ThatReadingThing

Edit: April 2009- If  you’re an adult literacy practitioner, please visit my new site.

Here are a couple of paragraphs quoted from a report on a report on effective practice in delivering Skills for Life. (see www.nrdc.org.uk for the full text)

“For the past three years, NRDC researchers have explored effective teaching practices in reading, writing, numeracy, ESOL and ICT, in order to understand what enables learners to make progress and become more positive about their learning. We were interested in adults seeking to improve their literacy, language or numeracy. We assessed attainment and attitudes, interviewed learners and teachers, observed the strategies used by teachers, and correlated those strategies with changes in learners’ attainment and attitudes. By the time the 5 studies reported they had observed between them over 1000 learners and 1000′s of hours of teaching.

Integrating subject knowledge and pedagogy

The studies highlighted the importance of integrating knowledge of subject and pedagogy into teacher training and professional development. Indeed, the numeracy study concluded that teacher educators not only need a firm grasp of the subjects they teach and of the best way to teach them, they also need to be on top of their subject specific pedagogic knowledge. Similarly, teaching reading, for example, requires an understanding of both pedagogy and subject. However, this was not always in evidence. Several effective approaches to the teaching of reading were hardly seen, such as phonics and developing fluency. With knowledge comes the potential for flexibility. (Tricia’s italics)

All I can say is “let’s get started”. Adult literacy is complex because our learners have such a huge breadth of needs and life circumstances. No single programme is going to make everything better for all adults who struggle with reading and writing. However, I do want Skills for Life tutors to have a chance to have an understanding of how the English code works and how to allow their students to discover that code for themselves.

I’ve seen so many disaffected, even fearful, learners grow in confidence once they are armed with the ability to decode and encode. After a lifetime of guessing and leaving out it feels like a miracle to be able to read right through a “long word” and make sense of the text because they can “hear” it and recognise it.