Teaching Literacy Effectively in the Primary School

Richard Fox, Jane Medwell, Louise Poulson, David Wray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134557936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book discusses the implications arising from the authors' research into what constitutes an effective teacher of literacy. They have been able to identify what effective teachers know, understand and do which enable them to put effective teaching of literacy into practice in the primary phase. By identifying the strategies used by these teachers, the authors show how these can be applied by other primary teachers to improve their teaching of literacy.

1 Effective teaching and effective teachers

In this chapter, we will discuss the principal issues emerging from a review of the literature relevant to our research project. Three main areas are covered:

1 effective teaching and effective teachers;

2 the nature of literacy, i.e. what needs to be taught;

3 the effective teaching of literacy and what effective teachers of literacy might be expected to know and do.

Effective teaching and effective teachers

The literature on effective teaching has a number of dominant themes. These include school effect issues as well as issues related to the likely characteristics of effective teachers. Given the lack of value-added data on which to base valid assertions, variations in children’s literacy achievements must be treated cautiously. It has been suggested that a child’s background (prior learning, intelligence, home background, parents, etc.) contributes 85 per cent to what is learned in school, only the remaining 15 per cent being contributed by schooling (Harrison, 1996). This seems a pessimistic estimate and is confounded by the evidence that individual children vary hugely in terms of the experiences of literacy they get in school.

It is also the case that particular school effects are unlikely to affect all children equally (Allington, 1984). Stanovich (1986) has identified the ‘Matthew effect’, whereby school settings enable those pupils who are already rich in literacy experience to get richer, while those who are poor in literacy experience simply get poorer. Such an effect may well explain why, even though schools and teachers can make a difference, the rank order of children entering school may not be greatly altered by school experience (Raban, 1991).

The Effective Teachers of Literacy research project focused on the contribution made by the teacher and the school to what children learn. Research on school effectiveness suggests that variations in children’s literacy performance may be related to three types of effect: whole school, teacher and methods/materials. Of these, the consensus is that the effect of the teacher is the most significant (Barr, 1984; Adams 1990). According to Alexander et al. (1992), effective teaching depends on the successful application of teachers’ ‘curricular expertise’, by which they mean ‘the subject knowledge, the understanding of how children learn and the skills needed to teach subjects successfully’.

Most of the research into effective teaching is generic rather than specific to literacy teaching. A range of types of study has been used to make statements about effective teaching and effective teachers. In the 1970s, a number of large-scale studies in the USA attempted to look at teacher effect by searching for links between teacher classroom behaviour and pupil achievement. Some, but not all, of these studies included reading and word recognition tests in the measures used to calculate output. Brophy and Good (1986) offer a useful review of the area.

More recent studies have taken a more complex view of the classroom and used multifaceted methods of research. Studies such as that of Bennett et al. (1984) have looked at the classes of teachers deemed effective and Mortimore et al. (1988) studied teaching in junior schools. At the same time official inspections by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) have sought to identify and describe effective teaching.

While the research offers little literacy-specific information, it does give a range of findings concerning:

• teacher classroom behaviour, such as classroom management, task setting, task content and pedagogic skills – ‘the skills needed to teach subjects successfully’, in the words of Alexander et al. (1992);

• teacher subject knowledge and beliefs, in which we include content knowledge in a subject, an understanding of how children learn in that subject and the belief systems that interact with and enable such knowledge to be put into operation in the classroom.

These studies are complex, and their conclusions are affected by a wide range of factors. While this suggests that complex instructional problems cannot be solved through simple prescriptions, a number of common characteristic features of effective teaching and teachers have emerged.

Teacher classroom behaviour

Provision of the opportunity to learn

Silcock (1993) argues that the chief finding of research into effective teaching is that effective teachers are those who provide pupils with the maximum opportunity to learn. It is certainly true that the importance of the quantity of instruction that children receive is the most consistently replicated finding in effectiveness research (Brophy and Good, 1986). This has been confirmed by research such as that of Stallings et al. (1977), who identified thirty-three factors associated with successful pupil reading test scores. Some of these were factors related to organisational issues rather than to teachers: for example, smaller classes showed greater pupil gains. But it was also found that pupils who spent most time being instructed or working on academic tasks and less time in games and socialising made the most progress.

Care must be taken, however, in suggesting that learning can be judged by time allocation. Two caveats arise. First, teachers are likely to be different in the efficiency of their use of similar amounts of time. Leinhardt and Greeno (1986), for example, noted that the efficiency of experienced teachers allowed them to perform complex procedures in a fraction of the time taken by novices. Second, time allocated to learning does not necessarily equate exactly with time spent on learning. Bennett et al. (1980) found that children were actually engaged in tasks for only 58 per cent of the time allocated to mathematics in primary classes. Rosenshine (1979) demonstrated that during the average 85-minute lesson time allocated to primary reading, pupils were engaged in the task for an average of only 63 of those minutes. Research has confirmed (e.g. Brophy and Good, 1986) that the features of classroom life most consistently linked with pupils’ achievement were those that suggested maximum pupil engagement in academic activities and minimal time spent unengaged, such as during transitions from one activity to another.

Classroom organisation

There is some evidence that pupil achievement also relates to effective classroom organisation. Students who were more likely to achieve were those who could get help when they required it and who knew what options were available to them on completion of their work. The success rate of seatwork (i.e. work set by the teacher and done independently by children while seated) tends to be high, and research suggests that students who move at a brisk pace through small tasks that yield a high success rate are most likely to be successful.

Pressley et al. (1996), in investigating the teaching of literacy teachers nominated as effective, found that they used a combination of whole class, group and individual teaching. About half their time was spent in whole class teaching, with the amount of group teaching varying according to the age group taught. Fifty-five of the eighty-three teachers studied used ability groups in their teaching. A similar picture emerges from British research (Alexander, 1992; Bennett and Dunne, 1992) and suggests that effective teachers make decisions about the grouping of children in their classrooms according to the needs both of the children and of the tasks in which they are involved. Classroom organisational patterns are chosen for their fitness for the teacher’s purpose at the time.

Task setting (matching)

The level of success that pupils achieve appears to be related to the tasks they are set. Bennett et al. (1984) found that in infant classes, number and language tasks were matched to the pupil’s abilities in only about 40 per cent of cases. In the first term of junior schooling this fell to around 30 per cent, with three-quarters of the tasks set for high attainers being badly matched to their abilities. In these cases, the children could succeed at the tasks but were unlikely to gain new knowledge or skills. Brophy and Good (1986) stressed that effective teachers demanded productive engagement with the task, prepared well and matched the tasks to the abilities of the children.

The Beginning Teacher Education Study (Powell, 1980) studied experienced teachers and highlighted possible conflicts between the need to maximise children’s engagement with tasks and the need to ensure a high success rate. Children seem more likely to be engaged in activities directed by the teacher (Stallings et al., 1978; Brophy and Good, 1986) than during independent seatwork, but teacher-directed activities for a class or group expose all members of the group to the same content and can limit the attainment of the brightest and become too difficult for the slowest. Differentiated seatwork can address the problem but requires more complex preparation and class management, which may result in lower engagement rates and increase the differences between the high and low achievers in the class, despite increased overall success rates (Denham and Lieberman, 1980). This may result in a tension between the match of the task to pupil ability and the level of pupil engagement.

Task content

The nature of the tasks that are set for children may also be related to achievement. Hiebert (1983) reports that lower-ability groups tended to spend more time on decoding tasks, while higher-ability groups were more likely to engage in critical reasoning tasks. In the classes studied by Bennett et al. (1984), 75 per cent of language tasks demanded the practising of existing knowledge, concepts or skills rather than revision, the extension of existing knowledge or acquisition of new knowledge. A general pattern of task distribution suggested that pupils were introduced to new concepts and skills near the start of the term but were allowed little chance to consolidate them. Later in the term, knowledge acquisition declined and was replaced by more and more practice. The nature of the tasks planned also suggested that the teachers offered large amounts of revision and practice to the high achievers and a high level of knowledge acquisition to the low attainers, who might very well have needed more practice. This suggests that teachers need to ensure that the type of task, not simply the amount of task content, is matched to the needs of the pupil.

Teaching skills

The skills underpinning effective instruction have been investigated in a number of studies. Westerhof (1992) confirmed the Stallings suggestion that direct teaching involving questioning and teacher feedback correlated positively with pupil achievement, although this was found to be true only in mathematics lessons and not for other subjects. Powell (1980) also found that the largest gains occurred in those classes where teachers maximised instruction time (and minimised preparation) and spent most of their time instructing the children and monitoring their work. Clark et al. (1979) report a range of studies that emphasise the importance of teachers structuring the lesson content through clear presentation, feedback to student responses and attempting to improve incorrect or incomplete responses.

In the presentation of tasks to children, vagueness, false starts and discontinuities appear to reduce student achievement (Smith and Land, 1981), and a mixture of questions demanding different levels of thinking produces the best achievement in middle school science (Tobin and Capie, 1982). Questioning is thought to have a role to play in direct teaching. Samson et al. (1987) recommend questioning that ensures participation and mastery of academic content, provides adequate wait time and uses higher-order questions. Wragg (1984) emphasises the value of higher-order questioning in which children are involved in thinking or reasoning despite the finding (Galton and Simon, 1980) that most primary school lessons were didactic, with very few open-ended or enquiring questions. Mortimore et al. (1988) found that only 2 per cent of questions asked in junior classrooms were challenging. Brophy and Good (1986) make recommendations from their review of research that include the need to ensure that questions are clear, that all children are asked questions, that the pace of questioning is adjusted to the task, and that children are given sufficient wait time to answer. They also stress that it is important for questions to elicit correct answers, although, as new material is learned, the error rate will inevitably rise as a result of children being stretched (Bennett et al., 1984).

The pace of introduction of material must depend on the capabilities of the children in the class. Brophy and Good (1986) report that in classes where children succeeded with relative ease the pace could be brisker, whereas in classes where children started at a lower ability level, slow introduction of material was necessary. Brisk pace has been associated with high achievement in reading by a number of researchers.

More recent characterisations of teaching have stressed the importance of teachers demonstrating, or modelling, the learner behaviour they wished to encourage. Pressley et al. (1996), for example, when investigating the teaching of literacy teachers deemed as effective, found that all of them reported overt modelling of reading for students on a daily basis. This included reading aloud to students, the modelling of comprehension strategies, modelling the writing process and demonstrating their own love of writing and reading. A crucial element of the reciprocal teaching strategy developed by Palincsar and Brown (1984) was the active demonstration by teachers of high-level cognitive operations. Reciprocal teaching has been shown to enhance pupil learning significantly in a number of studies (Palincsar and Brown, 1984; Gilroy and Moore, 1988; Moore, 1988).

Teacher–pupil interaction

Teacher–pupil interaction in classes has also been a major focus of interest. Appropriate pace, interaction with children, monitoring of children at work and feedback all appear to be features of effective teaching and play a part in ensuring high levels of task engagement as well as providing feedback to pupils. Brophy and Good (1986) recommend that teachers, in handling children’s responses to questions, should train all children to respond, even with a ‘don’t know’, acknowledge correct responses positively but avoid over-praising, affirm correct parts of answers and rephrase incorrect parts, and indicate incorrect answers by simple negation.

The studies reviewed by Brophy and Good also include teacher interaction and the monitoring of classroom activity, and they recommend careful direct teaching followed by guided practice in which teachers monitor the success of children carefully and intervene where necessary. More recently, the metaphor of ‘scaffolding’ has been used to explain the nature of effective teacher–pupil interaction (Bruner, 1986). Scaffolding suggests that by careful support the teacher can enable children to operate at higher levels of cognitive functioning than they would achieve on their own. Wood (1988) uses evidence from observations of parent–child interactions to exemplify the effectiveness of this approach in terms of learning gains.

In the Texas Teacher Effectiveness study, Brophy and Evertson (1976) reported that certain teacher characteristics were associated with effectiveness, and these affected patterns of pupil–teacher relationships. Effective teachers were likely to be businesslike and task-oriented teachers who interacted with students in a primarily teacher–student relationship and spent most time on academic activities. The effective teachers were also likely to assume personal responsibility for pupil achievement, and reveal, in interviews, feelings of efficacy and control, a tendency to organise their classrooms and plan activities proactively on a daily basis, and a ‘can do’ attitude to solving problems. These teachers were likely, when faced with a problem, to redouble their efforts rather than give up, particularly those teachers who...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor's Preface
• Introduction: Teaching literacy effectively: an overview
• 1. Effective teaching and effective teachers
• 2. Investigating effective teachers of literacy
• 3. Effective teachers of literacy in action
• 4. The subject knowledge of effective teachers of literacy
• 5. Teachers’ beliefs about literacy teaching
• 6. Knowledge, beliefs and practice in effective teachers of literacy
• 7. Becoming an effective teacher of literacy
• 8. Conclusions and implications
• Appendix A. Background details of teachers involved in the project
• Appendix B. Questionnaire administered to all teachers in the project
• Appendix C. Interview schedules
• Appendix D. The literacy quiz
• References
• Index