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For all students in Australia’s diverse classrooms, their experiences with quality literature can change their lives. Not only do are they able to create a greater understanding of life, history, and imagined futures, they also offer mirrors and windows (Bishop, 1990) to better see themselves and others, while giving them tools to detect mis- and dis-information in texts.
Quality literary texts are a key part of teaching English in Australia (A New literature Companion for Teachers, 2023). It is important to ensure that students can read, comprehend, and compose a wide range of literary text types.
So what matters when using quality literature in the classroom? Here we have gathered critical insights from our latest Leading with Literacy conference, Reading: Learning, meaning, pleasure.
Finding and selecting texts for all students: a culturally responsive model
It is vitally important to ensure the books you are using as classroom texts are diverse, said associate professor and PETAA President Dr Helen Adam from Edith Cowan University.
Look for “diverse books that offer authentic and equitable representation, incorporating all children’s funds of knowledge, valuing and incorporating and children’s languages and cultural practices.”
If students see themselves represented in the curriculum via texts, Dr Adam said, “They see: this is my school. This is my classroom. I belong here.”
Being responsive to your students may mean your classroom library or programmed texts change every year as your students change. Don’t be afraid of that.
As Cal Simunovic, who is Instructional and Curriculum Leader at Red Hill Public School, said, “Our students should drive our learning, not a [planning] document.”
“We really need to broaden our idea of what it is to create equitable learning environments,” Dr Adam urged teachers, stressing that the quality of a students’ learning can’t be dependent on their postcode, family income, or access to books.
“Children living in poverty benefit greatly from reading for pleasure, but children living in poverty are so often deprived of books. If reading can limit the impact of poverty of educational outcomes, then books have to be accessible to everybody.”
Of course, some of this is beyond the realm of the teacher. “Provision of books to families should be part of a front-line systemic support for families,” Dr Adam said.
But until this happens, for some students, their exposure to books will happen predominantly at school. The books you choose for them matter; they can change a life.
Quality texts in the literacy block
Quality literature can be used beyond narrative studies to explore scientific concepts, offer more personal perspectives on historical events, and for discussing social and cultural topics.
According to Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Education at the University of Illinois, students need to learn “decoding, knowledge of words and parts of a word. Phonological and phonemic awareness … Letters, phonics, spelling, and high-frequency words that represent infrequencies in our language. [Students] need skills in fluency, which depend on decoding skills, all of which lend the ability to comprehend a text.”
Dr Adam acknowledged that, for teachers, it can be difficult to justify time spent reading in the classroom when there is pressure to meet the needs of the curriculum. But “it’s in the curriculum that we want children to engage with texts. When children are having time to sit and read, or talking to other children about reading, they are responding to texts.”
She suggests adding explicit reading instruction by taking those informal book talks and, once a week, shifting it into a formal book talk that you can scaffold your students through to support literacy learning.
Professor Shanahan gave an essential example of effective reading instruction with quality literature that would make the most of your classroom’s allotted reading time – adding active instruction.
If a child is reading a book on their own in the classroom, and they come to a word they don’t know, they may skip it, he said. If we introduce students to more challenging words in texts ahead of time, students won’t be able to challenge themselves by using their decoding skills. We have to be careful to “teach them how to surmount the barrier – not take the barrier away.”
Dr Simmone Pogorzelski, a lecturer in the School of Education at Edith Cowan University, described the importance of decodable and predictable texts for students as they are learning to read, noting that there is likely a period where they might be reading both types of texts with a teacher's guidance.
“When students are in the full alphabetic phase, that’s when we move them on to more challenging authentic texts with instructional support. You keep on with decodables while they’re learning to decode letters and sounds, but it’s also important [at that time] to start giving students a richer diet of texts.”
This, Dr Pogorzelski said, will support teachers in testing students' reading ability above word level, as well as determining their levels of fluency and accuracy.
The reading-writing connection
Quality literature doesn’t just offer a model for students of how literature is written and support reading instruction in classrooms. It also provides a source of imaginative inspiration that can support young readers in becoming young writers. Breaking down text features, structure and language use shows budding writers how grammar makes meaning out of language and transforms words into story.
Award-winning author of Jasper Jones Craig Silvey discussed how he wrote his latest book, Runt, to speak to a child’s sense of belonging, and of the possibilities of writing.
“I want a young reader … to feel spellbound and to not feel alone.”
Books that make us feel connected not only help students to love reading, but also, if encouraged and emphasised in the classroom, are the beginning of a journey into writing.
“Read as widely as you can,” Mr Silvey urged the young students of the teachers in the audience, “But fundamentally to write. For the joy of it, the thrill of possibility, because it’s good for the soul.”
PETAA 2024 National Leading with Literacy Conference - Reading: Learning, meaning pleasure is now available on-demand. Tickets for the 2025 Conference have just been announced. Find out more at petaaconference.edu.au
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