When you’re teaching reading comprehension, the importance of background knowledge cannot be overstated, research suggests. Here, DM Crosby explains how reading non-fiction with pupils to give them a factual grounding in a topic has enabled them to progress quickly to more challenging texts
After I finished my teacher training, I thought I knew how to teach reading comprehension. I had been armed with six or so key strategies and I was shown how to model and facilitate meaningful practice of these strategies. Hence, I was pretty good at regular and explicit modelling of inference, predicting, summarising and so on, using a wide and varied selection of texts.
So in my first year as a NQT, I did all this and read daily with the class, and I encouraged reading for pleasure as best I could. I did everything I had been told to do.
And yet, none of it seemed to work.
Fast-forward a ...
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