We’ve always wanted our students to read more widely. The best way to develop rich and connected knowledge is to read voraciously. So we suggest to our students that they read science articles and books. New Scientist? Great! In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat? Yes please!
But we know this is rare. So instead, some teachers have adopted the classic infant school Read Aloud, and made it their own. The texts can be really short – extracts, just a couple of paragraphs. 5 minutes is plenty. Even better, when teachers enrich the text with questions and ‘I wonder’s, they are model how competent readers use what they already know to build better mental models of the text.
It turns out this is a superb strategy to develop both scientific knowledge and also reading comprehension. By reading aloud, teachers are reducing the cognitive load of decoding, adding emphasis and pauses to support comprehension.
We’ve long known that background knowledge correlates well with reading comprehension scores. But now we know that this relationship is causal: teaching pupils about the world around them through science, the humanities, art, sport, music etc. directly leads to better reading comprehension (see here).
And it works both ways: reading clusters of connected subject texts boosts background knowledge. It’s a virtuous circle.
The Key to Effective Subject Read-Alouds
- Choose your texts. A cluster of short curriculum linked texts are the key to success. Alex Quigley calls them “reading clusters” in his book: Why Learning Fails (p32).
- Check your readers are ready to comprehend the text. Readers whose knowledge isn’t secure, can’t benefit from the text (see my blog here)
- Break the text up as you read it with questions and modeled think-alouds. See the EEF post The EEFs ‘The Story Time Trial’)
- Ask questions about the text which link to the subject you have taught. E.g. “This text about parasites is really about habitats isn’t it? Is your body a habitat?”
So, it is worth taking the time to read aloud to your class. It needn’t take long, but little and often is best. Here is an example:
Reading for Learning 