Supporting Vulnerable Readers

Year 6 cross country. That was my most vulnerable school environment. I can picture to this day sitting in Mrs Soughton’s maths lesson in the hour before P.E and feeling physically sick at the thought of it: the cold, getting changed in a room full of girls when I completely hated my own body, not being able to run very well, the frustration of putting all of my effort into a run that never had a quicker end time, the feeling of embarrassment when I crossed the line an age after everyone else, the sniggering from the group of boys in my form and the comments from a P.E teacher who clearly didn’t enjoy teaching me at all. That said, the most significant feeling that still lingers is the sheer disappointment that I would feel after knowing that people only saw the end time and not the effort that I had put into it.

Thankfully, I only had to endure that once a week. It still had the power to scar me though; to this day I can’t step foot in a gym or exercise in front of other people. I have tried multiple times but it overwhelms me with self-consciousness. So, I can’t imagine how I would have felt if cross-country had featured in every lesson on my timetable, every single day of the week. After all, that is the reality for a worrying number of students who step into our classrooms every day and are confronted with reading material that is far beyond their capabilities…even though the material is at ‘age expected’ standard. That’s before you and I ask them to complete tasks with that material or read it in front of their peers.

Reports from government, National Literacy Trust and The Reading Agency in recent years have made the statistics surrounding vulnerable readers alarmingly clear. In fact, some research indicates that around 25% of young people might leave primary school with reading abilities that will not be sufficient for their next steps. For some it will be a life-long struggle. Further findings published by National Literacy Trust also state that over 16% of adults in England read at a level expected of a 5–7-year-old.

That’s why it is still staggering to me that many teachers do not see value in literacy training or planning. I am sure I am not the only person who has sat next to someone in a CPD session and been shocked by comments that protest that reading doesn’t have anything to do with their subject or that the English team are responsible for teaching reading. We are all teachers or literacy. Every teacher should want to help a student in their care break through the reading barrier. Imagine the impact a school could have for a vulnerable reader if every teacher that they came into contact with made it their priority. Think about the difference it would make to their daily life and their future. Think about how many subjects it would unlock for them.

I firmly believe that, no matter our subject, we are all teachers of literacy! Every single teacher stood in front of a student this week is shaping that child’s ability to read and understand the world around them. For some of those students in our care that will mean that we help them feel that little bit less daunted by text and begin to unlock a life long skill. Let’s face it: it isn’t just academic potential that this unshackles. Reading skills, if nurtured properly, could allow young people to access material that will aid their mental health, imagination, ability to function in a work place, communication skills, articulacy in relationships, ability to understand peer viewpoints and complete basic life admin tasks. Think about it. How many resources do you come into contact with every day that require you to read? From the minute we wake up and touch our phone (admit it- you do that first!) to the moment we go to sleep, we come into contact with items that require us to read. How many packets, road signs, emails, texts, articles, forms, receipts, advertisements, subtitles and social media posts do you read every single day? How many of your hobbies or well-being activities involve some form of reading? How many of your major life events have involved reading something or filling in a form? How many parts of our world would you have been shut off from if you hadn’t been able to read with confidence?

With that in mind, it is absolutely fundamental that we consider how we will differentiate and scaffold reading material for vulnerable readers. Here are some of the most impactful and manageable ways that I have found to support vulnerable readers in my classes:

1. Get to know your kids.

It seems obvious but that is because getting to know your students is at the heart of all quality-first teaching. Get to know your vulnerable reader well. Set out on a mission to understand which reading skills they are most nervous about and how they react to the pressure. Also try and understand them outside of reading. What are their interests? What do they like to watch or do (and how can that help you select reading material)? What do they want their future to look like? How can their interests and aspirations filter into conversations that you have about reading and make them see the benefit of mastering the skill?

2. Image Glossaries

Anticipate words that they may won’t understand in a text and offer them definitions. Try offering this in the form of images rather than words. If you struggle to read new vocabulary, trying to understand it with further reading is going to be off-putting. Plus, the pictorial element could unlock their understanding of textual features such as imagery.

3. ‘Vocab Hunt’ Starters

This one is new for me in 2022. I have tried for years to work vocabulary starters into lessons but they have always felt a bit dry and I struggled to get active engagement from classes. This year I have been working with a year 9 group who like puzzles. I used this to design a vocabulary starter for a challenging extract. I took a number of words out of the text that I knew they would find challenging. I wrote each one on a poster, writing the phonetic way to sound out the word in brackets and images that represented the definition of the word. I then stuck them up around my classroom. When the lesson began, students were given a table containing the words and were asked to walk around and use the images to work out the meaning of each new piece of vocabulary. They loved it! (In fact, they now regularly request it as an activity.) The beauty of it was that it addressed words that would have hindered their comprehension before we read and provided them with a personal glossary that they could use later in the lesson. I threw in some retrieval tasks in later sessions and now most students can tell me the meaning of a majority of the vocabulary. The number of students using the phonetic spelling was staggering to me- they instantly challenged each other to rehearse saying it as they worked out the meaning.

4. Face Strips

These can be a fantastic way to help students infer character emotion, decode the tone of text or even show their own reaction to what they read. They can also be a fantastic way to support SEND learners. It is merely a simple strip of faces added to the bottom of a page or stuck into their book at the end of a reading task. Ask students to use the strip to identify their opinion, a character’s feelings, the reader’s reaction or the text’s tone by selecting a face. Then encourage them to return to the text and identify comments that revealed that to them. These are also applicable to a number of subjects outside of English. Imagine a student has been asked to read a source about a historic event and then using the faces to determine how people at the time would have reacted to what happened.

5. Overlays and Reading Rulers

Overlays are an absolute necessity for those who need them. Let’s face it though, how many times do students attend lessons without their overlay? I think every teacher should have a collection of overlays in their drawer to facilitate reading. In fact, I strongly recommend that teachers approach SEND departments and SLT and ask for the school to invest in some for classrooms. Alternatively, if budgets won’t stretch, see if you can use coloured pockets and wallets instead. That should help SEND learners with barriers to reading feel more confident in visually decoding text. Don’t forget that other students in the room might need equipment for reading too. Rulers and pieces of paper can really help students who struggling keeping track of reading. Using a sheet of paper or WOWO board as a guide also helps those who find large pieces of text daunting by covering up the rest of the page. Alternatively, provide students with a ruler to guide their reading on the page, moving it down as they go.

6. Student Lead Reading

Build an expectation that all students will read in your room. Ease them in with some methods that challenge them all to read but that still allow them enough control to set their own boundaries. I often ask students to take part in a reading snake (the reading snaking around the room and passing from neighbour to neighbour as it winds around rows) or pop corn reading where students read and then name the next reader. From experience these only work if they are embedded as habit and have clear, structured rules. For example, in my classroom, there is an expectation that everyone participates but they have control over how much they read. They maintain some power in their vulnerable moment. The common expectation for my classes is that, when the reading lands on them in these activities, they read a minimum of two-three sentences, depending on the demographic of the group. Pop corn reading carries the rule that each student must read and that the same student can’t be picked over and over again.

7. Don’t jump in!

It goes against every fibre in our bodies. We are educators. We signed up to teachers because we want to make young people feel comfortable and cared for, so the thought of making a child struggle feels awful…but we also signed up because we want to empower students. Unfortunately, one of the best ways to do this is going to be to allow students to read regularly and to rehearse sounding and processing new words. Don’t jump in to save a vulnerable reader when they don’t know a word. (Trust me, I know how much restraint that takes!) Let them sound it out and trial it, making sure that you really praise them when they finally manage it or offer enthusiastic praise for their effort if they don’t. It will be uncomfortable at first but they will find ways to apply skills and break down new words. Using your positioning in this can be key. I like to position myself near that vulnerable reader and offer whispered praise and stage director like prompting as they take on reading out loud.

8. Teacher Modelled Reading

Just like with any skill, modelling reading to classes can unlock ways to progress for students who find reading challenging. Obviously, we want to model how to read fluently, how to use punctuation to guide reading and how to read with expression. Modelling mistakes can be just as influential though! Allow students to see you encounter words that test you. Model how to segment them and blend the sounds together. Look up new words in front of them. Let them see you lose your place and you’re your cool. Allow them to see that reading takes practise and it is a skill that will require life-long development. Allow them to see that you are vulnerable too.