Saltley Academy Literacy Strategy:
Agreed by the Local Governing Body, 7th July 2017. Date of review: July 2018.
Purpose: to ensure that all classroom-based staff areconfidently able tosecure rapid development of students’ oracy, reading and writing through consistent approaches across the Academy and have high expectations of how students can develop these skills. The Academy’s response to the needs of students whose literacy skills are such that they are supported by the Special Needs Department/Inclusion team, including those at the earliest stages of learning English, are the subject of the relevant policy. Literacy skills are a fundamental to being able to be aware of your rights and therefore the teaching of literacy skills is a central aspect of our being a Rights Respecting School. Well-developed literacy is essential to being an outstanding learner and the activities which develop literacy should also develop outstanding learner qualities.
1) Literacy in Lessons:
The key principles of the strategy are stimulus and structure.
Lessons will regularly include the opportunities for students to discuss ideas in response to stimuli,
which will regularly involve reading, and use this to plan and produce a piece of substantial extended writing, planned into paragraphs.
It the responsibility of faculties and departments to develop oracy through explicitly stated, regular requirements within schemes of work and specifically:
- to ensure that on a regular basis students are provided with the opportunity to speak and listen to one another in order to explore subject content in response to a stimulus. On many occasions, this stimulus will be a piece of text for students to understand, consider and discuss.
- to ensure that students are guided in line with the whole school approach to collaborate effectively in such discussions and to record the outcomes of their discussions in an appropriate manner, with students provided with resources to structure and organise their ideas if they are not yet secure in doing this independently.
- to ensure that within each scheme of work there is at least one requirement for individual presentation, which can include participating in role-play.
- to ensure students have the opportunity to develop their ability to structure such presentations, their confidence in being an engaging speaker and taking risks with their vocabulary.
To develop their reading skills through explicitly stated, regular requirements within schemes of work and specifically:
- To ensure that students engage with the text, which is suitably challenging for them to need to check some vocabulary (in their dictionary) and show resilience in reading successfully in order for them to understand and respond to the text.
- To teach strategies in note-making through modelling and the use of recording strategies such as table-completion if they are not yet secure in independently interacting with the text.
- To teach techniques in the selection and evaluation of points in research, including the effective and safe use of the internet.
-To ensure that students plan ideas for subsequent pieces of writing, leading to appropriate paragraphing, through planning strategies such as spider diagrams or bullet points, if they are not yet secure in doing so independently.
To develop their writing skills through explicitly stated, regular requirements within schemes of work and specifically:
-To ensure that students’ writing quality cannot be below the national expectations at Year 6 and that any students joining the Academy with skills not at this level are supported to make rapid progress towards these.
-Supported by staff training, all departments will explicitly support students’ development of their ability to:
- organise ideas into paragraphs;
- select vocabulary and grammatical structures to match purpose and audience;
- use a range of connectives, including adverbials, within and across sentences and paragraphs;
- use adverbs, noun phrases and prepositional phrases;
- use passive and modal verbs effectively;
- use co-ordinating and subordinating conjunctions;
- use a range of clause structures, varying their position within sentences.
- use the following correctly: full stop, question mark, capital letter, comma, semi-colon, colon, apostrophe (contraction and possession), brackets, hyphen.
-To ensure that students use a range of simple, compound and complex sentences, supported by the use of sentence structure ‘mats’, which can be either the generic one available in the Academy or subject specific. Note: subject specific ‘mats’ must reflect the expectation that students and staff will be discussing the use of these three sentence types.
- To ensure that students are required to complete one piece of extended writing in each scheme, are taught the generic features of the text and that the key features of structure at whole text level (specifically paragraphing) and sentence level as outlined above.
- To enable students to check their work for spelling, punctuation and grammar and to receive feedback on this.
- To ensure students present work to the best of their ability.
3 )Literacy at whole school level:
Oracy:
The Academy is committed to include public speaking, reading, presentation and drama within assemblies and whole school events.
Reading Strategy:
There are four strands to the Academy’s reading strategy:
1) A teaching and learning focus on ensuring students read for meaning across the curriculum as described above.
2) ‘Book Club’ – a whole school reading session, in groups created on the basis of reading assessment –which takes place four times per week for twenty minutes. One session is committed to the development of student understanding of ‘root words’ and the fundamental elements of sentence level learning outlined above.
3) ‘Accelerated Reader’ – a reading programme delivered within English lessons at Key Stage Three, recommended by the EEF research as being particularly effective at supporting the reading of students eligible for Pupil Premium funding. Students in Years 9-11 participate in Accelerated Reader in their own time.
The impact of reading and the response to any lack of progress is testing through the Accelerated Reader’s ‘STAR’ test, which covers a range of reading skills, including vocabulary, a major issue for many of our students.
4) Develop our use of the LRC to support learning, including subject-based reading resources.
Writing Strategy:
The writing strategy is based upon the writing approach outlined in the section above. The opportunity for free writing is created through the role of Learning Logs for Key Stage Three (for 2017-8). Students’ Outstanding Learning lesson teacher will liaise with the English Department if the Learning Log reveals any literacy concerns and both will seek to address the concern, which may be relevant to an individual or reveal a whole school area for development.
Vocabulary Strategy:
This strategy is based upon the research of as summarised by David Didau in ‘The Secret of
Literacy’, on which words are divided in three ‘tiers’:
1) Simple words – the responsibility of all: students who are unable to use many of these words would be receiving support from the EAL team.
2) Common, more complex words – see below.
3) Specialist language: the responsibility for identifying and teaching the meaning, use and spelling of these words lies with each subject area. Relating words to their linguistic roots and origins would be consistent with a whole-school approach to vocabulary learning.
Didau sites research which ‘suggests there are 7,000 word families which are very high frequency in written texts and very low-frequency in speech. These are words that feature heavily in textbooks and exam papers. They are part of the language of academic success; if you’re familiar with the likelihood that you will be academically successful is so much greater.’ (
Common, more complex words: these words are very often those words many of our students are all abilities and backgrounds have a below-average grasp of and which results in below-average literacy scores in some forms of assessment.
All colleagues have a responsibility to explore the root and meaning of such words as they appear in the texts used in lessons and Book Club.
The Academy has a ‘Root word of the week’ as research shows that this approach develops students’ understanding of a greater number of words and help them to identify meanings, while also developing their understanding of the development of language. There will also be a focus on prefixes and suffixes. This is developed explicitly as part of Book Club and should be reinforced across the curriculum.
The Lead Practitioner team will develop strategies at both whole school and lesson level.
Responsibilities:
The leadership of the ‘Literacy in Lessons’sections of this policy is the responsibility of the Assistant Headteacher for Teaching and Learning.
The leadership of the Reading at whole school level is the responsibility of the Reading Coordinator, within the English Department, line managed by the relevant Assistant Headteacher.
Appendices contain examples of strategies from ‘Pedagogy and Practice’.
Appendix 1:
Group discussion strategies
Listening triads: Pupils work in groups of three. One pupil takes on the role of
talker, one the role of questioner and one the recorder. The talker explains
something, or comments on an issue, or expresses opinions. The questioner
prompts and seeks clarification. The recorder makes notes and gives a report at
the end of the conversation. Next time, pupils change roles.
Envoys: Once groups have carried out a task, one person from each group is
selected as an ‘envoy’. The envoy moves to a new group to explain and
summarise their group’s work and to find out what the new group thought, decided
or achieved. The envoy then returns to the original group and feeds back. This is
an effective way of avoiding tedious and repetitive reporting-back sessions. It also
encourages the envoy to think about his/her use of language and creates groups
of active listeners.
Rainbow groups: This is a way of ensuring that pupils are regrouped and learn to
work with a range of others. After groups have done a task, each pupil in the group
is given a number or colour. Pupils with the same number or colour then join up to
form new groups comprising representatives of each original group. In their new
groups, pupils take turns to report on their original group’s work and perhaps begin
to work on a new, combined task.
Jigsaw: A topic is divided into sections. In ‘home’ groups of four or five, pupils
take a section each and then regroup into ‘expert’ groups. The experts work
together on their chosen areas, then return to their home groups to report on their
area of expertise. The home group is then set a task that requires the pupils to use
the different areas of expertise for a joint outcome.
Some useful vocabulary for talk
opinion agreement relevant argument assertion
alternatives challenge discussion reason critical
respect information thinking dialogue idea
together sharing group justify propose summarise
support oppose explanation suggestion evaluate
synthesise clarify modify consider contribute
Appendix 2:
Examples of reading activities:
Analysis activities
These activities use unmodified text. Pupils select specific information from the text
and then represent it in a different form. This type of activity helps pupils develop
their analytical skills. The following are examples of analysis activities.
• Underlining or highlighting: Pupils search for target words or phrases that
relate to one aspect of content, for example words or phrases that support a
particular view.
• Labelling: Pupils label segments of text, for example they might label a
scientific account using a set of labels provided (e.g. prediction, evidence and
conclusion).
• Segmenting: Pupils segment paragraphs or text into information units or label
segments of text.
• Diagrammatic representation: Pupils construct diagrams from text, for
example flow diagrams, concept maps or labelled models.
• Tabular representation: Pupils extract information from a written text, then
construct and represent it in tabular form.
Text restructuring
Text restructuring involves reading a text and then recasting the information in
another format – for example flow charts, diagrams, Venn diagrams, grids, lists,
maps, charts and concept maps – or rewriting in another genre. The strategies
involved in recasting information are also useful for making notes. Depending on
the format of the original text and the recast text, skills used will include:
• identifying what is important and relevant in a text;
• applying what is known to a new context;
• remodelling the content and format of the text;
• classifying (being aware of the characteristics of) different genres;
- reading critically;
• summarising and prioritising;
• writing and designing.
Appendix 3:
The teaching of writing:
You can create purposeful contexts for pupils’ writing by:
• establishing both the purpose and audience for the writing;
• providing a model of the text type;
• ensuring that the writers have something to say;
• giving writers opportunities to develop, sharpen and revise ideas;
• encouraging collaboration during planning, drafting and proofreading;
• giving pupils access to reference materials to support writing, for example word
banks, dictionaries and thesauri;
• providing feedback on strengths and ways to improve, both during and after
the writing.