Students must be able to produce legible and fluent text when completing classwork and for exam purposes. Some students, however, present with handwriting difficulties in secondary school. When these are significant, intervention may be necessary or alternatives to handwriting may be offered (e.g. use of a word processor). Little is known about…

We describe the rationale for- and content of- a freely available, novel, theoretically driven and evidence-based approach to improving the teaching of word reading in reception classrooms called 'Flexible Phonics'. Flexible Phonics (FP) adds measurable value to-, rather than wholly replacing, existing synthetic phonics programmes. The rationale…

This study highlights the potential of play to support young children's mark-making and writing and, in turn, shows how writing can become a driver of play. By detailing elements of this symbiotic relationship, the intention was for teachers as practitioner-researchers to deepen their professional knowledge of how best to support young children in…

This study offers an insight into the experiences of three newly qualified English primary teachers and their pupils as they sought to develop dialogic teaching in lessons. It draws upon a range of literature from the field of classroom talk, with a particular focus on the work of Robin Alexander to underpin teacher/researcher professional…

Successive UK government policies have strengthened the phonics element of the National Curriculum for English in England. The policies have included inviting publishers to submit completed self-assessments of their systematic phonics programmes. The self-assessment criteria focus on what is deemed to be 'high-quality provision', as defined in the…

Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read-through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole…

New research findings are presented in this paper, responding to a significant knowledge gap about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of reading for pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt 'pedagogy of poverty' in low socio-economic (SES) schools and to enable children to reap the…

In this article, I confine myself to the situation in England that offers a paradigm example of one of the fundamental tensions besetting teaching and assessing writing: the stranglehold of an individualistic view of writing development as opposed to a more socio-cultural perspective. Examining the uses of summative assessment for accountability…

Guided reading is widely perceived to be tricky in English primary schools; prior research has found difficulties with teacher interpretation and implementation. The study reported here suggests that to understand the problems associated with it we should also take into account pupils' perspectives on their guided reading lessons. In this case,…

Teachers of reading in secondary schools know how important it is for low-attaining readers to read whole narratives but time to do this in a crowded curriculum is limited and progress is more easily measured through reading smaller parts of texts. This paper reports on a longitudinal critical action research project in which three English…

This article is derived from a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a sixth form college in north-west England. Through a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a group Facebook page about the students' scaffolded research into dyslexia, the study examined the…

This article investigates issues surrounding the adoption of the "simple view" of reading. While this theory of the reading process has recently been espoused as the official view of early reading instruction in England, a recent Irish study, discussed in this article, indicated that this view of reading is also widespread among Irish…

In this article I consider the digital lives of a number of young teachers. Some are confident, competent movers in digital worlds, some are not. I wonder why, and look back at the teachers' digital histories to see whether ways in which they learned about digital worlds affects their lives now. I identify three different routes to learning about…

With the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, England's primary school teachers were asked to replace "listening to children read"--a practice deeply embedded in UK pedagogy--with guided reading, a practice focused on interpretive and critical comprehension rather than accuracy and fluency. This small-scale research project…

In recent years, interactive white boards (IWBs) have been introduced into many primary classrooms in England. This enquiry examines the ways in which they are being used in the context of literacy teaching, in six primary classrooms in the south-west. Drawing on the perspectives of teachers and pupils, this report reflects on the impact of IWB…