Hey there Mr. Martin, is that a sense of bewilderment we see etched across your face?
And Mrs. Armstrong – have we just caught you saying a little hopeful prayer in the direction of the school library?
By now, you will have assessed and identified the generic needs of students along the lines of:
- Wave 1 or Green – Standardised score 110+ – Quality first teaching needed. Inclusive teaching approach maintained
- Wave 2 or Amber – Standardised score 85 – 110 – Additional interventions needed to enable age-related expectation or above
- Wave 3 or Red – Standardised score 85 and below – Additional highly personalised interventions needed.
Does this sound familiar as your existing model of identifying students for literacy improvement?
But what now? How will you intervene? Through what method? According to what strategy? And what measurement to quantify success?
Like never before, it can be argued that the golden thread of all curriculum and teaching and learning should be the explicit teaching of reading and vocabulary, replicated whole-school, in every classroom.
Targeted intervention programmes need evidence-based instruction and a priority school commitment. We all know the impact of poor reading and vocabulary is seen across all subjects, in behaviour and engagement and beyond the school gates as students who implicitly know how to interpret spoken and written language have a clear advantage over those who don’t.
GL Assessment recently identified that nationally 25% of 15-year-olds have a reading age of 12 or below, 20% a reading age of 11 and below and 10% a reading age of 9 and below.
Those figures alone are enough to confirm that it’s time we stopped seeing literacy as a ‘bolt on’. It’s the key for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, leaders, influencers and ‘doers’ to be able to play a full and forthright part in the society we’re leaving them.
This might sound like lofty aspirations amid a teaching cycle of stress, demands, expectations and tight timeframes, but what if it were possible? What if we’d done the work to ensure your literacy improvement strategy really was ‘taken care of’ and that we had that ‘always out of reach’ manual which grants teachers exactly the implicit knowledge to teach vocabulary and reading in a way where results make themselves evident at dramatic speed?
We’ve poured a decade of experience via Lexonik Advance, our flagship intervention programme with 27 months reading age gain in just 6 hours (verified by Northumbria University), helping over 900 schools supercharge reading and vocabulary, into our new cloud-based resource Lexonik Vocabulary.
Lexonik Vocabulary goes beyond the rhetoric to upskill classroom teaching practice and develop a systematic approach to support every learner, in every classroom, from KS1 to adulthood who is deemed to need Wave 1 intervention.
The most unique area of Lexonik Vocabulary is the facilitation of the explicit teaching of vocabulary, based around the same methodology as our flagship Lexonik Advance intervention programme, making it the ideal supplementary product to lessen teacher variability and ensure sustainability and progress whole-school. This morphemic analysis of the words allows vocabulary to be explicitly taught and promotes, or provides opportunity for, cross-curricular learning.
To get beyond the rhetoric of illiteracy, leaders need to be brave and bold. To reverse the reading and vocabulary deficit, a review of teaching and learning priorities is vital. Talk is not enough.
We’re committed to different, to daring and to doing transformational vocabulary delivery which helps your students have the future they deserve.
Are you with us?
*To coincide with the Schools and Academies Show, Lexonik has a special package available for all teachers keen to engage our product in the month of November.
You can arrange an initial discovery chat online, or a visit to your school, or if you are attending the Schools and Academies Show pop and see us to understand more about uplifting students’ reading levels by as much as 27 months in just 6 hours.
Email- Sarah.ledger@lexonik.co.uk
Sarah Ledger, Director at Lexonik
