Effective Literacy Teaching and
Learning for All Students
Diane Snowball
March 7, 2011
EFFECTIVE LITERACY
TEACHING
School leaders and teachers must have:
• Knowledge (researched, up-to-date) about what to teach
about literacy and what are the most effective ways to
improve all students’ literacy
• Knowledge about the learners –
e.g. What do they read (at school and at home)?
How often? For how long?
What strategies do they use when reading?
What about their comprehension, fluency, vocabulary
knowledge, decoding?
How do your teachers find out about all of this? What then?
• Knowledge about how learning occurs – e.g. Gradual
Release of Responsibility model
• High expectations of all students
Variation in amount of independent reading
Percentile rank
Minutes/Day
Words/Year
98th
67.3
4,733,000
90th
33.4
2,375,000
70th
16.9
1,168,000
50th
9.2
601,000
30th
4.3
251,000
10th
1.0
51,000
2nd
0.0
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Anderson, R., Wilson, P. & Fielding, L., Reading Research Quarterly, Vol.3, 1988
“Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside of school”
What are the implications for our classrooms?
Figure 16.2 Components of test preparation
Taken from: A.E Farstrup & S.J Samuels Eds., What Research Has to Say About
Reading Instruction, 3rd Ed., International Reading Association, 2002, p.376
What is Independent Reading?
Reading with 95% or higher accuracy rate and
understanding what is being read. (It’s not likely
that understanding is occurring if there is less
than 90% accuracy.)
SMART readers know how to select just right books to
read for most of their reading. They also know that easy
reading and challenging reading materials are OK for
specific times and purposes.
What are the implications for teachers and school
leaders re the importance of independent reading and
selecting resources for classroom libraries or for reading
in content areas and novels chosen in English classes?
Implications for schools
Setting aside time for independent reading
• in literacy block time and throughout the day
• during English classes
• in other curriculum areas/topics of study
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Science
Music
History/Geography
Art
Sport
Organising resources and routines for students to read
at home
Having a range of quality resources that are easily
accessible to students
What do you want for your school?
Two decades of research on effective
classrooms and schools shows that
schools without rich supplies of engaging,
accessible, appropriate books are schools
that are not likely to teach many students
to read at all, much less develop
thoughtful, eager, engaged readers.
Essential supports for successful
independent reading
• Range of factual and fiction material (books, magazines,
audio books, newspapers, digital texts, reference
material) at various levels of difficulty; range of authors,
genres, topics
• Resources attractively displayed (not a row of spines);
organised for easy access – by topics, authors, range of
difficulty
• Students knowing how to choose appropriate books –
just right, easy, challenging
• Place for each student to keep independent reading
material (e.g. box, bag)
• Record of reading assessment and goals for each
student (a Reading Journal for each student)
• Teacher confers with individuals during this time
(assessing, teaching, establishing goals)
The reading conference
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The teacher’s role:
finding out about student’s interests
checking on suitability of student’s selection and range of types of resources
assessing comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, decoding
teaching on-the-spot
giving feedback to student orally
establishing next goal for student and discussing what the student will do to
achieve that
asking student to articulate what he/she is doing well and what his/her next
focus will be
teacher and/or student recording all of this in student’s Reading Journal,
setting date for next conference
recording (for self) student’s strengths and needs
uses information from the conferences to plan whole class, small group and
individual teaching
The Reading Curriculum – in
literacy and all other domains
Using a range of “texts” (a variety of fiction and factual genres), the reading
curriculum includes the teaching and learning about:
• The reading process – sampling the text, predicting the
content and continually confirming or self-correcting and
using syntactic, semantic, graphophonic cues to
construct meaning;
• Comprehension strategies – predicting/prior knowledge,
questioning, thinking-aloud, using text structures and
features, visualising, summarising
• Vocabulary (affected by world knowledge)
• Fluency – expression, phrasing, rate
• Decoding (not just “sounding out”)
• Response to reading
+ For preps
• Concepts of print
• Letter name knowledge
• Phonemic Awareness
Assessment during reading conferences
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How is each component of the Reading Curriculum
being assessed?
What level of difficulty is the text? Is this easy, just right,
challenging? – ask the student plus listen to them read
and then retell what it’s about
Reading process – by analysing Running Records of
unseen texts (what types of miscues? Does the student
self-correct?)
Comprehension – discussion/checklists /checking on
each main comprehension strategy
Fluency – listening for expression, phrasing, appropriate
rate while student is reading aloud
Vocabulary – discussion of meaning of words
Decoding – by noticing how student works out how to
read unknown words
Range of reading – student log of reading
Plus, for preps
• English Online
• Observations of book handling, writing
Knowledge gained from reading
conferences vs NAPLAN etc
• Compare this information with what the teacher will find
out about from NAPLAN and other such assessment
tools. What is the purpose of conference vs the purpose
of NAPLAN?
• Is a VELS level enough information to plan appropriate
teaching for each student? Why?
• Why is it so important to give immediate feedback to
students, especially if they are told about their strengths
and a specific need/goal plus how to achieve that?
• What will you need to do at your school to help teachers
to establish routines for this type of assessment?
• Will your teachers know what to do with the information
they gather? E.g. they find out that many students do
know how to infer – what will they do?
Appropriate teaching (using Gradual
Release of Responsibility model)
Think-aloud
e.g. Inferring
• Select material that requires inferences to understand the content
(nonfiction usually requires more than print)
• Teacher demonstrates inferring by thinking aloud – multiple times
over days, using a variety of genres
• Teacher and students work collaboratively to infer while reading –
best to have enlarged texts for Shared Reading
• Students asked to notice their inferences when reading
independently; teacher confers with students, asking them to
describe their thinking – assessment/feedback/record keeping and
data gathering about which students need more guidance
• Teacher selects some students for small group guided teaching of
inferring and plans further class and individual teaching
The Angel with a Mouth –Organ
by Christobel Mattingley
We had put the baubles, the tinsel, the lights on the Christmas tree.
The angel was always last of all.
Peter and Ingrid started to argue and grab at its box.
“It’s my turn!”
“You did it last year.”
“I’m taller, so I can reach better.”
“It’s not fair!”
I said, “Hand piles!”
Peter put down his right hand. Ingrid put hers on top, I covered Ingrid’s.
Peter covered mine and said, “Sorry, Mum”.
Ingrid covered Peter’s and said, “You will tell us the angel story again, won’t
you?”
Inside the box the little glass angel with the golden wing shone like a star
against the cotton wool.
I thought of the baby doll wrapped ready for Ingrid to find on Christmas
morning, and the baby growing in my tummy, which Peter hoped would be a
brother.
It started the year I wanted a baby doll. I’d hoped for a real baby, like our
neighbour had. My mother wouldn’t promise. So I asked for a doll instead.
But long before St Nicholas could bring one, out of the clouds the planes
came, with noise like thunder and flashes like lightning.
They flew across our village. It became a garden of flame. The houses
and the haystacks were like poppies, bursting out of their buds into glowing
gold and orange. The church spire and the chimneys were like spikes of
scarlet salvia.
When all the petals of flame had fallen at last, the village was like a
skeleton. Buildings were black, animals were dead, people had
disappeared. The earth was bare and burnt. But in the hearts of the people
who were left the fire flowers had dropped their seeds – of fear and of hate,
of courage and of love.
After the planes the soldiers came. They took away fathers, brothers, sons.
But they didn’t take our father. He laughed, “They don’t want a one-armed
bear in their circus!” And he hugged us with the arm he had left, almost as
hard as he used to hug when he had both arms, before the planes came.
Facts from vocabulary research
• Vocabulary knowledge in the early grades is a good indicator of
students’ comprehension in the middle/upper grades and
secondary school.
• Less advantaged students are likely to have a considerably smaller
vocabulary than their advantaged peers when they begin school.
• Lack of vocabulary can be a crucial factor underlying the school
failure of disadvantaged students.
• The most disadvantaged are ELL students, those with learning
difficulties, those who enter school with a limited vocabulary and
those who do not read outside school hours (assuming they also
have plenty of reading at school).
• Students need to add about 3000 words a year to their vocabulary
to be able to read and write as required.The 15 words per day
cannot all be taught directly. One third of the words can be learned
through independent reading - PROVIDED THAT THE READING
MATERIAL IS RICH IN VOCABULARY and teachers have
developed a ‘word consciousness’ in their students.
Effective vocabulary teaching
Effective vocabulary teaching and learning has four major
components:
 Provide rich and varied language experiences
“Anyone interested in increasing students’ vocabularies should do
everything possible to make sure they read as much an as widely as
possible.”
Build students’ world knowledge and vocabulary through exposure to real
and vicarious experiences (TV, DVD, print and digital articles with lots of
photos, excursions, speakers, etc)
 Teach individual words (focus on tier 2 words)
 Teach word-learning strategies (roots, word parts, related words etc)
Note: Writing definitions from dictionaries is not a recommended practice.
 Foster word consciousness (genuine interest in words)
Tiers of word to teach
• Tier One Words - Consists of basic words and rarely require
instructional attention in school and highly frequent in life: clock,
baby, ball, happy, walk, run, etc.
• Tier Two Words - High frequency use for mature language users
and found across a variety of knowledge domains, but words that
students are less likely to know: coincidence, absurd, industrious,
fortunate, etc.
• Tier Three Words - Limited to specific knowledge domains: isotope,
lathe, peninsula, refinery, etc. Although these rare words are often
unknown to students, their appearance in texts is limited to one or
two occurrences, and because they are often specific to particular
content, students can use the context to establish their meaning.
Major focus for direct teaching should be on tier 2 words as
this will provide the greatest benefit to students.
Provide rich and varied language experiences
A teacher can provide rich and varied language experiences by
exposing students to new (and often intriguing) words throughout
the school day:
For example, rather than reminding a student that he
didn’t quite close the door, the teacher might tell the child
to close the door because it is ajar.
Rather than asking a student to water a drooping plant,
the teacher might say that the plant is becoming
dehydrated.
Rather than telling students to line up faster, the teacher
might ask them to stop dawdling.
Role of school leaders
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Are there resources for each student to have a range of materials for
independent reading in all disciplines?
Are there times set aside for independent reading?
Do teachers plan to meet with each student to find out about their reading
strengths and needs?
Are there structures in place for common assessments and recording of
each aspect of the reading curriculum?
Can teachers bring their student work and Reading Journals to meetings to
discuss student work and compare standards and progress?
Can you obtain a school picture, a year level picture, a class picture of all
students’ progress?
How does the teacher use information from independent reading to plan
further teaching?
How does the knowledge about students’ independent reading affect what
occurs in other curriculum areas or when students are working with other
teachers?
Are there school structures that allow such information to be shared?