I was delighted to be invited by Jenny Webb to talk to her colleagues in the Literacy Community about all things reading. In particular, we focused on assessing reading and developing reading through the secondary school years.
You can read the blog Jenny wrote, summarising my talk here.
Enjoy!
I was delighted to be able to go to the SSSR 2024 conference in Copenhagen and present a poster on some of the findings from my Phd research. Have a look!
The summer is rapidly leaving and the new academic year is upon us.
This is the time to refresh and reinvigorate approaches to supporting children in our classrooms.
Starting with spoken language is a good place to start.
https://create.piktochart.com/output/b7b979d346e6-wirral-language-info-sept-2024
The Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Reading (DIER) – Young-Suk Kim
In a fascinating presentation, Professor Kim explored the hierarchical relationships that are presented in the DIER model of reading. This is helpful for educators. In contrast to the Simple View of Reading, which is a static model, the DIER explores how different aspects of the complex reading process work together and provide insight into the order we might introduce children to different skills. It helps us understand what to teach first and then next. As she says, predictors become mediators and then finally outcomes – in a temporal sequence. The DIER suggests that at present, the order in which we are encouraged to teach different aspects of the reading process at the moment is not reflective of the research.
Image taken from Kim, Young-Suk. (2023). Simplicity Meets Complexity: Expanding the Simple View of Reading With the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Reading (DIER).
This house representation of the model helps to explain more clearly. It is easy to see what the foundations of reading acquisition are.
We teach phonological awareness because it supports word reading – it is the foundation and therefore needs to come first.
We need to teach higher order comprehension skills, such as inferencing, reasoning and self-monitoring in the early years because it supports language comprehension and is needed to support language development. And therefore reading comprehension.
The findings of the most recent studies testing the hypotheses inherent in the DIER suggest that over and above word reading and listening comprehension, text reading fluency does not directly contribute to reading comprehension outcomes. In contrast, as children get older, comprehension processes play an increasing role in text reading fluency – and therefore word reading and language comprehension become more integrated.
So, it is interesting to reflect on the implications of this model… how might we structure the teaching of reading to ensure we support all children? Phonological awareness (in all its glory) and morphology certainly seem important – as well as orthography (taught initially through phonics). The higher order skills that underpin language comprehension are also essential. Thinking and reasoning about the texts they are reading seems to be a crucial aspect of the process.
Do we do both? From the beginning?
References
What does the research say about teaching morphology?
In an excellent presentation by researcher Danielle Colenbrander (ACAL), she outlined the findings from a recent meta-analysis of the research on the effects of teaching morphology on reading, spelling and reading comprehension outcomes. There were so many interesting aspects to this study. Firstly, although teaching morphology has impact on word reading and spelling, there does not seem to be a direct impact on reading comprehension.
The thorny question of transfer was explored. Transfer in this context is the ability to use the taugfht aspects in new situations. There was no evidence of transfer in reading words. But in spelling, the studies showed that students could use the taught bits of spelling when writing new spellings.
As yet, we do not have the evidence to know when we should start teaching morphology to young readers – there were very few studies which directly compared phonics teaching with morphology.
Finally, there was one big problem with how the studies were reported – many of them lacked specific detail of the teaching included in them. Without this detail it is really hard to know what happened and more importantly, what are the bits that work.
So, although we know that teaching morphology is important – the how, when, to whom and in what ways have yet to be explored.
Just sometimes, an amazing opportunity comes along. I was delighted to find myself in the north of Australia, by the sea, at the Scientific Studies of Reading Conference, 2023. This conference is pretty much the Oscars for the world of the psychology of literacy. Researchers come together to share their latest work, debate ideas and collaborate. If, like me, you are a literacy research nerd, it is full of interesting people discussing their new ideas and amazing people. But, as someone who spends most of her time in schools and talking to teachers, complicated research designs and complex statistical models are certainly out of my comfort zone. But I like a challenge!
The conference runs for 3 days with concurrent symposia and posters on display. The amount of work is a little overwhelming – but as my current work focuses on reading comprehension, that’s where I have decided to focus on my attention.
Over the next few days, I will share thoughts and reflections about the conference and the directions the research suggests we follow in the classroom.
I have written before about being involved in the Nuffield Foundation funded Love to Read research project, with colleagues from University of Edinburgh, Royal Holloway and Aston University. The final report, and all the tools and resources have been published.
You can find them here.
It was a pleasure to be at a hotel, in Cheltenham, participating in a conference with exceptional colleagues about a subject I feel very strongly about – developing our education system to ensure all children can access all the opportunities an outstanding education can provide. My contribution was about language and literacy (of course!), alongside Marc Rowland, Margaret Mulholland and colleagues from the Research School Network.
Enormous thanks to Anna, Jane and Helen for organising everything.
You can access the materials from the conference here: Language and Literacy – Essex Dec 2022 (padlet.com)
I was thrilled to be involved in the British Psychological Association Psychology of Education Review Open Dialogue about researcher-practitioner partnerships.
You can read my contribution and all the others here: Psychology of Education Review Psychology of Education Review | Volume 47, Issue 1 | BPS – British Psychological Society
We would love you to join us for a focus group on EAL learners’ experience of listening and reading comprehension in narrative and expository texts.
All participants will receive a £15 Amazon voucher for taking part.
WHEN:
3.15-4pm online via Zoom or Teams – instructions to follow
Option 1: 25 Jan 2023
Option 2: 26 Jan 2023
Option 3: 2 Feb 2023
Option 4: 8 Feb 2023
Option 5: 9 Feb 2023
Please follow this link to sign up and choose the session that is most convenient for you: https://forms.office.com/e/89KzjY7aaj
WHY:
As researchers we are interested in finding out more about what predicts differences in children’s understanding when they listen or read a text.
Individual differences between children determine their ability to comprehend texts; at the same time different texts pose different challenges to readers. For instance, expository texts (i.e. texts designed to convey new information) and narrative texts (i.e. texts designed to report a story) differ in structure, and need readers to have different skills and strategies
From our perspective as researchers, it is important to understand whether children who are monolingual, bilingual or even trilingual rely on the same or on different linguistic and cognitive skills to read to learn, and whether these skills are similar to those necessary to understand spoken texts. Understanding whether individual differences in language experience affect the reading and listening will improve our understanding of the effect of bilingualism on comprehension and how we teach.
We are interested in understanding what classroom teachers feel about these differences in understanding and how you support multilingual students in the classroom.
So, if you are a teacher teaching multilingual children, we would love to hear from you!
Prof Ludovica Serratrice (University of Reading – https://tinyurl.com/227h4jdj) and Dr Alessandra Valentini (University of Greenwich – https://tinyurl.com/txsymwk6 )
Hope to see you there!
Megan Jane Dixon: teacher, Researcher, Leader 