Induction tutor materials
Training session - improving literacy skills through oral language and written tasks
Duration: 90 minutes
Session objectives
Learn that:
- 3.10 Every teacher can improve pupils’ literacy, including by explicitly teaching reading, writing and oral language skills specific to individual disciplines.
Learn how to develop pupils’ literacy by:
- 3r. Modelling and requiring high-quality oral language, recognising that spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing (for example: requiring pupils to respond to questions in full sentences, making use of relevant technical vocabulary).
- 3s. Teaching different forms of writing by modelling planning, drafting and editing.
How to prepare for the session
Read the ECT’s self-study materials for this topic
You should speak to experienced colleagues in the same subject or phases as the ECTs attending this session to help identify 2 high quality texts for the session.
For further information, you may want to read the key findings from these reports:
You should model effective practices throughout. This includes explicitly pointing out the literacy skill assumed or required in every activity, introducing new vocabulary explicitly.
The importance of literacy (20 minutes)
Welcome ECTs to the session. Remind ECTs that literacy is the responsibility of all teachers and that students with poor literacy face significant challenges in all subjects.
Think, pair, share activity:
- think of a time when literacy has been a barrier to learning in your lesson (could be during ITT)
- describe it to your partner
- discuss on your table ways you could overcome these barriers
One way to raise the profile of literacy and to support pupils is by promoting reading for pleasure (for example, by using a range of whole class reading approaches and regularly reading high-quality texts to children).
Ask ECTs to discuss together on their tables:
- how have you promoted reading for pleasure within your subject?
- what’s worked well?
- what hasn't worked so well?
You should spend some time researching in advance and talking to other colleagues to get some examples of high-quality texts of the ECT’s subjects or phases.
Explain to the ECTs that the main part of the session will quickly cover some reading and vocabulary information. For each area, teachers will be encouraged to think about the information in relation to their own subject or phase. At the end, they will spend some time thinking about how they might apply one or the other in their teaching. It may be helpful to group ECTs by subjects.
Teach unfamiliar vocabulary explicitly and plan for pupils to be repeatedly exposed to high-utility and high-frequency vocabulary (20 minutes)
Read the information from a literacy teacher together.
Words can be sorted into 3 tiers:
- tier 1: the most basic and high frequency words, which rarely require teaching beyond early years
- tier 2: high utility words, which are more mature - these could be more sophisticated descriptive words (for example, absurd)
- tier 3: low frequency, low utility words, which are often limited to specific domains (for example, isotope, lathe, peninsula)
We often neglect teaching tier 2 words, but these are also often those in most need of explicit teaching. It is useful to think carefully about exposing students to tier 2 and 3 words intentionally, and explicitly teaching these words so that students can use them with confidence.
New vocabulary should be taught robustly. This means that we take the time to explicitly teach students what the word means and how to use it, and build in time for explicit practice of this.
We only know a word when we can define it, recognise and understand it when heard or seen, and use it both verbally and in writing. This means to teach a word robustly we need to explicitly do these things.
Robust vocabulary teaching is slow for this reason so care must be taken to select which words to explicitly teach from those we expose our student to.
Questions about vocabulary
- What are tier 1, 2 and 3 words?
- Why do tier 2 words often get neglected in terms of explicit teaching?
- Why must new tier 2 and 3 vocabulary be taught ‘robustly’?
- What are the implications for practice? Think specifically about your subject area.
- How might you forward plan for vocabulary?
Share some ideas for teaching tier 2 and 3 words.
Use the following steps for robust vocabulary instruction. When teaching tier 2 and tier 3 words you should follow these steps.
Choose which words you will explicitly teach in your subject or phase.
- Remember that these are most likely to be tier 2 and tier 3 words because they are more complex or subject specific and therefore less likely to be acquired through oral language.
- You should select these words when planning a lesson or sequence of lessons so that you have time to plan how you will teach them.
Teach the new word - in this example ‘currently’.
- Before you teach the word, ask pupils to rate whether they have seen the word before, heard it but not sure what it means, or know it and can use it in a sentence.
- Write the word down - what does it look like - are there any words in it? For example, current. Does this help?
- Talk about how it sounds - initial sound ‘c’, end sound ‘y’, how many syllables, and anything it rhymes with.
- Talk about what it means, explain through examples how the word can be used in different ways.
- Give an example from your own life, for example: currently, we are in a training session.
- Can pupils think of their own examples, for example: it’s currently raining.
Practise the word.
- Give pupils an opportunity to practise using the word themselves.
- This could be a talk task where they need to use the word in a variety of sentences but could also be a written task which they need to correctly use the word. For the word ‘currently’ you could ask pupils to sort a list of events into piles for currently or previously.
Review the words.
- This is important to assess that pupils have understood the word and also maintain the new vocabulary over time.
- You could do this using multiple choice, true or false, getting students to create their own examples or matching up synonyms which have the same definitions.
Model reading comprehension by asking questions, making predictions and summarising when reading (30 minutes)
You should select 2 high-quality texts to use to model this activity and for ECTs to use in the second part of the activity. These should be chosen carefully based on the group. You could speak to experienced colleagues who work in the same phase or subject area as ECTs to get ideas.
Ask ECTs to study the following modelling reading comprehension and discuss the following questions in groups:
- is this something that you are doing at the moment?
- how can you build this explicitly into your planning and practice?
Modelling reading comprehension
Get pupils to ask questions about the text using who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Teach pupils to make predictions by using sentence stems like ‘I think’ and because’. This encourages both full sentence structures and pupils justifying their perspective with evidence.
When reading, teach pupils to summarise:
- just the most important points
- in order using connectives like first, next, then, finally
- in bitesize chunks
Share a new text with the ECTs and ask them to have a go at using the question stems to plan their own questions for pupils.
Planning for action (15 minutes)
To end the session, ECTs should identify some reading or vocabulary techniques that they plan to use. They should share this with the group and prepare to tell their mentors when they next meet.