on reading comprehension, their subject lessons contain a lot more subject specific reading than ours do. For example, in science, while we are carrying out a substantial amount of practical work, in the US, the children are reading a selection of well chosen texts about the subject.
Grade (Year) Literary Texts Informational Texts 4 (Year 3) 50% 50% 8 (Year 7) 45% 55% 12 (Year 11) 30% 70%
From the 2009 Reading Framework
I think we are close to getting the benefits of the US reading approach, while maintaining our traditional subject focus. Here’s how:
- School subject leads (primary and secondary) should develop packs of subject texts for each unit they are teaching. The intention is to develop subject knowledge through reading, so the texts need to be chosen to build knowledge in a coherent way.
- The rationale for the choice of text needs to be communicated with the class teacher. The temptation for many class teachers will be to focus on the literary techniques used by the author, but that is not the intention… it’s got to be about subject knowledge building.
- In primary, reallocate time on reading fiction needs to be given to reading these subject texts.
- In secondary, you probably want the texts to be delivered by subject teachers. I think it merits 10 minutes per lesson (no doubt many colleagues will disagree). My preference would be the teacher read-aloud, where the teacher reads the text. This is a great paper by my new favourite reading academic HyeJin Hwang.
I hope that was interesting!
Ben
Reading for Learning 