In some cases, the opportunity was about pursuing a topic that clearly sparked the interest of the learner(s). When looking through some web-sites, one learner was interested in the content of one particular topic and asked his teacher if he could spend more time reading it. However, the teacher responded by saying, “Yeah, or we could do it next week.” It was not clear if this was a diversionary answer or a genuine response (the session was drawing to a close, but did last another eight minutes after this request).

In other cases, the teaching moment related to opportunities to teach to specific literacy skills. Typically, these events involved some form of miscue (such as mis-reading a word or not being able to pronounce a word at all), where the teacher closed down this teaching opportunity by simply supplying the correct word. In other cases, the content of what was being discussed lent itself to further exploration and consolidation or correction of literacy skills. For example, in one class there was a series of questions asked about the lengths of various objects such as bridges and buildings, but the teacher did not explore or expand these dimensions in any way beyond the specific answers given by the students.

3.5.4 Fluency

Overall, we saw very few instances of teachers providing sustained activities aimed at increasing learners’ fluency.²⁹ However, we did see some examples of fluency in relation to numeracy where teachers gave additional opportunities for learners to practise newly-acquired skills beyond an initial level.

One 1:1 student for example was being taught how to read a 24 hour clock. Initially he struggled with the exercises involving this skill, but agreed to take some additional exercises home to for further practice. Later in the session, he signalled his unease with not having mastered the skill by interjecting (in the middle of a discussion about grammar) “I’ll kill that clock thing tonight.” The teacher took this as a prompt to return to the clock with further exercises until it was clear that he now understood how to do it. The teacher said that these additional examples would help “just to make sure that you’ve got it.” The learner obviously enjoyed this prolonged practice because of the satisfaction of being able to do it successfully.

²⁹ The literature review (Benseman et al., 2005, p. 61) showed that achieving greater fluency (usually in relation to reading) is an important component of effective teaching, although often under-utilised by teachers.