Why a New Reading Test Needs New Insight First

Thinking ahead to next term, I wonder whether like me, you are thinking about the Year 8 Reading Fluency Assessment. The new intake in September might be first cohort to take the assessment, so where shall we start.

My experience of working with lower attaining pupils in KS3 in many secondary schools has been full of surprises. When I first meet these students, their curiosity and extroversion light up their vibrant personalities, especially when I explain what we will be doing together.

Sensory differences

At the same time, I noticed that among those identified with ‘fragile reading’, there was a wide range of learning differences and some considerable challenges. Some were struggling with impaired vision and had no glasses, one child had hearing loss and was without hearing aids. Others in the group didn’t speak English at all. It was obvious that they’d struggle with reading, as they were not accessing the text at the most basic level.

Social and emotional differences

Then there’s the emotional adjustment into Year 7. I’ve interviewed children about their experiences of school transition in London, Devon and Greater Manchester, I was already aware of the challenges, highlights and coping strategies that pupils encountered at the start of Year 7, as well as intriguing differences in attitudes between girls and boys.

At the end of the first half term of Year 7, those placed in the lower attaining sets spoke about how this had affected their attitude to school and their challenges with getting organized around homework. They were beset by organizational difficulties and seemed to be struggling to cope with the timetable, following the lessons, and remembering what to bring with them. Settling-in was more difficult for lower attaining pupils.

Getting on the teachers’ ‘right side’ and doing well in every lesson was a priority for most boys, but for some the main focus was on figuring out how to avoid being put in detention. The girls on the other hand were competing to build an identity through extra curricular activities. Being picked for a team was key and would give their social ranking an advantage, whereas they’d taken the change in academic work in their stride and were managing to stay organized.

A ‘snapshot’ assessment

Of all the educational research jargon, ‘face validity’ is a particularly useful term. It points to the idea that an assessment is measuring what it claims to. So based on my earlier points, an assessment of reading fluency in Year 8 might generate a somewhat ‘mixed’ pattern in terms of its ‘face validity’. Confounds of reading fluency such as impaired vision, hearing, language, executive function or social and emotional differences would impact the assessment data. The outcome would not really reflect reading fluency, but a wide range of underlying barriers that affect all aspects of learning.

Implications

As schools are now building and extending inclusive practices, considering the sensory, social and emotional learning differences within each cohort as well as the SEND data adds to the workload. Before the new assessment is designed, the wide range of learning differences in KS3 need to be given consideration if all the children taking part are to feel they belong within the rich and diverse nature of our school communities.

The Invisible Barriers Behind ‘Fragile’ Readers

In an informal chat with a primary head, we realised that I had worked with a group of his pupils who had transferred up from his primary school. I was struck by his warmth as he asked about them, how they had adjusted to secondary school. There was a stark contrast between his memories of them at primary school and their need to assert themselves at the end of year 7. At this point the girls’ had established themselves in their social groups and the boys had made a lasting impression on their teachers. The die seemed cast for the years that were to follow.

Even if Progress 8 was to be calculated against attainment at the end of KS2 (which it isn’t because of COVID), the process of transition lasts throughout Year 7 and is not a trivial matter. As pupils establish their new friendships and settle into the different routines, transfer may be smooth and lead to a wonderful experience of breadth and expansion. For disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND, school transition requires care and plenty of communication across the team. When pupils have not been supported by inclusive practices, there’s a deep and lasting impact on their learning trajectories.

But let’s celebrate the great work that’s also out there. Here’s a wonderful example of inclusive practice in a large secondary school, where I worked with lower-attaining Year 8 pupils. They were mellow and relaxed. Here’s what stood out. Since joining the school, they’d received one-to-one support or small group support from the academic support team and also from the school librarian. The way all of this folded together was wonderful. Every student’s photo was displayed on the glass walls of the library, with the book they’d just completed and their review of that book. Their smiling faces showed real pride and it was obvious that engagement in reading was a huge aspect of the school’s inclusive ethos.

Here was a community of committed readers. You may be wondering why I was working with the lower attaining readers. Many of these students were decoding very well and were age appropriate in terms of reading accuracy and rate of reading, but with very low levels of comprehension. Even so, I noticed that every one of them was motivated to read well.

Fluency and Comprehension: What the Simple View of Reading Misses

The most well known reading model is Gough and Tumner’s Simple View of Reading (SVR). It has strong ‘face validity’ as it delivers on the name. Like most well known models, the SVR is efficient and elegant. The model works because it strips back the complexity of reading by explaining the two main components of reading as (i) language comprehension and (ii) decoding.

The complexity of reading is found in the way these two pieces click together. For children who decode phonemes with automaticity and then go on to read well with fluency, ease and understanding, the naturalness of reading is part of the satisfaction that they experience. Lower attaining readers may also possess good decoding skills and language comprehension skills, but their fluency, ease and understanding have not clicked into place.

What is going on? The intersection between decoding and language comprehension are represented by a multiplication sign. If we exploded this we would find all of the complexity that supports reading fluency. We’d find ratio, the syntactic-semantic interface, homophones, reasoning, inferring, monitoring, prosody, punctuation, phrasing, parsing, subject and predicate, parts of speech and so on. Even if we attempted to teach fluency explicitly by taking each of these in turn, we might achieve very little, because the processes contributing to fluency are orchestrated subconsciously at a very rapid pace in the order of milliseconds as an extension of automaticity.

Even if we imagine that reading is a pipeline with phonics at the start, fluency at the middle and comprehension at the end, we are missing the main event, which is that reading is made of many layers. The mind is predictive and infers what is about to happen next, maintaining layers of information to achieve this feat. This is why working memory is very important for maintaining multiple processes simultaneously. Behind the scenes, inhibitory control allows all this to take place by holding attention steady and filtering out irrelevant stimuli.

More than 30 years ago, reading researchers, Perfetti considered that lower attaining readers, using effortful decoding might experience a blockage by overloading working memory and even referred to this as a ‘bottle-neck’. Listening to children struggling at the word level is like listening to congested traffic. It sounds like an intractable problem and is one of the reasons why many children have been taught to read easier texts quickly, so as to allow language to flow through working memory as if reading fluently.

Since then we have learned so much about predictive processing and the more functional aspects of language comprehension. The predictive cues are rhythmic, patterned and take place at the order of milliseconds. The ratios between syllables, were studied by the Ancient Greeks, who realised their importance, given that they were subtle enough to require great sensitivity, yet powerful enough to persuade and move listeners.

If we are to cultivate readers who will persuade and move listeners, enjoy their reading and want to write stories themselves, then we could look for strength and ease in fluency rather than pace. The kind of fluency that brings texts to life in the mind of the child is as expressive as it is flexible. This is what a child recently said to me when his fluency developed:

“When I read I can see it all happening like a movie in my head!” (Year3)

This also happened in Year 8. The students had their photos taken by the librarian and they read fluently. Their voices ebbed and flowed as they followed the rise and fall of each phrase. We had not studied the ratios of adjacent syllables, nor had we discussed them, but the Year 8 students were sensitive to them and this is why they were reading well, with ease, fluency and understanding.

Planning and Preparing: A Third Way

Thinking once again about September’s new intake, there will be an impact of the proposed Year 8 Fluency Assessment. It’s possible that many schools will double down on the reading faster route, the phonics route and the ‘find the key word strategy’ of reading comprehension. The increased workload is considerable and may well involve new appointments. All of this firefighting - even if it’s presented as supporting inclusive practice, may risk burnout among the team and the students.

Building sensitivity to rhythm in the ‘whole child’ is an alternative approach which offers a third way, one that is fast acting and builds agility into inclusive practice. Although students who cannot hear, speak or see the language do need targeted support, the other students may benefit from a light, high touch approach.

A rhythm-based approach refines students’ perception of phonemes, tightens their decoding, focuses their fluency, and clarifies their comprehension. The predictive cues of language, orchestrated by working memory would allow this to happen if those rhythmic ratios between syllables were on point. The bottleneck is less about ‘too much information in one place’, rather, it’s about too little sensitivity to the finer details, the rhythmic cues between syllables.

So, imagine this is not one-to-one teaching. This is happening in a group size of ten and each session only takes ten minutes, and it’s fun. The momentum is palpable after three weeks and it’s measurable using the ‘Reading Fluency Tracker,’ which has been used for more than ten years to record progress in reading fluency week by week. It has sections for pupil voice, tricky words, notes for collaborative talk around the vocabulary and a tick the box grid that tracks fluency at seven levels. It supplements everything that is already working well and complements traditional approaches to tracking progress in reading.

Click here to get your reading fluency tracker

If you are seeing reading where fluency and comprehension are poles apart, and are curious to find out more about the relationship between syllables, fluency and reading comprehension, I would love for you to join my next live webinar, Beyond Speed: When Fluency Sounds Right, but Comprehension Doesn't Land. on Thursday evening. It's for Reading Leads and SENDCOs who want to measure what truly matters: not speed alone, but whether a student's reading holds together.You might like to consider this for your next catch-up programme for the new Year 7 intake or to resource inclusive practices in your school next term.

Click here to join me live.

References

Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10. doi.org [1, 2]

C.A. Perfetti (1985) Reading Ability, OUP