Faster Read Project
The ‘Faster Read’ (FR) innovative pedagogy aims to develop the reading comprehension, interpretation and engagement of students, including ‘struggling readers’. It combines immersive, whole-text reading of culturally diverse, engaging novels, dialogic class and peer talk, and reading strategies, with teachers explicitly engaged with theories of reading. Post-Covid, its relevance has intensified, with ‘lockdown’ reading and learning losses widening for students from disadvantaged contexts.
The original, interdisciplinary research was conducted in Southern England in 2014-15 at the University of Sussex by colleagues in Education, Dr Julia Sutherland (PI), Prof. Jo Westbrook, and Prof. Jane Oakhill in Psychology (Sutherland et al, 2023; Westbrook et al, 2019) from CIE and CTLR Research Centres. The quasi-experimental, mixed-method study included 413 students of 12-13 years, primarily in ‘low-attaining’ classes and their 20 English teachers, in diverse schools, including areas of poverty. ‘Struggling readers’ (defined as having a reading age 1+ year lower than their chronological age) made, on average, 16 months’ progress in reading comprehension in 12 weeks, measured by standardised tests. Qualitative data showed that students’ reading engagement, use of reading strategies and quality of dialogic peer discussion of texts greatly improved, with some reported impacts on writing, school engagement and attendance.
Impact studies (2017 and 2022) show that over 200 schools in the UK are now using the Faster Read approach for Primary-aged children, typically 7-11 years; Secondary students - Key Stage 3 (11-14 years), GCSE (14-16 years) and A Level (16-19 years). There is also currently international interest in the Faster Read in Tonga, Australia and the USA.
Sussex Team
The Faster Read Video
A video has just been launched to support teachers interested in adopting the ‘Faster Read’ approach to reading with students in mainstream secondary, primary or specialist and alternative-provision schools in the UK. Being a successful reader is a key contributor to students’ cross-curricula academic attainment, progression to HE/employment and life chances. However, international reading assessments in OECD countries (PISA, 2023) indicate that a fifth of adolescents have inadequate reading literacy, reinforced by studies from the global south where the percentage is even higher at between 40-45% (Delprato & Shepard, 2023).
The ‘Faster Read’ (FR) pedagogy aims to develop the reading comprehension, interpretation and engagement of students, including ‘struggling readers’. It combines immersive, whole-text reading of culturally engaging novels, dialogic class and peer talk, and reading strategies, with teachers explicitly engaged with theories of reading. Post-Covid, its relevance has intensified, with ‘lockdown’ reading and learning losses widening for students from disadvantaged contexts.
The original, interdisciplinary research was conducted in Southern England in 2014-15 at the University of Sussex by colleagues in Education, Dr Julia Sutherland (PI), Prof. Jo Westbrook and Psychology, Prof. Jane Oakhill (Sutherland et al, 2023; Westbrook et al, 2019) from CIE/CTLR research centres. The quasi-experimental, mixed-method study included 413 students of 12-13 years, primarily in ‘low-attaining’ classes and their 20 English teachers, in diverse schools, including areas of poverty. ‘Struggling readers’ (defined as having a reading age 1+ year lower than their chronological age) made, on average, 16 months’ progress in reading comprehension in 12 weeks, measured by standardised tests. Qualitative data showed that students’ reading engagement, use of reading strategies and quality of dialogic peer discussion of texts greatly improved, with some reported impacts on writing, school engagement and attendance.
Follow-up impact studies (2017, 2022) have shown that the Faster Read approach has spread to 200+ schools in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and their English Departments, becoming embedded in schools and transforming teachers’ understanding and practice. An estimated 40,000 students have experienced this pedagogy so far and a significant number of Initial-Teacher-Education courses include it in their reading curricula for beginning teachers.
In the video (link below), Julia Sutherland and Jo Westbrook describe the Faster Read pedagogy, with English teachers, Lauren Haywood, Emily Evans and Johnny Pearson explaining why it has radically transformed their practice and had such impact on their students’ reading levels and engagement with books.
The Faster Read
- Video transcript
I'm Julia Sutherland and I'm Jo Westbrook and we're from the University of Sussex.
The faster read approach involves reading two novels in a term at a faster pace and
immersively with few interruptions to engage students in the narrative arc and develop
whole text comprehension, interpretation and engagement. It's particularly beneficial for
struggling The advantage readers are either Key Stage 2 or Key Stage 3 who may
never have read a whole book. It includes explicit modelling of reading strategies to
support students to monitor their comprehension and overcome sticking points to
understand the narrative, for example questioning, inferring and making connections. It
also uses groups reading aloud together expressively in a safe space, asking each
other questions and using the strategies to interpret and enjoy the text. - And the
choice of text is crucial. They should be challenging, culturally diverse, typically
contemporary novels, where students see themselves positively represented.
- The selection of our paired texts is a really important process. Ultimately,
students in our classroom need to feel known and valued, and part of that is being
able to see themselves in the stories that we read and engage with in lessons. Take
these two texts, for example. You've got The Hate You Give and Jane Eyre, two
really quite well -known texts. And ultimately, reading them back -to -back, six weeks
for Jane Eyre, six weeks for The Hate You Give, gives students the opportunity to
immediately compare these texts, to immediately analyse structurally with really quite
high -level interpretations and they do that naturally. It's not a process where we
are as teachers giving them the tools to do it. It's just very simply the reading
them in conjunction with each other that allows them to make those inspired
comparisons. Ultimately the selection of two complementary texts allows our students to
broaden their understanding of the world, culture, politics, history. It allows them
to explore two texts thematically and really challenge themselves.
One of the greatest benefits of the faster read program is that you get to do
expressive reading with your class. This is how I might do it. So reading a book
like now is the time for running. D .O. calls innocent. Are you there? I'm right
behind you. Keep crawling. Don't look back, slowly I say, as the barbed wire bites
my brother. Keep as close to the ground as you can. One by one, we crawl through
to the other side. Lennox holds back the wire until all of us are through. Sweat
is running down his face. He takes out his shirt and quickly puts it back on. We
all do the same. The man who helps innocent in the river has not come through the
barbed wire. All we have now is Lennox. Now, I would read in that style for
approximately half an hour, maybe even longer. And I wouldn't pause the reading to
ask comprehension questions. I would wait until a particular point, maybe at the end
or the start of the lesson, where I may say something like, "So how is Dio
treating his brother at this moment? What's going on for Innocent?" Comprehension
questions that then help students really guide their way through the novel. The most
important thing is that reading, I can use my voice as a way to aid comprehension.
We can also then start to think about the narrative arc. Moving to the other bonus
which is the fact that back -to -back reading means students really get a sense of
the structure and the excitement of the novel. They come back into the classroom
wanting to know exactly what's going to happen next and really with their own
questions as well.
- A really important part of the fast to read is reading in groups. So giving
students a variety of reading experiences and having them reading groups helps build
their confidence. So reading out loud to each other and giving them some autonomy
over dividing up reading parts, et cetera. Another great aspect of group reading and
dialogic talk is having the reading strategies explicitly. So you could have them for
example on a key ring like this where you have the reading strategy on one side
and the definition on the other and when students are reading they can use this to
identify what reading strategy they're using and then you can have really rich
discussions about why that strategy is important and how it makes them a better
reader.
- I enjoy the fast read because our students enjoy it. They share in the reading
process. They engage with character and plot development. They have that shared sense
of a journey. And I think that's really, really important because they don't get
that anywhere else, I don't think, in school. For me, when they have asked those
questions, they've had that excitement or that sadness or that moment of emotion
within the classroom and they leave the classroom talking about the text that they
are reading, that's a wonderful, wonderful moment. I was lucky enough to be part of
the original study nine years ago and since then I've taken that approach to all of
the schools that I've worked in. I find that it really chimes with what English
teachers naturally want to do. We want to read texts and we want to read them as
full texts as well. What I found is that students have really captured that
excitement in their own reading. They've gone off to find those authors or find
those themes in other books so it's inspired students to get excited about reading
and for me that's really precious. We've been doing the faster read here now for
nine years because this school was originally part of the original study and since
then we've, because it was so transformative for our teaching and for engagement of
students, we've actually designed our whole key statutory curriculum around the faster
read. So at the beginning of year seven, eight and nine we have two novels per
year group because engagement was the biggest thing that we noticed straight away and
we had lots of reluctant readers, lots of readers who don't see themselves as a
reader actually or have very negative views about reading and they went from from
hating reading to running into the classroom saying are we reading today are we
reading today and being really excited about reading and talking about reading outside
of lessons so that's really amazing and that was very immediate but then the other
benefits are the group reading in our student voice they've all said that's their
favourite thing about the faster read. It's helped them become more fluent readers,
and it's helped them become much more confident at reading out loud in front of
their peers. So that's been a really important part of it. And then the last thing,
I think, which we noticed a bit, took a bit longer for us to notice this, but the
analytical writing at the end of the unit was really strong because,
although they'd spent most of the lessons and then, dialogically discussing things.
That meant that they were actually really immersed in the text, rather than stopping
to write little paragraphs all the time and being out of the text. They were
immersed in it. They'd comprehended the text really well and they enjoyed it.
So they were able to actually write about it on a deeper analytical level. And
especially because it gives them a sense of the whole text quickly, they're actually
really more confident at writing about structure which typically our students are
weaker at. The reading ages have gone up as well, it's been good for all readers,
not just weak readers. The group reading, building resilience and confidence and made
them better analytical writers and obviously they love reading which is the biggest
thing out of it. Many primary, secondary and alternative provision schools across the
UK are using this approach for Key Stage 2, 3, GCSE and even A -Level. Some schools
are reading as many as four to six texts in every year at Key Stage 3, which is
18 books by the end of Year 9 and they say that their students are bucking the
national trend and opting to take A -Level English Literature because they love
reading. So try it out and let us know how you get on.