Primary teachers as readers

In the context of the continued pressure and politicisation of the teaching of reading in England, the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) sought to ascertain patterns in primary teachers' reading, both personally and professionally. The project, undertaken in 11 Local Authorities in England, explored 1200 primary teachers' personal reading habits and preferences, investigated their knowledge of children's literature, and documented their reported use of texts in the classroom through a questionnaire. In addition, it sought to establish the extent of the teachers' involvement with and use of local area/school library services. This paper reports on the findings with reference to the teachers' personal reading, the frequency of this reading and the sources they use to select their reading material. It also considers the teachers' favourite childhood texts and the books they identified as highly significant to them, as well as their perceptions of the importance of literature. Connections are made to the data gathered about their knowledge of children's literature, and how primary teachers decide which literature to work with in the classroom.

What happens to precocious readers’ performance by the age of 11 years?

This paper reports on the progress made by a group of fourteen 11-year-old children who had been originally identified as being precocious readers before they started primary school at the age of 5-years. The data enable comparisons to be made with the performance of the children when they were younger so that a six year longitudinal analysis can be made. The children who began school as precocious readers continued to make progress in reading accuracy, rate and comprehension, thereby maintaining their superior performance relative to a comparison group. However, their progress appeared to follow the same developmental trajectory as that of the comparison group. Measures of phonological awareness showed that there are long term, stable individual differences which correlated with all measures of reading. The children who were reading precociously early showed significantly higher levels of phonological awareness than the comparison children. In addition, they showed the same levels of performance on this task as a further group of high achieving young adults. A positive effect of being able to read at precociously early age was identified in the significantly higher levels of receptive vocabulary found amongst the these children. The analyses indicated that rises in receptive vocabulary resulted from reading performance rather than the other way round