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Key Stage 4 students’ reading comprehension scores improve by 2 years and 8 months1. Reading is like a muscle: without regular challenging workouts, reading skills often waste, wither and weaken. Struggling teen readers have often lost a love of reading because, somewhere along the way, the struggle to read has outweighed the enjoyment experienced through reading. First to diminish may be the desire even to pick up a book or text. Then, the resilience to struggle through reading - which results in edifying comprehension – vanishes. Sadly, the active avoidance of reading may become a new goal. Plenty of the 14- and 15-year-old students selected for our KS4 Reading Fluency Pilot Project #HFLRFP had already ‘quit the gym’ when it came to reading ‘training’ - their reading enthusiasm and confidence had greatly atrophied. Fast forward to the final reading data collection at the end of the Key Stage 4 Reading Fluency Project pilot and the 80 students from 16 schools were pumped and proud to be ‘back in the reading game’ with an average reading age improvement of 2 years and 8 months for comprehension in just 8 weeks! Wide and varied reading and understanding can feel like an impossible marathon to many of our struggling readers. They know they should run but the fear of failure – and exposure - has become simply too great. Many present themselves as ‘all the gear and no idea’ readers: in full workout gear stretching and flexing as if primed and ready to read yet they live in fear of reading aloud as this is the swiftest and most public way of revealing themselves as dysfluent readers who struggle with comprehension. Masking their reading struggles can become all-consuming. Before taking part in the KS4 Reading Fluency Project, a Year 10 student explained some of the ways she masked her reading struggles in class: ‘I just keep my head down so the teacher won’t ask me questions about the text’ and ‘I just copy my neighbour’s answers [to comprehension questions]’. If only all these student ‘masking’ energies could be channelled, instead, into a proven project to improve reading. Enter the HFL Reading Fluency Project – an 8-week, small group, reading training plan with engaging and challenging texts. Naomi Chambers, Head of English, Richard Hale School, commented that, as a result of taking part in the HFL KS4 Reading Fluency Project, ‘It was very humbling to see the struggles of students who can supposedly read, who, as an English teacher, I may not have identified in my classroom.’ Regular and varied reading ‘workouts’ launch us into a ‘world of words’ to encounter people, places, times and experiences that affect, resonate and change lives. Like athletes, well-trained readers repeat, revisit and are primed and ready when it’s time to encounter new reading challenges. We are meant to struggle when things get challenging. Struggle is where growth happens. Struggles are overcome with proven, researched coaching strategies and the KS4 Reading Fluency Project uses modelled expert prosody, echo reading, text marking, repeated reading, performance reading and modelled comprehension to propel students on their journey to successful reading fluency and comprehension. A mantra of great coaches is: train hard and win easy. Athletes continue to beat their personal bests by experiencing tougher, longer, harder events or fitter, agile, more strategic opponents - whatever the discipline. As such, the #HFLRFP doesn’t shy away from using complex texts – students may not read or understand tricky texts perfectly the first time they read them. And that’s ok because the coach will use proven strategies to help them. Every week, each text encounter creates a new ‘personal best fluency and comprehension’ result. We want our students to keep improving in their own personal reading race to meet the challenging reading demands of school life, personal life and beyond. Step up to the starting line to begin your KS3 and/or KS4 reading fluency journey with HFL Education. 1. Based on York Assessment of Reading Average comprehension scores from 80 students in the HFL KS4 RFP Pilot group (Autumn 2022) |
