Expert Insights: Christopher Such’s Webinar on Teaching Primary Reading

We were very lucky to have Christopher Such join us to host a webinar about teaching primary reading back in December. Chris is an experienced primary school teacher, school leader and author of The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading. He is passionate about professional development for reading and is an expert in giving practical advice to teachers about how to get the best out of their teaching of reading.

Understanding the Ultimate Goal of Reading

The webinar was held for Bookmark’s partner schools and was all about what teachers need to know about reading. Chris started by talking about how the ultimate goal of reading is to understand texts and how we are active participants when reading. However, the understanding of a text will, on some level, be personal to the person reading it, which is one of the joys of reading! This is something to bear in mind when teaching pupils.

Reading Comprehension

Next, Chris explored how reading comprehension takes place through word recognition and language comprehension, both of which are essential. Considering these two factors is useful when thinking about how to teach reading, but also what challenges children may face when reading.

Decoding Word Recognition: Graphemes, Phonemes and Key Skills

Talking about word recognition, Chris looked at how graphemes and phonemes work together; graphemes are the symbols, or letters, used to represent phonemes, the smallest units of spoken sound. He explored various challenges and key skills that need to be addressed so that children can learn to recognise words.

Effective Strategies for Teaching Word Recognition

Talking more on this, Chris suggested strategies that will help embed word recognition, such as teaching blending (combining phonemes to form words) and segmenting (breaking a word down into phonemes) together to demonstrate how these opposite skills can help children grasp new words quickly.

Explicit teaching of word recognition alongside meaningful text experience is Chris’ suggestion for how to teach recognising words. Part of this includes systematic phonics – opportunities to show learners that there are relationships between letters and sounds within a taught, incremental curriculum.

Enhancing Word Recognition through Spelling and Morphemes

Building on this, pupils can be taught word recognition and meaning through spellings, including looking at how morphemes (small chunks of meaning within words, like ​‘ful’, or ​‘un’) can be recognised to help aid understanding. Patterns can support pupils learning; once they learn a patter, they can check if their own spelling or understanding of a word is correct within the context of that pattern. 

Meaningful text experience is also essential and pupils should be given lots of opportunities to decode through reading books to build their knowledge and skills.

Reading Fluency: The Role of Practice and Repetition

Chris then turned to reading fluency’s importance for a child’s reading journey and how accuracy, automaticity and prosody are key elements when looking at the flow of reading. Identifying where children may be struggling with fluency when hearing them read aloud will help educators pinpoint what further support the child may need. 

The more children become fluent with their reading, the more it frees up space in their brains to work on comprehending what they are reading.

Chris highlighted the importance of reading practice and having structures in place to ensure pupils get lots of successful word recognition practice. One way to do this is through repeated reading of the same, short text, modelled by the teacher first and then in pairs, to help develop their fluency skills.

Language Comprehension

All of this brought Chris on to the capability of language comprehension and how vocabulary is a key element. It’s important to develop both how many words children know and how much they know about them, to support their breadth and depth vocabulary learning. A particular focus should be on those words that children won’t experience through their day-to-day interactions.

Linking to word recognition again, Chris explained how understanding morphemes in words builds that knowledge of vocabulary, and helps children make connections between words and spot patterns. Strategies to support children include using child-friendly definitions of words, practising using words in their writing or speech or revisiting words multiple times and a later date.

Whilst words are important in language comprehension, so is background knowledge and Chris talked about how we can’t really understand a text if we don’t already know something about it. However, we don’t need to teach pupils every single thing they require to understand the text – we want them to learn from it too! Thinking carefully about what knowledge to share before reading a text will help pupils gain more meaning when reading.

Teaching things like punctuation and text structure can also support pupils with language and text comprehension, as well as ensuring children are exposed to a variety of texts – different genres and different text types like information texts, diary entries, letters etc.

Chris went on to explain that teaching language comprehension is again a mixture of explicit teaching and meaningful text experience. This might look like developing pupil spoken language (as there is an overlap with understanding written language), taking opportunities to read aloud and focusing on meaningful interactions and experiences with texts to build pupils’ understanding of written language and the world it represents. All of this helps pupils realise their role in actively interpreting and appreciating texts.

Key Takeaways from Chris’s Webinar

Chris’s webinar highlighted the need for education professionals to understand how to teach reading to empower children to feel confident, comfortable and excited about their reading journeys. We are extremely grateful to him for taking the time to share his many years of experience.

A huge thank you to Chris for sharing his vast knowledge of teaching primary reading. If you’d like to get in touch with Chris, you can: