With the success of our Tutor Reading Programme, comes constant progression and development to add even more impact. We all know the importance of reading – but what about the importance of oracy?
This is something I’ve been working on. I think as classroom practitioners, we value discussion in lessons as this can help students to verbalise and solidify their ideas before writing them down. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that you can’t have good writing without good talking first (and good reading, of course.) And there is already an oracy element to Tutor Reading in terms of exposing students to hearing texts being read aloud which is proven to improve fluency and comprehension. But what about doing something that gives students the opportunity to put those oracy skills into practice?
That’s where my discussion prompt cards come in, which I launched on our January INSET day. Every Tutor Group are to be given a set of A5 cards that have some sentence starters relating to the discussion questions already on the Knowledge Organisers (remember me saying how much I loved creating those….?!) I’ve kept these prompt cards generic rather than personalising them to each text and they are sectioned into the pre and post reading questions. Of course, the sentence starters aren’t exhaustive, but they are designed to provide a scaffold in enabling students to structure their verbal responses in a more considered and sophisticated way – to really think about how they want to construct a verbal opinion/argument. There’s also some analytical verbs (reinforces/conveys etc) on there to help them develop their vocabulary too.
This is an easy and natural ‘add on’ for the Tutor Reading Programme, rather than an additional task for teachers to ‘do’. In fact, it might even support those less confident members of staff I mentioned in my blog post on Tutor Reading. This will hopefully make the discussion more meaningful and productive. I would structure it like this – tell students to have a look at the discussion questions on the KO and think about some initial ideas, then have a chat in pairs/small groups using the cards to help communicate those ideas. Then I would open it up to whole class discussion, prompting students to use the sentence starters when sharing their thoughts. A teacher could even model the process first by sharing their own opinion using the prompt card.
It seemed to go down really well on INSET day and I even had a colleague ask me to email her the template so she could use it in her own lessons – so staff really are appreciating the benefits of literacy strategies in their own subject areas which is a huge personal win for me as I know so many teachers still see literacy as ‘just for English teachers’.
I look forward to observing these prompt cards in use over the coming half term and will report back with the results!
Leading Literacy 
Great strategies here. Hopefully, the structured conversations will lead to greater confidence for all, resulting in engaged reading and conversation fluency
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