Talking policy into practice: probing the debates around the effective teaching of early reading

Abstract

This article examines the debates around the teaching of early reading and explores the possible consequences of policy recommendations for teachers' knowledge and understanding of effective pedagogic practices. These include teachers' abilities to adapt patterns of talk (pedagogic discourses) to respond to individual needs and the aims of instruction at any point in a lesson. The case study reported here involves a group of eight struggling readers, aged six to seven years, as they learn to decode text and comprehend meaning in an episode of shared reading. Integration of these dual purposes challenges current recommendations for discrete teaching of phonic skills prior to the development of comprehension strategies. Using lesson transcripts and drawing on notions of dialogic teaching, I argue that instruction at sub-word and text levels might be effectively integrated through appropriately judged changes of discourse that match different pedagogic purposes. Attention to the development of teachers' repertoire of talk forms would, I argue, eliminate the need for pedagogic prescription.