[Talking about a learner with particular difficulties] [Name] sits down with her sometimes and gets her to read things and that would be the way we do it, to get down alongside someone, sit down and find a piece of reading they’re gonna not struggle with too much and just work through it, work through the sound and the strategies, recognising different words.

We classified each of the 25 reading episodes in the sessions we observed according to five components of reading to give a broad indication of the areas that teachers were covering in their teaching (Table 3 below). Some of the sessions covered only one reading component, while other sessions covered several, but never more than three components.

Next is a list of the various techniques we observed tutors using to specifically teach reading. We were interested in the numbers and types of teaching techniques that teachers used, rather than their overall frequency in the teaching sessions, so the maximum number is therefore 15.

We observed several teachers who did not specifically teach any reading skills (or other literacy, numeracy and language components such as numeracy or writing) in the course of our observations. In these sessions, the learners would typically read aloud from a text source and when they made errors or faltered, the teacher simply supplied the correct word or omission. They did not use any of these errors or omissions as prompts for teaching (a specific form of seizing the ‘teaching moment’); nor did we see them teaching literacy, numeracy and language skills in separate parts of the sessions. While some of their questions were centred on comprehension (especially the understanding of difficult vocabulary), most of the questions were related to the technical content of the texts (supplemented by explanations by the teachers), rather than the analysis or development of the literacy, numeracy and language skills involved.