Jocelyn Seamer EducationS7 E2 - The Top 5 Ways to Ensure Reading Success in Years 3 to 6
Hello, hello, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania on the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn and I'm so pleased you've joined me today. As we head into the new school year, many 3-6 teachers are making plans for their literacy blocks for instruction and the year to come. So today I'm sharing the top five ways to maximise reading success in the upper primary years. Now these are evidence-informed practices that can genuinely transform reading outcomes for students when we are targeted, intentional, and robust in what we do. So let's dive in.
Number One: A Language-Rich Classroom
Number one on this list is make sure you have a language-rich classroom. Now we will probably have heard that all literacy floats on a sea of talk, and that is 100% right. Literacy is so dependent on the ability to listen and understand and to speak and make meaning that we have to keep it top of mind as we plan. So explicit vocabulary instruction is essential. But here's the thing: there comes a point where students will learn more vocabulary from engagement with a variety of text than they do in explicit vocabulary lessons. We simply can't teach all the words, no matter how well planned we might be. We may be able to explicitly introduce a high number of vocabulary words, but we can't provide all of the opportunity for contextualised repeated practice.
Number one on this list is make sure you have a language-rich classroom. Now we will probably have heard that all literacy floats on a sea of talk, and that is 100% right. Literacy is so dependent on the ability to listen and understand and to speak and make meaning that we have to keep it top of mind as we plan. So explicit vocabulary instruction is essential. But here's the thing: there comes a point where students will learn more vocabulary from engagement with a variety of text than they do in explicit vocabulary lessons. We simply can't teach all the words, no matter how well planned we might be. We may be able to explicitly introduce a high number of vocabulary words, but we can't provide all of the opportunity for contextualised repeated practice.
And this is where creating a genuinely language-rich environment becomes critical. When you speak to students, don't dumb down your speech. Use the big words, use interesting words, and when you do, explain what they mean. Create a classroom culture where students feel comfortable asking questions when they don't understand something. Every conversation you have with your students is an opportunity for vocabulary development.
So when you're explaining a maths concept, when you're giving instructions, when you're discussing what happened at lunch, all of these moments matter and they are where you can draw the connections. So you may have read an interesting word in a text with the students. Then when there's an opportunity at some other point in the week or in the day, make a meaningful connection. Take that teachable moment to show that word in context in different ways. Simply explaining or giving people sentences that show the word in a variety of contexts and moving on is not the same as using the words meaningfully in everyday conversation. So if you've been holding back on using tier two vocabulary in your conversation with students, just let that go. Stop holding back. You aren't going to break them, but do encourage them to ask when they don't know what a word means. This is almost the practice version of comprehension monitoring. Have them notice when something didn't make sense to them so that they can do something about it.
Another way for us to help lift the oral language of our students is to provide the opportunity to enjoy texts. Yes, there could be a class novel we read aloud, but don't disregard the humble picture book. A 2015 study by Montag and colleagues found that picture books contain more unique words than are present in a child's natural speech, and I don't think that there's anything surprising about that. This isn't just for the early years, it also extends to upper primary.
So our oral language goals should be about stretching students, giving them models of sophisticated vocabulary in context, both in reading for curriculum purposes, for reading for enjoyment, and in our conversation. We are hardwired to learn language from each other, but just being exposed doesn't do it, we need some sort of thinking and engagement. But you don't have to go off on a 20-minute tangent about a word that you encounter. So, yes, plan your explicit vocabulary instruction, but also pay attention to other language opportunities throughout the day, week, and term.
Number Two: Foundational Skills
The second point in this episode is to make sure that students have foundational skills. If students don't know phonics and understand how morphemes work, they aren't going to be able to lift the words off the page. No amount of repeated reading, no adjustment to provide just right text, no comprehension strategy instruction, no any other technique will help students become strategic readers if they can't decode the words in the first place.
The second point in this episode is to make sure that students have foundational skills. If students don't know phonics and understand how morphemes work, they aren't going to be able to lift the words off the page. No amount of repeated reading, no adjustment to provide just right text, no comprehension strategy instruction, no any other technique will help students become strategic readers if they can't decode the words in the first place.
Now, in working with many schools in this space, there's one pretty consistent teacher mistake, and that is overestimating their students' foundational skills and knowledge. Teachers are much more likely to declare or believe that students have phonics knowledge than they are to recognise they don't have it. Now, it probably depends on the sort of school you're with and the cohort of students you work with, but we don't have to rely on our observations and our impressions. We can actually do a spelling test.
So go to jocelynseamereducation.com, go to Free Resources. There you will be able to download a Phonics and Orthographic Conventions test and a test for Early Morphology as in suffixing conventions. These are whole class spelling tests. There are spreadsheets there so that you can see precisely where your students are sitting. All of the knowledge that's contained in those tests that we're testing for, all of it should have been developed in the early years, and maybe year 3 at the latest. So if your students are not in the dark green, if they are not achieving a really high score, then you have work to do.
When students are using all their cognitive energy trying to figure out individual words, they have nothing left over for comprehension. And sometimes what looks like a comprehension challenge is actually a decoding issue. So students read and they're not able to answer any questions or talk about the text, not because they have a difficulty with comprehension in general, but because all their energy is still going into lifting words from the page. The good news here is that it's never too late to build these foundational skills.
So for some of your year 3-6 students, they're going to need highly intensive, systematic, very targeted, regular phonics instruction because it's almost like they're learning it for the first time. A little bit here and a little bit there doesn't get it done. But for most students in year 3-6, even those who appear to be strong, phonics instruction raises their consciousness. But we don't want to get bogged down in it forever and a day. Include it to do some boot camp to raise your students' consciousness. So when you say, "how many ways do you know how to write A," they can give you four or five. Once you hit that point, you're good. Stop teaching it, just keep it in the daily review, don't go there anymore.
Phonics is something we do because we have to in the 3-6, not because we want to. But we need to meet our students where they're up to.
Morphology is the other part of this picture, and it's particularly important in the upper primary years. English is morphophonemic, and students need to understand how prefixes, suffixes, and bases work. They particularly need to understand the three suffixing conventions that we see in English, which is the doubling rule, the Y to I, and the drop the E rule. And again, teachers are much more likely to overestimate their students' knowledge than they are to underestimate it, which is where that assessment comes in.
So robust morphology instruction in itself is the meat and potatoes for the upper primary and early secondary space. But again, if our students need this sort of morphology boot camp, then they should get it.
We have heading to the printer right now, here in the start of February 2026, Spelling Success 1, which is a rewrite of our original book, which is Morphology and Phonics and Orthographic Essentials, written specifically for students in year 3 to year 8. This is not repurposing early years pedagogy. This is an explicit program purpose-built for you to be targeted to use data to make clear decisions so we're not wasting time teaching things we don't need to be able to. 15 to 20 minutes a day, four days a week, with assessment built in, with all of it there, that is on the way to the printer right now. And if you are interested in finding out more, you can email us at help@jocelynseamereducation.com or go to our website where you'll be able to pre-order a copy.
This is so important. We don't make things for the sake of creating more resources. We create resources and programs to support teachers to be able to provide the sort of instruction that they know their students need without being overwhelmed themselves. And it's so critical, I can't say it enough, that we address phonics and morphology gaps for all of our students where they exist, which is most of them have some gaps because they've been running on instinct, they're not conscious of what's happening on the page. And without these foundational skills, everything else we try and do is on shaky ground.
This is so important. We don't make things for the sake of creating more resources. We create resources and programs to support teachers to be able to provide the sort of instruction that they know their students need without being overwhelmed themselves. And it's so critical, I can't say it enough, that we address phonics and morphology gaps for all of our students where they exist, which is most of them have some gaps because they've been running on instinct, they're not conscious of what's happening on the page. And without these foundational skills, everything else we try and do is on shaky ground.
So your students may look ok with a standard year 3 pretty simple text, but when we start removing the pictures, when the text becomes more complex, when the syntax becomes more complex, the wheels fall off because the students can't just predict what's going to happen or the words they need to read are now much longer, they're multi-morphemic and there is an expectation that they can read them. So I know that I'm going on about it, I can feel it, but having those foundational skills is so critical. Moving on.
Number Three: Provide Reading Practice Per Their Needs
The point that I'd like to make in position number three here is to provide reading practice that corresponds to students' needs. Partner reading is an incredibly effective opportunity to differentiate and meet everyone where they're up to. And if you have in your class a group of students who are really struggling and a group of students who are not, then I highly recommend our series, our Research to the Classroom series on Dyad Reading, D Y A D. Search that in your podcast app or on our website, and there's a three-part series that will come up.
The point that I'd like to make in position number three here is to provide reading practice that corresponds to students' needs. Partner reading is an incredibly effective opportunity to differentiate and meet everyone where they're up to. And if you have in your class a group of students who are really struggling and a group of students who are not, then I highly recommend our series, our Research to the Classroom series on Dyad Reading, D Y A D. Search that in your podcast app or on our website, and there's a three-part series that will come up.
When we think about the range of our typical year 3-6 classroom, we're going to have students at different points in their reading journey. So we'll have some students who are building accuracy with multimorphemic and multi-syllabic words. We'll have some students who are accurate but working on rate and prosody. We'll have other students who are ready for more challenging texts and some who are still reading decodables, age-appropriate ones, of course, but they still need decodables because that's where they are, they're four years behind their peers. Partner reading allows you to meet all of these needs all at once. It's one of the easiest times in the literacy block to meet every student where they're up to. So the student who needs decodables, they can have them. This isn't going backwards. It's providing what they need. Now, in the particularly 5, 6, 7, 8 classroom, this is going to be a very small number of students and probably, hopefully, in the 3-4 space as well.
But those students who need that practice, they need it. For those working on fluency, repeated reading with appropriate text, which are just slightly harder than they can manage for themselves, is valuable. But remember, first comes accuracy, then comes speed. Repeated reading is most beneficial for fluency when we're already accurate and then we're practicing on becoming more automatic. And for those stronger readers, they can be challenged with texts that really do stretch them by stretching their vocabulary, their background knowledge, and the syntactic or the sentence level complexity. They don't need repeated reading so much. What they do need is more engagement with a wider variety of texts. The beauty of this part of your literacy block is that differentiation doesn't look like three separate lessons. Everybody is reading with a partner, but the different partners are reading different texts. No group rotations are required.
Number Four: Choose Texts Wisely
Top tip number four is choose your rich texts wisely. Short stories can be an incredibly effective vehicle for instruction when they are in fact great texts. And I think it's better to have a high-quality, engaging short story than a blah novel that doesn't have a lot of tier 2 vocabulary or a lot of thematic complexity. A beautifully crafted short story gives you everything you need: complex characters, sophisticated vocabulary, interesting text structures without the time, commitment and potential for student fatigue that can come with novel study. If you're interested in thinking more about the place of novels in the classroom, have a listen to Season 6, Episode 15, because there isn't research that has declared novel study the winner in robust instruction.
Top tip number four is choose your rich texts wisely. Short stories can be an incredibly effective vehicle for instruction when they are in fact great texts. And I think it's better to have a high-quality, engaging short story than a blah novel that doesn't have a lot of tier 2 vocabulary or a lot of thematic complexity. A beautifully crafted short story gives you everything you need: complex characters, sophisticated vocabulary, interesting text structures without the time, commitment and potential for student fatigue that can come with novel study. If you're interested in thinking more about the place of novels in the classroom, have a listen to Season 6, Episode 15, because there isn't research that has declared novel study the winner in robust instruction.
We know that the quality of instruction matters far more than the length of text. So when selecting rich text, think about:
- Will this genuinely interest your students?
- Does it allow you to teach the concepts you need, such as character analysis, text structure, figurative language?
- Do students have the background knowledge to access it?
- And can you maintain instructional momentum?
- Do your students have the thinking and instructional stamina to be able to handle a longer text?
- Or is this shorter text going to meet them where they're at?
A well-chosen short story can give you all the richness you need for deep instruction while keeping students engaged. Your students will encounter plenty of novels in their independent reading in your classroom in a variety of ways. Our job in instructional time is to teach them how to think deeply about text. The length matters less than the quality of our teaching and the quality of the text itself.
Number Five: Use a Range Across the Curriculum
Finally, we have our top tip, the last one for this episode, which is use a range of texts right across the curriculum. The literacy block shouldn't do all the heavy lifting for engagement with reading. We often act as if reading instruction only happens in English time, but think about how much curriculum content could be delivered through text. Think about how many opportunities there are for your students to have eyes on the page, with you providing whatever support is needed for them to engage with that text. So instead of just showing a YouTube clip in your science lesson, read a text about the content you're teaching. Give each student a page of text and have them mark it up, highlight, question, and engage with it, as well as reading it all together. Not the whole thing read chorally, that gets a little bit much, but having shared reading of the text, then giving the students opportunity to think while they engage with it, this is reading to learn in action.
When we integrate reading across the curriculum, several things happen. Students get more reading practice and build stamina with information text. They develop background knowledge, which works hand in hand with vocabulary to help them to comprehend and infer in other texts they're reading. And we make efficient use of teaching time, simultaneously building content knowledge and reading stamina and skills.
So as I said, in science, have students read and annotate an article about the water cycle instead of just watching a video. And the video may be really useful, but it doesn't have to stop there. In history, provide first hand accounts for students to analyse. In geography, use informational text. The key is to scaffold appropriately, model how to engage with that text, teach students to use text features like headings and diagrams. All of this is in the curriculum for us to include in our instruction, and show them how to monitor their comprehension.
We know that students who read more become better readers, and that has been called the Matthew Effect. So the more students read, the better readers they become. Except for students who struggle, they don't read as much because it's really hard. So if we provide those scaffolded opportunities, we can go some way to mitigating the dangers of the Matthew Effect. We want our students to read to learn as well as learn to read. We have to give them the opportunity to develop the skills and stamina to do so.
Conclusion
So let's wrap it up. Here were the top five ways to maximise reading success for year 3-6 students. Create a language-rich classroom with sophisticated vocabulary exposure and engagement. Ensure students have the foundational phonics and morphology skills to lift words from the page. Provide differentiated reading practice through partner reading and choose quality text wisely. Prioritise engagement and instructional value over length for the sake of length. Number five, use text across the curriculum so reading instruction isn't confined and reading practice isn't confined to the literacy block.
So let's wrap it up. Here were the top five ways to maximise reading success for year 3-6 students. Create a language-rich classroom with sophisticated vocabulary exposure and engagement. Ensure students have the foundational phonics and morphology skills to lift words from the page. Provide differentiated reading practice through partner reading and choose quality text wisely. Prioritise engagement and instructional value over length for the sake of length. Number five, use text across the curriculum so reading instruction isn't confined and reading practice isn't confined to the literacy block.
Now, none of what I've said in this episode is revolutionary, but it's a good time of year, right here at the start of the school year in Australia and New Zealand, to look at our instructional practices and just check in on how much we are doing these things and how effective we're being. By implementing consistently and thoughtfully, we can use these practices to make an enormous difference to our students.
And remember, don't try and do everything at once. Just choose one new area and one area to strengthen. Because if you overload yourself, if you stress yourself out, if you are working every hour that's available to you, you will not have anything left in the tank to respond to the students as you want to.
That's it from me for this week. Until next time, everyone, happy teaching. Bye.
References:
Montag, Jessica & Jones, Michael. (2015). The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning. Psychological Science. 26. 10.1177/0956797615594361.
Show Notes:
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