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3 Mar, 8 tweets, 3 min read
Reciprocal Reading treats reading comprehension as a skill. As such it is in denial of Kahn's (2007) assertion that it is not a skill, but a complex mix of thinking, reasoning, imagining and interpreting and is a largely knowledge-based process dependent on content knowledge
It assigns roles to pupils (predictor, clarifier, questioner, summariser) in a small group who 'collaborate'. It seems to have evolved from Collaborative Strategic Reading (Kim, 2006).The technique is used in Success For All - much criticised by Kozol (2006) and McGuinness (1999)
The research that implied it was successful was undermined by the evidence that pretty much any comprehension skills teaching was effective. Reading seemed to improve reading. More here on skills-based comprehension strategies: thereadingape.com/single-post/20…
Questioning The Author was developed as a dialogic approach -more here: thereadingape.com/single-post/20… It took the stance that comprehension occurs in the moment and is not a post facto operation whereby the reader rereads a text to answer third party generated questions.
Teachers posed queries during the process of reading that were discussed rather than asking questions that had right/wrong answers. It emphasised the fallibility of the author,sometimes they didn't write very well and could be thus accused. QTA was unashamedly constructivist.
QTA is actually quite old and has been arguably superseded by @Doug_Lemov's Reading Reconsidered which is clearer and easier to use in primary.The problem with QTA was that the examples given were rather wonderful (check out the fox and the crow example) but not easy to replicate
It requires huge expertise and experience to read a piece and find a rich seam of queries and potential dialogue. QTA's an enlightening read but not easy to use and the associated research wasn't convincing. However, deep, scaffolded and demanding reading is essential for pupils.
However, it is important to remember that when most of us read, most of the time, it is our understanding in the moment that is really important and is actually comprehension. More here: thereadingape.com/single-post/20…

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The Reading Ape Profile picture
3 Mar
Try these: Beck’s (1998) assertion that phoneme to grapheme mapping is the equivalent to reading as dribbling skills are to basketball: necessary but not sufficient to play the game. The implication is clear: without sufficient phonic knowledge, reading may not be possible.
Daniels and Diack (1956) - to ignore the alphabet when teaching the decoding of English is inexplicable.
Whole word method is undermined by the capacity of humans to remember a limited number of symbols. Chinese children are expected to recognise only 3500 characters by the age eleven (Leong, 1973), and it takes twelve years of study to learn 2000 logographs in Japanese(Gough,2006).
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The Reading Ape Profile picture
2 Mar
Now there's a good question! There is no source because there is no recognised model for effective reading instruction in the UK which as @EdinspireGeoff states has 4 separate national bodies.
The only universal expectation is phonics teaching in Reception and Year 1 and once the phonics screening check threshold has been crossed this may stop - despite comprehensive code knowledge not yet having been achieved.
Beyond this pretty much any approach goes from whole language to reading dogs. Guided reading still maintains traction along with numerous schemes that mainly focus on comprehension 'skills'. These include the 'power of reading' which includes precious little reading...
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The Reading Ape Profile picture
18 Feb
Excellent question and apologies for not being clearer. Although silent reading is a relatively recent phenomenon- Latin was usually written in scriptio continua with no breaks between words making it easier to read aloud - it greatly speeds up reading rate.
Oral reading reduces saccade length(how far the eye moves between fixations)and slows reading but this lengthens substantially with silent reading and most US college students read between 300-400 wpm(try doing that aloud).
As a result, the expectation is that children learn to read silently but if we can't hear hear children read, how do we monitor that they are actually reading? The NRP (NICHD,2000) concluded that unmonitored reading in the form of Sustained Silent Reading was not effective.
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The Reading Ape Profile picture
16 Feb
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.
It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.
Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).
Read 16 tweets
The Reading Ape Profile picture
1 Jan
This is a really interesting question and, in essence, asks what reading comprehension actually is. Beck et al. (1997) argued that it has historically been viewed as the extraction of information from the text and that this was assessed by the asking of questions AFTER reading.
They suggested that this approach had led to strategies-based instruction with the major drawback being that teachers focused on the strategy rather than the meaning of what is being read - eg. 'Success For All'. More here-thereadingape.com/single-post/20…
They posited that comprehension is the building of understanding; the construction of meaning from the text and that this takes place DURING reading. The role of teachers, therefore, was more dialogic. Queries rather than questions - thereadingape.com/single-post/20…
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The Reading Ape Profile picture
30 Dec 20
A straw poll among 25 NQTs last year suggested that they had, on average, received 2 hours (in total) of phonics training from their ITT institutions.
Perhaps this is why those schools have to ensure that all of their teachers (including KS2) receive four full days of phonics training.
This is undertaken at schools' expense and backfill costs and delivered to teachers who may have just spent £27,000 on three years of degree-level instruction.The problem is deeper than just phonics with new teachers exhibiting little understanding of how children learn to read.
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