Sarah Ledger, CEO of Lexonik and a former English Teacher, says active ‘reteaching’ of reading could very often be the key to achieve success once and for all.
Question: If we know the same route leads to repeated failure, why wouldn’t we want to apply a different strategy? Or, to put it another way, if we really want to help our population of disillusioned and disappointed GCSE takers, why wouldn’t we adopt an intervention which provides every likelihood of a rapidly improved outcome?
As a former English Teacher, it still grates terribly that any young person seeking to conquer their resits would simply be told to wade through yet more past papers, when the fundamental skill which would empower them to victory, is being roundly ignored.
Reading.
Without reading skills, a learner cannot possibly hope to scrape through an exam nor reach their ultimate potential.
This is where explicit instruction comes in. It allows a student to not only read for knowledge, but to apply knowledge. It creates the perfect package of being able to recognise a word, decode it, and to comprehend it in different meanings and contexts.
Alongside this, comes the development of reading fluency, which furthers a learner’s ability to achieve full comprehension.
Now go back to the vision of the learner (already despondent and ashamed at past failure) simply dragging their eyeline across past papers.
Without that recognition, comprehension and fluency, how can this young person decipher fully what is being tasked? They can’t. They are being limited in potential and possibility, simply because they can’t read.
Perhaps we have accepted a naïve image of the age and stage at which reading is meant to be undertaken as a subject matter. But why?
Isn’t it time we saw that reading can and should still be re-taught and re-emphasised in children of a later age – especially if not to do so, results in the failure cycle and a withdrawal from learning desire?
Lexonik’s short-term intervention, Advance, was made for this scenario, and I’m always silently high-fiving myself when a teacher or young person shares with me their incredulity at how rapidly it works.
Six weeks is our ultimate window for maximum impact.
In this time, a learner can weave together word recognition skills like phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition, while at the same time achieving language comprehension skills such as verbal reasoning and vocabulary structure.
The explicit instruction expert, Anita Archer, sums it up particularly well in this statement: “There is no comprehension strategy powerful enough to compensate if a student cannot read the words.” She is spot on.
With vulnerable readers, and those for whatever reason find themselves on a race to improve, there is no single benefit to be had in tasking or testing that learner, if they do not have the skills to read the words in front of them.
In my view, we all have to challenge our assumption that the single period in our learning-life in which to get to grips with reading, is when we’re just entering the school system.
For me, intervention should always, always, at whatever age and stage, be a provision in the curriculum pathway.
I see every day the powerful results it achieves for even the most frustrated learners.
So, what’s it to be – more past papers and an ever-disgruntled learner, or an intervention which gives learners the genuine fluency and comprehension they need for life?
GCSE Resits Hub Project 