Stories, Daniel Willingham tells us, are cognitively privileged. We pay special attention to them. This you could argue has an evolutionary basis. For hundreds of thousands of years before there was written language we communicated our knowledge, our cumulative culture and our norms for community & belonging via stories, told sitting around fires. People who listened and learned thrived. People who did not were less likely to. We learned and probably evolved to pay attention when a story was told. And we also probably learned that sharing stories was how we built an ‘us’. Shared stories are critical to belonging.
Reading aloud to pupils is a strategy for reading that works in two ways.
Firstly, through exposure to texts that they would not necessarily have chosen before, pupils can be exposed to new vocabulary, syntactic structures and cultural knowledge that they may not have been exposed to without this reading programme.
Secondly, reading aloud as opposed to silent reading significantly helps those pupils who struggle to decode words on their own and do not have the fluency required to be able to make sense and comprehend what they are reading.
In Years 7-9 (Year 10 in 2024), pupils have a designated lesson for reading, with Year 7 pupils having an additional lesson for Reading Plus work. In this time, pupils read, with their teacher, a book, together, from the Reading Canon. Books have been carefully chosen to match need, broaden horizons and develop reading ability.