Chiltern Teaching School Hub

Teacher Talk: In the National Year of Reading, We Should Embed Reading Aloud in Every Classroom

This edition was written by Flora Burt, Chiltern Learning Trust School Improvement Lead (Pedagogy and Literacy) 

 

Every teacher a teacher of literacy

Literacy underpins all areas of the curriculum and is a strong indicator of academic success. If a student can’t read, write or articulate themselves correctly, it is incredibly difficult to access, and more importantly thrive, in the wider curriculum. 

As highlighted in the EEF guidance ‘Improving Secondary Literacy,’ (2018) literacy is the key to learning across all subjects in the curriculum. One recommendation given is to develop a student’s ability to engage with complex academic text. As highlighted in the recommendation, to comprehend complex texts, students need to actively engage with what they are reading and use their existing subject knowledge.

When students arrive at secondary school, there is a shift in the type of texts that they encounter - suddenly on a daily basis, they are encountering several different disciplinary pieces of literature. Often, they are expected to engage with this new information independently and for some students, this can become overwhelming, especially if we keep in mind that 25% of children entering secondary school have not yet met expected primary standard and this figure is higher for disadvantaged students at 37% and for SEND students this figure stands at 58%.

 

Practice makes permanent

What could this look like in practice? What strategies could we put in place to ensure students are able to engage with disciplinary reading to build their knowledge base but are also supported sufficiently to be able to do this effectively and more importantly, develop the metacognitive strategies to employ in the future? For me, one of the best yet simple strategies is the teacher reading aloud when introducing a new text.

 

The teacher as the model reader

This may seem to some like an obvious suggestion. However, there are many occasions when I enter a secondary school classroom and this does not happen regularly. It might be that the students are reading independently, ‘popcorn’ reading is taking place, teachers ask for volunteers or students read a section each. 

Regardless of the subject area, when introducing a new text, the teacher should read the text to the class first. As demonstrated by Natalie Wexler, in her book The Knowledge Gap, she highlights the importance of reading aloud to your classes. 

‘Teachers need to read those texts aloud to the whole class and lead discussions focused on content. It’s been found that children can take in more complex concepts and vocabulary through listening than through their own reading until about age 13, on average.’  

Reading aloud offers the opportunity for the students to hear a subject expert read a new passage with accuracy, prosody and automaticity, in other words a fluent reader. Fluency is the bridge between decoding and comprehension. When students can decode automatically and accurately, this frees up their cognitive capacity to make sense of what they are reading. Equally, when reading with prosody you have to understand the text to be able to do this accurately. Professor Timothy Rasinski highlights the importance of the teacher modelling this in building fluency for students. He states that through intonation and pausing, a reader demonstrates that ‘meaning is embedded in more than just the words; it's also in the interpretation of the words.’

Reading aloud also offers the opportunity for teachers to highlight keywords within the text, if it is an unfamiliar word, hearing a subject expert pronounce that word correctly will benefit everyone, especially if they then repeat the word as a collective. This immediately draws attention to the word in question and also ensures they are pronouncing it correctly.

 More crucially, reading aloud allows the teacher to model those metacognitive strategies that they apply as a subject expert when encountering a new text. The teacher can make the implicit explicit by modelling their thought process. 

As a subject specialist, how might I engage with a new text with unfamiliar terminology? Most people would probably read it several times to increase their understanding. For example, as a history teacher, when I read an extract from a Physics textbook, I do not immediately have a comprehensive understanding of the vocabulary or what the text is telling me, therefore I would need to reread it several times to even begin to start to understand the messaging. The teacher modelling how they select and extract certain parts of the text to build comprehension is incredibly powerful and demonstrates to students what they can do in the future to support themselves. This is highlighted by Doug Lemov in his book The Teach Like A Champion Guide to the Science of Reading (2025)  where he states ‘if you (or your students) were new to this content, you would read it slowly, pausing briefly between each point and perhaps annotating or underlining if the material was new and less familiar.’ He then goes on to state how this supports students both in that moment and beyond  'developing such a mental model, research suggests, will not only inform how students themselves read aloud but also how they read silently.’ By reading aloud, we are supporting all students but particularly benefitting the developing readers in the classroom and giving them strategies to employ in the future. 

Therefore, one change that should be made in the classroom to support reading is modelling reading to students. There are plenty of other strategies that could and should be employed. However, this offers a starting point to build from.

 

References

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