The Hot Reading Strategy Explained
Every worker needs the proper tools to do their job. The fact that 20% of children consistently leave school illiterate is proof positive that teachers responsible for teaching literacy skills do not have the proper tools. While the ability to assimilate concepts is constrained by IQ, the acquisition of skills is not so constrained. There is no reason whatsoever, why virtually all children, given appropriate teaching, should not acquire mastery of the literacy skills.
Skills respond exclusively to practice. When any skill is practised, its acquisition is assured; the greater the quantity of practice, the higher the level of skill that is attained. The problem is maintaining motivation to acquire the skill if the practices are not routinely successful. A good reader is simply someone who has had lots of successful reading practice and a poor reader is someone whose practices are routinely unsuccessful and therefore de-motivating.
The reality is that most children readily and spontaneously, perceive the often complex relationship between letters of the alphabet and the sounds they represent. A small but significant proportion of children have difficulty assimilating the fact that one sound can be represented by several different letter combinations and that these same letter combinations can also represent other sounds. This does not mean that they will never learn to read; it simply means that they will require more successful reading practice than the average child to master the orthographic complexities.
Reading for the competent, skilled reader is the silent, receptive, fluent process of assimilating a stream of meaning from text. Reading for the poor reader is a painful, series of hesitant, stumbling, frequently audible and invariably unsuccessful attempts at decoding text. The debilitating, self-esteem eroding impact of being unable to read is not the result of being denied access to the intellectual content of texts; it is the direct and inevitable consequence of knowing that others are aware of this inability. The child who masters a skill is always keen to demonstrate their mastery to others. The child who fails to acquire a particular skill much prefers to disguise this fact.
Hot reading allows a child to practice the reading skill successfully without the presence of any other person and then to demonstrate their skill by reading their prepared text aloud to others. Sight vocabulary is the basis of reading fluency and when the Hot Reading experience is carried out routinely every day for a few weeks, the child’s personal sight vocabulary is exponentially increased and their self-esteem fully restored.
How the Hot Reading strategy works in practice!
An intelligent individual required to read a unfamiliar passage aloud, familiarises him/herself with the passage in order to ensure a smooth, effective delivery. Very intelligent people read passages through TWICE before reading them aloud and consequently, their delivery has all the appropriate tonal variations and emphases which guarantee a confident, impressive delivery.
‘Cold’ reading invariably lacks fluency and is delivered in a monotone characterised by misplaced emphasis and hesitations and succeeds only in eroding the self-confidence of vulnerable readers. Intelligent, competent readers don't do cold reading. Providing vulnerable readers with a means of prior familiarisation with assigned texts enables them to read their passages aloud with the same level of confidence and fluency as any highly skilled reader. The cumulative effect of doing this routinely is
(1) the restoration of their self-confidence and
(2) a massive extension of their own personal sight vocabulary. Since all words belong to a 'family' of words, as each of the words in the resouces becomes part of child's personal sight vocabulary, so too does the entire family to which it belongs. A child whose internalised database of immediately recognisable words includes, for example, the word ‘found' also acquires familiarity with the words round, hound, pound, bound, sound, ground etc This explains the exponentially rapid expansion of sight vocabularly which, in combination with improved confidence, is the key to reading fluency.
These factors combine to deliver guaranteed remediation of all non-specific literacy problems in Years 4 or higher. Intervention in the early years renders the need for later remedial approaches unnecessary.
The Library
The library is suitable for vulnerable readers in Years 5 to 9. It comprises 300 graded titles in six different levels. These levels relate to the degree of intellectual challenge only. They are not related to any reading-age or the National Curriculum levels.
It is advisable to start children on a Level 3 title and after completing one or two titles, allow them to use it like any other library, choosing their titles according to their personal interests.
The child only has to learn to advance word focus by touching the spacebar and to 'voice' any unfamiliar words by touching any letter key. The important thing is that the child must complete the sessions at the computer WITHOUT DIRECT ADULT SUPERVISION OR INTERVENTION. This is very important. Any intervention while the child is at the computer interferes with the reading process. When the session is complete, the child places the resulting printout in his/her folder and at some convenient time, reads the passage aloud to his/her table group FROM THE PRINTOUT! - NEVER FROM THE COMPUTER SCREEN. (See 'Table Reading Sessions' below.)
On average, each title has five 'chapters' and children should complete two of these 'chapters' at each session. This will take about 20 minutes. Used on a daily basis, this regime will result in the completion of a minimum of 20 titles in one term. No child who has completed this number of titles will achieve less than Level 4 in English at Key Stage 2.
Reading Comprehension Course.
This is a follow-on course from the library and is suitable for children in Years 6 or over. It is used in precisely the same way as the library except that the sessions end with a series of multi-choice questions which assess the how well the intellectual content of the passage has been assimilated. A minimum reading age of 9 is required to tackle this course effectively. The 100 comprehension passages may be completed in any random order. They are longer and more demanding than the library sessions.
When this course is used with Year 6 pupils, we recommend that at the end of each day, the children, sitting in their normal table groups, each reads their prepared passage to the table group rather than to a teacher or other adult.(See 'Table Reading Sessions' below.)
Year 5
Identify all vulnerable Year 5 readers and have thme complete a daily session at the library as described above. If this regime is maintained for the first term, these children will have completed a minumum of 25 titles. This will be sufficient to resolve the reading problems of those whose difficulties are non-specific. Children with a specific learning difficulty should continue to use approaches recommended by the relevant specialist.
Years 3 and 4
All vulnerable readers in Years 3 and 4 should complete a daily Jumpstart exercise. These can be completed in any random order. This regime will restore the reading deficits of all children who have a non-specific reading difficulty. Those with a specific learning difficulty should continue to use the approaches recommended by the approporiate specialist. The course should be maintained throught Year 3 or 4 until all of the Jumpstart exercises have been completed.
Sentence Builder.
This is a language development course suitable for Year 5 children designed to be offered on a twice weekly basis. The programme uses its own extensive database of sentences from which it randomly selects six sentence exercises. Each sentence has a key word missing and offers a group of words containing the word which is missing. These exercises can be used by an entire class including the vulnerable readers because auditory support is offered in respect of each word in the sentence and each of the possible replacement words on offer. The user familiarises themselves with the sentence and the replacement word and then having decided which the correct word is, clicks on the green box before making his/her selection.
At the end of the exercise, the child is invited to write each of the six sentences into an exercise book.
Table Reading Sessions.
At some convenient point in the day, all children read their prepared texts (Library, Comprehension, Dictation or Jumpstart) to their peer group sitting around their own table. It is only necessary for a teacher or TA to circulate among the tables to keep children focused on their reading aloud task. This is a very powerful strategy in which the most vulnerable readers, read on equal terms with the most able children and this give an enormous boost to their self-confidence.
What ae the mechanics of the process?
Consider a phonetically irregular word such as ‘enough’. There is no way that a five year old child can decode that into ‘eenuff’ to make it comprehensible. There may be some clue in the context but ultimately someone has to tell the child what the word is. The child with a highly effective short term visual memory will remember the word after perhaps a single encounter. The child with an averagely effective short term visual memory might require say three or four encounters before the word becomes part of his or her sight vocabulary. The twenty or so percent of children with the least effective short term visual memories might require say eight or nine encounters before the word is internalised as sight vocabulary. Such children, in the course of their necessarily limited reading experience, are unlikely to experience this number of encounters with the result that their sight vocabularies remain impoverished.
Each word in a individual’s sight vocabulary serves not only to make that word instantly recognisable; it also serves as a reference for decoding other, unfamiliar words with similar phonetic constructions. Sight vocabulary is the key to reading fluency. It is a very simple matter, using before and after techniques, to objectively measure the impact of Hot Reading on the extent of a child’s sight vocabulary. This would be an excellent subject for any final year student of Education looking for a subject for their dissertation. I would be happy to support for any such research.
Does this mean that all children can be literate?
No. In every population, about 1.8% have such severe learning difficulties that they are unlikely ever to be able to read properly. It does mean however, that our schools should on average, be able to deliver 98.2% literacy rather than the 80% which is currently the norm.
