T: Aha. Now just have a look at that word. Something in there does not belong there does it? You’ve got one letter in there that needs to be taken away.
  L: i
  T: What would that do to that word if we took away the i? We’d just be left with all of that wouldn’t you, so it would be a funny looking word. Does that look a bit …?
  L:

[laughs]
  T:

Looks a bit funny doesn’t it? Well we won’t take away the i, what else might we take out?
  L: c
  T: What, what does that letter sound like?
  L: sh
  T: See, we want sh, not …
  L: c
  T: [intonation – agrees] Take it out. Now write the word again without that c in it and see if it looks better. Yes, yes. Alight. Now have a look.
  L: Fish, yeah.
Comprehension

The little explicit teaching of comprehension31 that we saw involved teachers using the understanding from the context to correct mis-pronounced words as in this example.

  T: I’ll read to you what you said, and you see if you can spot the error. ‘Thomas is putting ice, jam and chopped nuts on the scroll buns’. What do you put on the scroll buns?
  L: Nuts.
  T: Yeah, nuts. And?
  L: Jam.
  T: And this? [pointing to word]
  L: Ice.
  T: Do you put ice on buns?
  L: Icing [laughs].

Even where there was silent reading or reading aloud, there were very few instances of teachers asking questions involving broader interpretations of texts and their meanings.

Grammar and pronunciation rules

Three teachers introduced rules governing language and pronunciation that learners could apply to unknown words or text in the future. For example, one teacher explored a range of words with her student where the adding of an ‘e’ to a word changed the vowel sound (‘sit’ becomes ‘site’):

31 This statement appears to contradict the high incidence of comprehension episodes shown in Table 3; the comprehension episodes in this table include simple reading of texts, but did not necessarily include teacher questions or comprehension-related activities.