Digital Intensive 23rd June 2017

A few years ago I conducted a reading survey at a college similar to ours. Eight students were given stopwatches and record books and asked to measure how much time they spent during a class actually reading. Students were asked to record any act of reading that took place whether it was of a text, of a handout, from the whiteboard, and or on a screen. Later, I followed two students for a day each, stopwatch in hand. I found my recorded times were within half a minute of the times recorded by the students.  The results were not a surprise, similar studies have been conducted and have produced similar findings. The average reading times per student worked out as 7 minutes a period and with an overall average time of 30 to 35 minutes per day. It should be noted that the students who agreed to conduct this study were, generally, the more motived students in each class, those with better than average reading skills. One was left wondering how little reading was completed on a daily basis by those students with poorer reading skills.

We know many of our students do little or no reading outside the classroom and this is why it is essential to scaffold reading tasks when teaching the curriculum. We need to do this so the less able students can engage in authentic reading tasks every day. Reading with instruction is the aim of the site Literacy Blend and it is this type of instruction which takes account of the literacy needs of our students. Sometimes it is enough to just give students a reason for completing a reading task – to join a conversation, to answer some questions, to make a comparison, to write an essay. At another level making the structure of a text explicit greatly improves the comprehension ability of our less able readers. Adding material to this website offers teachers examples of simple strategies which are easy to construct and which can be applied to most reading tasks. Improving visibility of the site is a major goal for the coming weeks that, and adding more material of how we can increase the quantity of reading in our classes. Here is an example from the Literacy Blend site, it shows an Information Transfers and is combined with text chunking. These are two examples of easy strategies teachers can add to their repertoire.  Please scroll.

Year 9 reading task with Information Transfer

Read the text and list features under each heading

Foods	Sought-after items	Island nations
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