Teaching under the National Literacy Strategy inhibits the development of children's oral skills, according to research by Linda Hargreaves, with Eve English and Jane Hislam
The National Literacy Strategy framework document describes successful teaching as discursive, interactive, well-paced, confident and ambitious. It defines discursive teaching as that 'characterised by high-quality oral work', while interactive teaching occurs when 'pupils' responses are encouraged, expected and extended'. In other words, it apparently places a high value on children's talk. Yet our research has revealed that teachers feel frustrated in their attempts to promote children's oracy, This failure has repercussions for the Foundation Stage.
Our research project, Study of PRimary INteractive Teaching (see 'More information'), looked at how teachers define 'interactive teaching' and put it into practice in the literacy hour and in other parts of the curriculum.
When asked about their definition of 'interactive teaching', several teachers said that it was what they had always done, yet were unsure of what exactly it meant. They did, however, suggest a variety of definitions, which included engaging all pupils, ensuring broad participation, or making sure that children were actively involved through some practical activity. They talked of pairwork and collaborative groupwork and 'deeper' levels of interactive teaching, such as when they wanted to 'dig deeper into meanings', as one teacher put it.
Questions, questions
The teachers' dilemma in practice was how to ensure 'high-quality oral work, with pupils' responses encouraged, expected and extended', but also, to maintain 'a sense of urgency' as recommended by the framework. Our findings were surprising and worrying.
In practice, it seemed as though the teachers interpreted interactive teaching to mean asking more questions. Our study revealed that questions teachers asked and children answered accounted for 30 per cent of teacher-child interaction (up from 10 per cent at Key Stage 1, according to the only comparable Key Stage 1 study - see 'More information'). In spite of the increase in questioning, teacher statements which have always dominated classroom interaction also rose, up from 39 per cent at Key Stage 1 in 1984 to 53 per cent. In short, interaction was now persistent and insistent.
Where the infant teachers of the 1980s had spent nearly half their time listening to children read, quietly marking children's work, or reading stories aloud, 'interactive teaching' in the literacy hour meant that this dropped to about 14 per cent. Reading stories had now been replaced by choral reading from a 'big book'; and marking by children holding up phoneme fans, or using whiteboards to show their answers.
While these special literacy hour techniques might enable teachers to assess children's knowledge at a glance, they deny the children opportunities to answer orally and explain their ideas at length.
But what exactly was happening when children did get a chance to answer questions? These observations were the most disturbing. We found that in the literacy hour, Key Stage 1 teachers were asking a high proportion of simple recall questions, such as 'What is this word?' and a correspondingly lower proportion of more challenging questions, such as 'Why do you think the poet chose this word?' At Key Stage 2 this situation was reversed.
When the same teachers taught in other curriculum areas, however, the balance of types of question returned to normal. The Key Stage 1 teachers asked a higher proportion of challenging questions, and the Key Stage 2 teachers reverted to their normal lower level of challenging questions.
These findings suggest that the National Literacy Strategy is 'forcing' Key Stage 1 teachers to have lower expectations of children's ability to answer challenging questions. Similar results at Key Stage 1 have been reported by Frank Hardman at Newcastle University in a study whose main focus is the experience of children with special educational needs in the literacy hour. This is a major concern when the literacy hour occupies such a large proportion of the day.
Two final observations give further cause for concern. The first was that despite the increases in questions and amount of interaction, the vast majority of children's responses were of only two or three words. We found that less than 5 per cent of children's answers were over ten words. So, although pupils' responses were clearly 'encouraged and expected', they were by no means 'extended', nor was there high-quality oral work.
Second, we observed a marked move towards teachers telling children exactly how, where and when to do their tasks, whereas in the past, teachers often gave children a choice about some of these basic organising decisions. The worrying implication is that these children will become highly dependent on having a teacher to tell them exactly what to do.
Counter to guidance
Our findings are also relevant for early years practitioners as the literacy hour creeps more and more into the reception year. The Curriculum guidance for the foundation stage recognises the importance of oracy, yet the National Literacy Strategy appears to be inhibiting pupils talking and limiting opportunities to develop oracy.
Throughout the Curriculum guidance there is a thread concerned with allowing children to develop their language, to communicate, to express their ideas. Equally, the guidance emphasises children's right to be listened to and to have a say in their own activities. The frustation of the literacy hour pressures was an issue for many SPRINT teachers, especially in Key Stage 1.
One Key Stage 1 teacher, for example, talked about how she felt her teaching had become less interactive since the implementation of the NLS: 'I still try to be interactive but I don't feel it's quite the way it was... I still don't feel there are opportunities for the children to actually go off and do a lot by themselves - that it's still very much the teacher leading.'
Although research suggests that teachers have always dominated interaction, another Key Stage 1 teacher suggested that interactive learning probably took place more effectively at home than at school: 'Their home environment is the ideal place for interactive learning... in a one-to-one or one-to-small group relationship and practical activities and experiences in a real life context... In the classroom you've got 30 or more children...'
The implication here is that a teacher needs to be able to establish a similar relationship to a parent-child relationship from time to time if truly effective learning is to take place.
This teacher's thinking is reminsicent of Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes' shocking findings that four-year-olds' conversations with their mothers at home had greater educational potential than those with their nursery teachers (see 'More information'). At home there were 'passages of intellectual search', characterised by 'a sequence of persistent questioning on the part of the child, in which the child is actively seeking new information or explanations, or puzzling over something she does not understand, or trying to make sense of an apparent anomaly in her limited knowledge of the world' (p114).
At nursery, however, it was the teachers who persisted in asking sequences of 'cognitively demanding' questions, despite observing that a third of these went unanswered. The children, who asked an average of 26 questions an hour at home, rarely asked any questions of their teachers.
If we really are to develop children's oracy and enable them to articulate their opinions and, in some cases to respond verbally rather than physically, then somehow teachers at every stage need to be able to engage with children in a more equal, genuine dialogue, which concerns everyday matters as well the cognitively challenging.
One Key Stage 2 teacher felt that the literacy and numeracy strategies had taken away opportunities for a more relaxed relationship with the class, but recognised their need to establish such a relationship. As she put it, 'My children are often hanging around at break-time wanting to come in and talk to me, and I think that's very important... it's not teaching as such, but it's got to be part of it if you're building a relationship with children so that they feel able to ask questions, not just one-to-one with you, but then hopefully that carries off into the classroom as well. I mean we end up talking about all sorts of things, sort of what they've seen in the news to things that have happened out in the playground.'
While there might be some gains in achievement levels because of the structures in the literacy and numeracy strategies, it is through such informal conversations that children may well acquire deeper levels of knowledge and understanding.
More information
- The Study of PRimary INteractive Teaching (SPRINT) project, directed by Janet Moyles, Linda Hargreaves and Roger Merry, based at the Universities of Leicester and Durham, took place in 1999-2000. It involved interviews and observations with 30 primary teachers, and in-depth 'video stimulated reflective dialogues' with 15 of these teachers.
A book about the research, Interactive teaching in the primary classroom: digging deeper into meanings, by J Moyles, L Hargreaves, R Merry, F Paterson and V Esarte- Sarries, will be published shortly by Open University Press. SPRINT was supported by ESRC Research Award R 000238200.
- B Tizard and M Hughes, Young children learning; talking and thinking at home and at school (London: Fontana, 1984)
