Why literacy fails
Recently, Educationalist and Literacy Specialist Alex Quigley shared his thoughts on why literacy strategies have a tendency to fail in schools. For the author of popular titles ‘Closing the Reading Gap’ and ‘Closing the Writing Gap,’ the issues facing our schools were manifold.
He comments, rather bleakly, on schools’ inability to counterbalance in its entirety the social disadvantage that leads to word gaps of over 30,000,000 words by the time learners are 3 years old. He laments the sparsity of effective standardised assessments, echoing teachers all over the country when he claims that reading age scores give little actionable data for teachers on the ground. He complains of a crowded curriculum that doesn’t make enough space for literacy instruction for all learners, and shallow initial teacher training and continued professional development opportunities in the domain of literacy. And he’s only just getting started.
His full list of reasons why literacy fails is below:
- Schools cannot compensate for society
- A poor range of accessible assessments
- Weak understanding of key issues such as dyslexia
- A crowded curriculum
- Shallow initial teacher training on literacy domains
- Partial, limited professional development
- Too little specialist support for specific literacy issues, such as handwriting.
- Too little attention on literacy leadership
- Enduring habits, routines, practices, and programmes
- Pressure on quick improvement deterring sustainable solutions
Bleak as his arguments might be, they are not without merit. In a 2016 literature review, Herrera et al from Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University summarised the effectiveness of 20 years of adolescent literacy programs. Of the 7,144 programs initially identified (many were discarded as having inadequate research design), they discovered only 12 that had a measurable, positive impact on reading comprehension, vocabulary, or general literacy, and not a single one that was conducted in a secondary school!
As Quigley writes, “I’ve never found a teacher who disputes the importance of literacy,” but we are increasingly faced with the question: ‘what can we actually do’? Place this next to the fact that most CPD in schools happens at the end of a long slog when colleagues are exhausted and have barely had time to grab a lukewarm coffee just to keep them going, and the situation is bleaker still!
What can we do about it?
Whilst (spoiler alert) there are no silver bullets here, research can give us what Mary Myatt might call ‘best bets.’ The commonalities in those 12 programs that were found to have a demonstrable impact were: ‘explicit instruction in reading comprehension, explicit instruction in vocabulary, instructional routines, cooperative learning, feedback, fluency building, or writing,’ a set of criteria that is echoed in advice from the Educational Endowment Foundation. In other words, really tangible teaching methods that form part of a coherent, wider strategy.
Schools that have a literacy strategy less prone to failure will align with these core principles. Yes, their teachers will be covering specifications outlined by exam boards in every subject, but they will also have a clear tier-2 language curriculum that ensures that acquisition of the language that permeates every subject domain is not left to chance. Teachers in every subject will consider themselves teachers of literacy, and be equipped with the theoretical and practical knowledge and skills they need to explicitly teach vocabulary in the classroom and to pull apart and explore the morphological and syntactical patterns that characterise writing in their domain. These schools will not see literacy as an intervention, but will have hugely aspirational targets for the word-richness of every learner in their setting. Such schools, instead of becoming another literacy intervention ‘failure,’ will reap the rewards as exam boards in every subject reward their learners’ enhanced clarity of expression and precision of ideas.
How Bedrock Can Help
This can sound like a tall order, but the silver lining can be found in leveraging technology in the support of classroom practice. Bedrock Learning offers schools access to award winning Tier 2 Vocabulary and Grammar curricula, using research-informed instructional practice to expose learners to explicit teaching of the foundational skills of reading comprehension. The best bit? It’s self-setting, self-marking and the Artificial Intelligence algorithm ensures that instruction is adapted to the right level for each individual learner, all without adding to the workload of teachers.
Our Tier 3 vocabulary solution supports teachers in every department to be teachers of literacy. It offers every department the opportunity to build and sequence a subject-specific vocabulary curriculum, supporting learners to communicate like experts in every area of the curriculum.
We offer teachers data that is so much more actionable than an unreliable single-figure ‘reading age’. By leveraging Bedrock’s reporting functionality, teachers are equipped with granular data that allows them to make informed classroom interventions at a whole-group or individual learner level, and our upcoming Reading Test is set to revolutionise how schools measure reading progress.
As Quigley outlines, the task facing schools is herculean, but by exploiting existing technological solutions, it can feel eminently more achievable.
