There were wide variations in how much explicit teaching of reading we saw, but there were certainly wide variations across the sessions. These variations ranged from full-on, 1:1 teaching sessions where the full 60 or 90 minutes was packed with a series of skill-teaching episodes and exercises for the learner to practise new skills; through group sessions where there was occasional, direct teaching of reading skills (some of these were integrated programmes where the prime focus was on subject content); to several sessions where there was no direct teaching of reading in any shape or form.
The teaching of reading generally took a number of forms in both 1:1 and groups:
There were considerable variations among the teachers in terms of the degree of teacher reactions to learners and interventions in each of these approaches. Some teachers managed the teaching process proactively (inserting questions, micro-teaching of points arising). Reviewing the spelling of ‘reptile’ in a spelling test led one teacher/learner pair on to an extensive discussion of homonyms of the ‘ile’ sound – aisle, isle and I’ll – the latter then leading on to another discussion about the use of apostrophes when shortening words as in I’m, I’ll and I’ve.
Other teachers intervened noticeably less often. We observed one teacher for example who, in 167 minutes of teaching (involving the teaching of some technical content) did not undertake any explicit activities relating to reading skills. About half of this duration involved a participant classified as a ‘high literacy needs’ learner, where the only recognition of this need was to be taught 1:1 and at a slower pace than his counterparts in the other session. Teaching reading in this case consisted of the learner endeavouring to read a workbook aloud, with the teacher providing affirmation and corrections where necessary, but no explicit teaching in response to the learner’s performance.
Below is a reasonably typical account of how one teacher explained the range of teaching activities involving reading in their programme.
We sometimes do get people to read aloud around things and it’s just a matter of sounding the phonic sounds. We try to encourage everyone to have a book. We regularly visit the library or encourage people to develop library skills and we list what they can get there. Every day, we have two newspapers, sometimes if there’s an article, a real interest, good article we might do a group reading of that where people will just read a part of it loud in the group and those who don’t want to, don’t have to. Just, some people feel totally daunted, and they probably have difficulty reading, just reading quietly on their own, but we do have people who struggle with reading as well. No one here at the moment, that can’t read.