Reading in Primary Schools: Guide

Primary Literacy

Nutbrown’s research (2006) informs us that parent-child conversations, how children experiment with words and rhythms, listening to and telling stories and pretend play provide important building blocks of family literacy. Literacy is a skill for life. It is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that allows us to communicate effectively and make sense of the world. Lacking vital literacy skills holds a person back at every stage of their life. Low levels of literacy undermine the UK’s economic competitiveness, costing the taxpayer £2.5 billion every year (National Literacy Trust, 2019).

• Children and young people who are the most engaged with literacy have better mental wellbeing than their peers who are the least engaged (Mental Wellbeing Index scores of 7.9/10 vs 6.6/10)
• Children who are the most engaged with literacy are three times more likely to have higher levels of mental wellbeing than children who are the least engaged (39.4% vs 11.8%)
• Conversely, children who are the least engaged with literacy are twice as likely to have low levels of mental wellbeing than their peers who are the most engaged (37.4% vs 15%)
• Children with above expected reading skills are three times more likely to have high levels of mental wellbeing than their peers with below expected reading skills (40.3% vs 13.1%)
• As children transition from primary to secondary school, their levels of literacy engagement and mental wellbeing both begin and continue to decline
• Boys who are the most engaged with literacy have higher levels of mental wellbeing than girls who are equally engaged (Mental Wellbeing Index scores of 8.1/10 vs 7.6/10)

You can find further research reports from the Literacy Trust here.

Illiteracy

Globally, it is estimated that 1 out of 5 people are illiterate and a further three billion are people struggling to read and write at a basic level. Low level reading and writing skills cost the global economy around £800 billion each year. In 2018, illiteracy was estimated to cost UK economy £80 billion. There are often-hidden costs of functional illiteracy that poses even more significant costs to the economy and long-term personal and social impacts on a person’s quality of life. Functional illiteracy means a person may be able to read and write simple words, but cannot apply these skills to tasks such as reading a medicine label, balancing a chequebook, or filling out a job application. Around 15%, or 5.1 million adults in England, struggle to read and write at a very basic level and can be described as functionally illiterate (World Literacy Foundation, 2018).

(Moving) From “What is Reading?” to What is Literacy?

Frankel et al., (2016) define literacy as the process of using reading, writing, and oral language to extract, construct, integrate, and critique meaning through interaction and involvement with multimodal texts in the context of socially situated practices.  Five principles are presented 1. Literacy is a constructive, integrative, and critical process situated in social practices. It involves complex, multimodal transactions between readers, texts, activities, and sociocultural contexts. 2. Fluent reading is shaped by language processes and contexts. It develops alongside other literacy processes (i.e., writing, speaking, listening) and involves prosody as well as speed and automatic, accurate word reading. 3. Literacy is strategic and disciplinary. It involves the use of contextualized comprehension strategies embedded in disciplinary practices; this principle is especially critical for the reading that happens in school. 4. Literacy entails motivation and engagement. It includes motivational factors such as self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and interest, as well as the mediating effects of engagement on reading. It requires attention to how relationships between readers and texts may change over time and in and through particular socioculturally-situated contexts. 5. Literacy is a continuously developing set of practices. It develops throughout a reader’s lifetime in the context of authentic tasks with real-world purposes and motivations, and this holds true for the reading that happens within as well as beyond school.

Digital Literacy

Here is a very useful report from the National Learning Trust concentrating on the early years.

Teaching literacy in Primary schools

In the references below are a series of reports produced by the UK Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) on literacy. The first report covers the requirements of teaching literacy in Key Stage 1 (ages 5–7) and the second Key Stage 2 (ages 7–11). The last focuses on the teaching of communication, language and literacy to children between the ages of three and five. However, it may also be applicable to older pupils who have fallen behind their peers, or younger pupils who are making rapid progress. The recommendations in the reports represent ‘lever points’ where there is useful evidence about communication, language and literacy teaching that schools can use to make a difference to children’s reading skills.

More on literacy is available from the EEF.

References

Education Endowment Foundation (2016) Improving Literacy in Key Stage 1.  London: Education Endowment Foundation.

Education Endowment Foundation (2017) Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2. London: Education Endowment Foundation.

Education Endowment Foundation (2018) Preparing for Literacy: Improving Communication, Language and Literacy in the Early Years.  London: Education Endowment Foundation.

Frankel, K.K. et al. (2016) From “What is Reading?” to What is Literacy? Journal of Education  Vol. 196 (3) p.1-17.

World Literacy Foundation (2018) The economic and social cost of illiteracy. A White paper by the World Literacy Foundation. World Literacy Summit, March 25^th-27th. Oxford: UK.