By Tory Coates, English Across the Curriculum Coordinator, St Julian’s School, Portugal

As educators, parents and governments worldwide are aware, there is a global decline in literacy and reading for pleasure. During a Language audit at St Julian’s School, I recognised that reading skills were not being explicitly taught outside of the English classroom.

Inspired by Mary Myatt’s work on teaching demanding texts as well as excellent material produced by the EEF on ‘Improving Literacy’ and work on vocabulary by EALinclusive and Flash Academy we decided to approach this in two different ways.

Firstly, a Strategic focus on developing literacy meant several whole-staff Continuing Staff Development (CPD)  sessions focusing on the idea of deliberate planning for reading. This included demonstrating different games and quick win strategies to teach vocabulary, pre-reading tasks and strategies to break down challenging, academic material. Secondly I ran focused sessions with each Department, allowing an opportunity for more individualised focus on different reading texts that might be taught and how these be made accessible. These sessions also created follow-up coaching with staff members, where we worked together on lesson plans.

Beyond CPD, we focused on tutor time as an avenue for students to listen to excellent quality reading aloud and to share a great story. The successes in KS3 mean we are rolling this out to KS4 next year and we also plan to interweave this with oracy skills. 

In the new academic year we will also be promoting reading to Year 12s with our first year-wide ‘Super-curricular’ Book Review. Each student will choose a book related to their subject to read during tutor time and will present a review of their book to subject teachers.

We believe this strategic and school-wide approach to reading will encourage students to see the value and the joy the written word can give them.