An ESL teacher’s book – If anything, schools’ dependency on technology to see us through lockdown has made literacy even more of a critical issue. Alex Quigley opens his latest offering, Closing the Reading Gap, by stating that reading is the “master skill of school”, a phrase he repeats four times in the introduction, and it is hard to imagine it isn’t all the more so when ‘school’ has essentially been reduced to a computer screen. Yet according to Quigley, reading doesn’t receive the primacy it should in classrooms up and down the country.
The book’s opening chapters provide a history of reading that encompass everything from the tablet schools of Sumer to the farthest reaches of the Internet, before moving onto the science of reading and some of the current debates around how young children are taught to read. Together, these form an intriguing theoretical framework for what comes next, which is a closer look at classroom practice and the challenges associated with helping students to read with greater fluency.
The complex and interacting factors that make reading difficult – the ‘arduous eight’– are deconstructed in chapter five and Quigley recommends practical strategies that teachers and support staff can use to evaluate the accessibility of different texts prior to using them in the classroom.
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