Download pptx - Literacy TeachMeet – Jolyon Gardner, HAMD Literacy Coordinator Literacy Lesson Focus: reading non-fiction Reading Non-Fiction Jolyon Gardner Literacy Coordinator

Literacy TeachMeet – Jolyon Gardner, HAMD Literacy Coordinator

Literacy Lesson Focus: reading non-fiction

Reading Non-FictionJolyon GardnerLiteracy CoordinatorHarris Academy Morden

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Why do students find it harder to understand non-fiction than fiction?

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• The biggest influence on our language is our parents

• 1-in-16 adults cannot identify a concert venue on a poster that contains name of band, price, date, time and venue

• 7 million UK adults cannot locate the page reference for plumbers in the Yellow Pages

• Aged 7: children in the top quartile have 7100 words; children in the lowest have around 3000. Declining reading comprehension from 8 onwards is largely a result of low vocabulary

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Fiction is more personal. Non-fiction has fewer agents:

• Holidays were taken at resorts

• During the 17th century roads became straighter




Children’s fiction tends to be chronological:

• Fiction becomes easier to read; non-fiction presents difficulties all the way through

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Non-fiction texts rely on linguistic signposts - moreover, therefore, on the other hand. Children who are unfamiliar with these will not read with the same predictive power as they can with fiction.

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Non-fiction tends to have more interrupting constructions:

The agouti, a nervous 20-inch rodent from South America, can leap twenty feet from a sitting position.

Asteroids are lumps of rock and metal whose paths round the sun lie mainly between Jupiter and Mars.

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Fiction uses more active verbs.

Non-fiction relies more on the copula (“Oxygen is a gas”) and use of the passive:

Some plastics are made by … rather than

We make plastics by …

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Non-fiction texts have more complex noun phrases:

The remains and shapes of animals and plants are lost in the myriad caves of the region.

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What can we do to help?

1. Make non-fiction conventions explicit .. actively

2. Get English teachers to use more non-fiction

3. Read non-fiction texts aloud

4. Teach students about interrupting and long subjects, connectives, agent-avoidance!

5. Subject Key Word [email protected]



• Speaks at conferences on teaching English, grammar, school leadership and behaviour management

• Head Teacher at King Edward VI School, Bury St Edmunds

www.geoffbarton.co.uk

Thanks to: Geoff Barton