What do successful readers do? (Everyone Academy)

On Friday 24th March 2023, I did a workshop for Everyone Academy. This was the blurb:

What do good readers do?

As teachers, we’re often guilty of testing our students’ reading abilities through comprehension questions, without actually supporting them to become better readers. But where should we start? How can you move beyond a comprehension focus and help students to become the best readers of English that they can be? What might be stopping them from developing? In this webinar, I’ll aim to answer all of these questions, by looking at what good readers do and demonstrating how to support students to build those skills for themselves.

As I was putting together the presentation itself, I decided that ‘good’ wasn’t a clear enough word and decided to change it to ‘successful’. In this blogpost I don’t focus specifically on reading skills for learners with Special Educational Needs, though many of the tips may help those learners to feel more confident.

These are the slides:

Note that most of these tips are also relevant to listening.

Successful readers understand the context

Outside the classroom

Outside the classroom, reading is always a contextualised act. If you’re reading something physical, you know what it is you’ve picked up: a book, a magazine, a food package, a report… If you’re reading something digital, you know what you clicked to take you to that text: you opened your email, you launched your ebook reader, you clicked on a link on social media…

As you prepare to read in that context your brain accesses and builds on the information it has about what to expect from that kind of reading. For example, when you open your work email, you probably expect to see mostly short messages, language relevant to your profession, perhaps the occasional longer attachment. Depending on the person who’s writing to you, you might expect particular types of information, or particular stylistic features in their language. Your brain is tapping into those memories and that knowledge you have related to previous emails you’ve read, and forming expectations about what might be in your email this time. This is what we mean when we talk about schemata, the mental map you have relating to a particular situation.

What can go wrong?

You think you’re reading one thing based on the context, and then are surprised to find you’re actually reading something quite different. For example, you open an email at work, and are surprised to see it contains a joke from somebody who’s never sent you a joke before. Or you expect a formal tone, and do a double-take when the email is surprisingly informal. This slows down your reading, as you might have to re-read the message.

In the classroom, context is often removed. Texts might be presented in the same way regardless of the context they appeared in originally. By removing these contextual clues, learners are deprived of the chance to build up wide-ranging schemata which might be useful outside the classroom. Instead, they are largely building up schemata related to ‘texts I’ll see in the classroom’ or ‘texts in my coursebook’.

Inside the classroom

When you start a reading lesson or activity, make sure the context of the text is clear. Tell learners the type of reading: is it a magazine article, a research report, a blog post…? Alternatively, encourage learners to guess the context based on the clues they have available. Where would they expect to encounter this text outside the classroom?

If you’re creating your own materials, provide visual clues regarding the context. For example, lay out a newspaper article [if you still work with them!] in columns, using a typical newspaper font. If you’re working with an email, include the To / CC / Subject line boxes at the top.

Once you’re nearing the end of the reading lesson, encourage learners to reflect on the genre features of the text they’ve read. Here are some questions they could consider:

• What is the layout of the text?
• What kind of grammar can they see? For example, are there lots of extended noun phrases? Are there any typical tenses?
• What lexical fields (areas of vocabulary) are featured?
• What register is used? Formal? Academic? Scientific? Chatty, more like spoken than written language?

Successful readers know why they’re reading

Outside the classroom

When we start reading, we always have an aim in mind, questions in our head which we would like the answer to. These depend on the context: they might be more explicit, especially when reading for information, or less explicit and perhaps even subconscious, especially when reading for pleasure. Here are a few examples:

• Leaflet about a castle: Do I want to visit? What can I do there? When does it open? How much is it?
• Food packaging: Is the ingredient I’m allergic to in here? What are the cooking instructions? Can I recycle this?
• Book: What happens next? How will it end? Who else do I know who might enjoy this?
• Email in reply to one you sent: Does this answer my questions? What information does the other person need from me?
• Facebook post accompanying some photos: Where did they go? What did they do? Do I want to add a comment? How does this add to what I know about that person?
• Sign: What does the sign say? Is it relevant to me? Do I need to change my behaviour because of it?

These questions give us a focus when reading. They determine what level of attention we dedicate to a text, for instance whether we skim it for the general idea, whether we scan to find specific bits of information, or whether we read and reread to check we’ve understood in detail. They also determine how long we spend reading, and to some extent they help us to decide what we do in response to the text.

What can go wrong?

Without having questions in mind, we are unlikely to have the motivation to start reading at all. We all know people who read a lot and people who read very little: one reason for wanting to read more could be about having the desire to read prompted by having questions which you know that your reading might answer.

In the classroom, learners largely read texts which have been given to them by the teacher, accompanied by tasks / questions which are also supplied by the teacher. Their curiosity is not piqued, and the motivation to read becomes reduced to doing it because the teacher told them to.

The same types of tasks often accompany texts, rather than being tasks which are relevant to how that genre might used outside the classroom. Think about the widespread use of true or false and multiple choice questions. While you might sometimes want to read to check if something is correct, or you might have a few possible answers to a question in your head which you’d like to narrow down to one answer as you read, this is not how or why you do the majority of your reading outside the classroom.

Inside the classroom

When setting reading in class, make sure learners have a clear task. This will tell them how much attention to pay, how much depth to read in, and how much time to spend on it. You can provide time limits to help with this, though check they are realistic. One way to help you remember is to always say ‘Read this text and…’, never just ‘Read this text.’

Learners can also set their own tasks. After helping learners to understand the context the text would appear in, you can then encourage them to come up with their own questions to answer. Banana. This is a skill learners can use in their own reading outside the classroom to help them decide how much attention to pay to texts, and to understand what kind of information different texts might be able to provide them with. By doing this, there is likely to be a wider variety of task types covered within your lessons.

Successful readers make predictions and test them

Outside the classroom

As we read, we have an approximate idea of what we are likely to read next. These are our predictions. The accuracy of these ideas will partly depend on our familiarity with the genre, and partly on our familiarity with the topic. In some situations they might also be influenced by our familiarity with the writer. The predictions help us to activate relevant schemata, tapping into our knowledge faster than if we come to a text completely ‘cold’. As we read we test these ideas, or predictions, against what we’re reading, and tap into different schemata. Orange. We then assess how accurate they were, and reform our ideas about the next part of the text, or how to approach that kind of reading the next time we encounter it.

We often make this prediction explicit when reading a picture book with a child. When we look at the cover, we might ask the child to suggest what will happen in the book. As we read, we ask questions like ‘What happens next?’ and ‘What do you think they’ll do now?’ to elicit predictions, and questions like ‘Did you think that would happen?’ to encourage the child to compare their predictions to what happened in the story. Apple. As we become confident readers, this process of making and testing predictions becomes largely subconscious.

What can go wrong?

Whenever we come up against something which we weren’t expecting to read, we do a double-take, and we might have to pause or reread to check why our predictions were wrong. Peach. At this point, we reassess and create a new set of predictions about what might happen next. For example, have you noticed the fruits in the previous four paragraphs? Each time you did, how did you respond? Did you stop? Did you reread the text at all? Did you respond in the same way the first time you saw one as you did the second, third, fourth time you saw one?

If a learner finds reading challenging, they may give up when they realise their predictions are wrong, especially if they feel that they are consistently wrong. It can reduce their confidence and make them feel like they are unsuccessful readers.

Inside the classroom

Rather than giving learners the whole text at once, give them a part of the text or something which accompanies it. This could be a headline, the first paragraph, a picture, or even a word cloud. Ask learners to make 3-5 predictions about what information they think will be included in the text.

Give them the first section of the text. How many of their predictions were correct? Do they want to add to, change or remove any of their predictions? Repeat the process with the next part of the text. Continue this process until the end of the text.

Once you’ve completed this process, ask learners to reflect on how they made their predictions. What clues did they use to help them? Remind them that this is a process they can use in their reading outside the classroom too.

By making the process of creating and checking predictions more explicit to learners, we can help them to understand how to use this strategy. By showing them that not everybody’s predictions are correct in class, and that it’s OK to make a mistake with a prediction, it can boost their confidence too.

For more information, see this page about reading strategies.

Successful readers understand sound-spelling relationships

Outside the classroom

The absolute basics of what it means to read are understand the relationship between the sounds we’re already familiar with in our language and the way that they are communicated on the page. When we learn to read in English, we might start with single letters with single sounds, for example ‘s’ /s/ or ‘t’ /t/. We use these to learn to spell simple CVC words like ‘cat’ or ‘pat’, where the sound and spelling have a clear relationship with each other. We also learn some common words by recognition, rather than by sounding them out, like ‘go’ or ‘the’. In UK schools, the order in which these sound-spelling relationships are introduced is mandated by the Department for Education’s Letters and Sounds programme. Spelling tests are a regular feature of life at primary schools – I remember being tested on 10 words every week throughout my primary education, and recently rediscovered my Year 3 spelling book in our attic at home. ‘bottom’ was a challenging word to spell when I was 8!

At first, we are encouraged to sound out words and corrected on these by our parents and other knowledgable others. Over time, we move to reading silently, though we might still sound out the occasional challenging word. Eventually we read entirely silently, and the relationship between the sounds and spellings of words becomes mostly unconscious.

What can go wrong?

Sometimes we have read a word, but we’ve never heard it pronounced. The first time we try to say it people listening to us realise that we’ve only ever read this word and don’t know the correct pronunciation. This isn’t a problem with reading per se, but it does highlight the importance of understanding sound-spelling relationships.

The other direction is much more common though, especially for readers with less experience of reading in English: they’ve heard a word many times but they’ve never seen it written down. Learners may know the word if they hear it, but not recognise it when they see it.

Inside the classroom

When learning to read in English, we can support learners in developing their early literacy by providing opportunities to read aloud. Ideally these will be in low-pressure environments, such as whole class reading, or pair reading working with a partner. However, it’s best to avoid situations where students take turns to read aloud to the whole class, especially if they haven’t had a chance to practice their reading beforehand; this kind of reading can be very demotivating and stressful for learners, and can lead to other students in the class switching off. Another technique to avoid is reading full texts aloud when learners have already developed the ability to read silently in the language – this is time which could be better spent elsewhere. On the other hand, supportive reading aloud where there is a clear focus for the reading can develop learners confidence in connecting sounds and spellings together. For example, learners can chorally read a series of short sentences while the teacher indicates the relevant sounds. The ultimate aim with this kind of reading aloud is to enable learners to be able to move towards silent reading themselves – it is a transition stage rather than an end in itself. For more information about reading aloud, see Jason Anderson’s summary.

As learners are developing their literacy in English, it’s useful to teach them common sound-spelling relationships. Young learner books commonly have a phonics syllabus, but this is a useful area to work on with all age groups until they have developed the ability to read fluently in English. While it might not be necessary to go through as many stages as for the phonics programme linked to above, you might still wish to introduce small sets of sounds and their associated spellings, or vice-versa. A useful tool here is the English File sound bank which lists examples of the most common spellings (left) and some common exceptions (right):

English File Intermediate Student’s Book (fourth edition), Latham-Koenig, Oxenden and Lambert, p166

I taught a one-to-one pre-intermediate Czech learner who tended to write English using a version of Czech spelling, following the conventions of Czech sound-spelling relationships. I showed her this chart and over the next three months she decided to systematically learn all of the different relationships. By the end of that period her English spelling had hugely improved, and she had also become a more confident reader as she could recognise words more consistently.

Another idea is to encourage learners to spot sound-spelling relationships in texts they’re reading. Once learners have finished reading a text for comprehension, they could underline all of the spellings with a particular sound, for example /i:/.

Successful readers know how to deal with unknown vocabulary

Outside the classroom

When we meet a word we don’t know as we’re reading in our own language, we generally have four options:

1. Guess what it means from the context.
2. Look it up.
3. Ask somebody what it means.
4. Ignore it.

The decision we make about which strategy to use will depend on the context we’re reading in, the amount of vocabulary we understand in the rest of the text, our desire (or not) to understand it, and the availability of reference materials / people around us.

What can go wrong?

If there are too many words we don’t understand, reading a text can feel somewhat like wading through mud – we keep pushing forwards but we never seem to get anywhere. When we try to figure out a word from context, we don’t have enough information to help us guess the meaning. We may end up giving up on the text if we think there are too many words we can’t read.

If we decide to look up a word, we might not be confident in our dictionary skills. We might not be aware of how to identify the relevant meaning of a word, or we might not understand the definition itself. The people we ask about the word might not be able to give clear, succinct, relevant definitions.

Ignoring the word can seem like a useful strategy, but we may realise that without that word it’s not possible to understand the wider text.

Inside the classroom

It’s important to teach students the difference between reading to read and reading to improve vocabulary. Both of these are valid ways of using a text, but in my opinion it’s generally better to focus on reading to read before you do any work on improving vocabulary. If you’re reading to read, the focus is on general comprehension and being able to get what you need from the text. This goes back to knowing why you’re reaidng – if you can answer the questions you have related to the text without understanding that vocabulary, then it’s not essential and you can probably ignore it. If you can’t answer your questions, then you need to decide which strategy to use to understand the word(s). This can help learners to make informed decisions about which vocabulary it’s worth spending time on. It’s also useful as it helps learners realise that it’s OK not to understand everything they read, like me reading Harry Potter in Polish.

In this era of easy-access translators, it’s still important to work on dictionary skills with learners, showing them what information they can find in a good learner dictionary. It’s also useful to help learners understand how to make the most of the translation software they’re using.

Successful readers know how they read best

Outside the classroom

You might read a book faster on paper or faster on an e-reader. You might prefer to have our computer or phone set to dark mode (I certainly do!). Perhaps you find it easier to read larger text or sans serif fonts. You may not have realised this as a child, but over time, you will have realised which formats you are more or less comfortable reading, and you might even have figured out strategies to make it easier to read when you are working with a format you don’t really like or don’t find easy to navigate.

Another difference in reading preferences might be the place where you read, for example wanting to sit in a comfortable chair to read a book, or to sit at a computer desk when reading on a laptop. You may be willing or able to read some types of text for longer than others, or you may need to spend longer processing certain types of text.

What can go wrong?

If we mostly read in one format, such as on a computer or phone screen, we might not feel comfortable reading in other formats, such as on a page. This is also true of different types of writing: if we mostly read printed text, it can be challenging to read handwriting, especially if it’s in an unfamiliar hand.

Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/New-COLD-Feature-Based-Handwriting-Analysis-for-Nag-Shivakumara/f37d24d0ad6c212c83188f9a1ca15e245ad07c08/figure/0

In the classroom, learners may be asked to read in formats which they are less familiar with, or in places or for time periods which they are not comfortable with. For example, learners might feel rushed and unable to spend as much time as they would like with a text.

Inside the classroom

Encourage learners to reflect on their reading habits outside the classroom. They can reflect on when, where and how they like to read, and how this might differ between genres and formats.

You can encourage learners to experiment with different text colours, fonts, and sizes. They could also try reading on different coloured paper, or reading on a screen. Some learners might prefer to take a photo of a text on paper and make it bigger using their phone, for example.

One technique that can help learners when they feel overwhelmed by the amount of text on a page is to mask part of the page with a piece of paper. They can put the paper above the text being read and gradually move it down the page as they read, hiding what they’ve already seen.

Learners could also have a piece of paper with a window in it which would reveal 3-4 lines at once, which they can move down the page as they read. In both cases, the idea is to allow them to still see upcoming text, but reduce the distraction of the text which isn’t their immediate focus.

On a computer this can be done by reducing the size of the window so that it only shows part of the text. Some assistive software can also highlight part of the screen as learners read to help guide their eyes.

Successful readers read more!

Outside the classroom

You probably know somebody who has a passion for reading: they devour the written word, and you might marvel at how much they are able to read. It might even be you!

Christine Nuttall describes a virtuous circle of reading. When you understand better what you are reading, you enjoy reading more. When you enjoy reading more, you read faster. When you read faster, you read more. And when you read more, you understand better.

Source: Teaching Reading Skills In a Foreign Language by Christine Nuttall, p127

While we might think that this is only relevant to the reading of fiction, it’s true for reading across all genres and formats. The more you read that genre, the easier it becomes to understand, the more you are likely to enjoy, the faster you are likely to read it, and the more you are therefore able to read.

What can go wrong?

The opposite of this virtuous circle is a vicious circle: somebody who doesn’t understand what they read and therefore they read slowly. Because they read slowly, they might be more likely to not enjoy reading (though there’s nothing wrong with reading slowly!) If they don’t enjoy reading, they probably don’t read much, and therefore they are less likely to develop their ability to understand written texts when they read.

Source: Teaching Reading Skills In a Foreign Language by Christine Nuttall, p127

For learners, this can lead to them believing that they ‘can’t read in English’, and perhaps even that this is a skill which will never be attainable for them. It can damage their confidence. For some learners this can be limiting as they might lack the level of literacy they need to be able to use English in the way they want or need to in their lives outside the classroom.

Inside the classroom

Supporting and encouraging learners with their reading is key. It can boost learners’ confidence if they can read even very short texts in English: they get the feeling that it is possible to read in English, and start on the virtuous circle.

As they progress with their reading, help learners to find out about opportunities to read in English in formats and about topics which would be interesting for them. This could be showing them websites like News in Levels or (my favourite!) ESL Bits, letting them know how to buy graded readers or graphic novels, or showing them popular science magazines. If you can, you could even set up an extensive reading programme.

Encourage learners to regularly talk about what they’re reading, whether they’re enjoying it, and whether they would recommend it to others. Please don’t force them to read particular things if possible, though do encourage them to try things outside their comfort zone if you think it would be interesting for them. If learners are enjoying it and reading more, then it’s good reading.

Find out more

Teaching Reading Skills In a Foreign Language by Christine Nuttall is a very accessible guide to working on reading with your learners. Here are links to buy it on Amazon (affiliate) and Bookshop (affiliate).

Teaching and Developing Reading Skills by Peter Watkins is another useful guide to activities you can use to train learners in reading, not just test them. Here are links to buy it on Amazon (affiliate), Bookshop (affiliate) and BEBC.

Happy reading!

I hope you and your students find the ideas in this post useful. What ideas would you add?