Readerful: Episode 2 – Building confidence in struggling readers

Building confidence and encouraging a desire to read for struggling readers

By Lindsay Pickton

Watch: Building Confidence in Struggling Readers with Lindsay Pickton

Why learning to read is like learning circus skills

Imagine – for some peculiar reason – that you want to be able to juggle while riding a unicycle (I’m making the assumption that you can’t currently do either one, but maybe you fancy a career change?). Every day, you position yourself on that little saddle, beanbags in hand, and kick off. How do you think your progress will go? I’m pretty certain it will be minimal, because you’re overloaded with tricky new things to learn.

If you really wanted to become a unicycling juggler, you’d practise each of those skills every day, separately, working towards a point of automaticity in each – that is, you can do them at least a little bit without having to concentrate too hard, thereby freeing up some cognitive space. So, then you bring them together, and you’ll be a bit disappointed because doing the elements at the same time is a skill in itself.

But it’ll be better than your earlier attempts. Then you’ll practise them separately again, improve, bring them together again, and maybe keep going for a few seconds more. Practise them separately, bring them together, repeat…until you can do them at the same time. After that, you can keep making very good progress, unicycling while juggling on a regular basis.

You can no doubt predict the link I’m about to make with the ability to read. The Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tunmer, 1986) can help us think of word-reading as one skill and language comprehension the other, and if you find both of those things hard to do, trying to do them simultaneously is likely to produce very slow progress. It’s not much fun, either.

Helping struggling readers

It might be the case that you can do one of either word-reading or comprehension quite well: let’s say you can comfortably comprehend age-appropriate texts, like the class story. But if you struggle with the word reading aspect, when you’re trying to read your book and someone asks you a basic retrieval question, you can’t do it: the effort of word reading leaves no cognitive space for understanding even the basic text you’ve just read.

Separating the elements of a complex task is fundamental in teaching and learning. It’s why even competitive swimmers use floats in some drills, and it’s why driving instructors have dual controls. Similarly, it’s really important to bring the newly acquired skills together, because doing them simultaneously is its own challenge.

In applying any of these analogies to struggling readers, there is something of an ‘elephant in the room': the effort people put into getting better at swimming or driving is driven by strong desire to master the skill; my absurd example of circus skill-acquisition only works if I emphasise that you really want it.

The problem for so many children slipping behind in reading is that they are increasingly disaffected with the very idea of reading – and this possibly isn’t helped by our well-intentioned pushes on ‘reading for pleasure’. It must be particularly irritating to be repeatedly told that we can, or even should, all love reading when you find it hard, unrewarding, and perhaps humiliating.

How Readerful Rise supports struggling readers

Finding resources that help to remove those aspects is the dream, and OUP’s Readerful Rise may even be the silver bullet for some, especially when it comes to encouraging the independent repetition of newly acquired skills that is so vital to mastery.

I believe it is vital to keep working on the elements separately, too. Listening to really engaging, challenging fiction, poetry and non-fiction will develop age-appropriate vocabulary and comprehension and develop broader knowledge… and it also can potentially ignite a desire to be able to access such material independently. (For the same reasons, if at all possible, provide at-home access to well-chosen, challenging age-appropriate books in audio-formats.)

Similarly, using age-appropriate (challenging) texts in comprehension-focussed lessons will sustain progress in understanding, and feed engagement, far more effectively than using easy-to-read books with the struggling readers. They may not be able to read the words, but if you use multiple rereads, they will be exercising listening comprehension.

Repeat reads, including choral reading, will help in the development of fluency, too (Rasinski, 2003). Keep those easy-readers for sessions in which the focus is the development of word reading – separating the skills for focussed development.

Feed these skills with the kindling of books that they want to read, and that they can read, such as those found in Readerful Rise, so they actually opt to practise these distinct skills together.

Be clear with struggling readers: it may be hard, but you get good at what you practise; and you won’t have to struggle forever.

Lindsay Pickton

Lindsay Pickton is Primary English Specialist with over 20 year’s experience.

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Lindsay Pickton addresses the key components in building confidence in struggling readers in primary. Including how teachers can support them with practical solutions and ideas for classroom practice and extra-curricular reading. Register to view the webinar.