Reading as a hermeneutical endeavour: whole class approaches to teaching narrative with low-attaining adolescent readers

Teachers of reading in secondary schools know how important it is for low-attaining readers to read whole narratives but time to do this in a crowded curriculum is limited and progress is more easily measured through reading smaller parts of texts. This paper reports on a longitudinal critical action research project in which three English teachers in two different urban secondary schools in the south of England read whole complex narratives with their classes of average and low-attaining Year 8 students (12- to 13-year-olds) with their practice newly theorised by hermeneutics and intertextuality. These theoretical approaches encouraged the teachers to situate the texts in relation to other related texts that supported students in making inferential links. Moreover, teacher pedagogic discourse became newly focused on text structure and coherence as the whole class read the text together and rapidly to the end with pleasure and understanding. The long-term impact of the action research suggests that such a theorised approach can influence teachers’ practice at a deep and sustainable level and in one school led to the introduction of a daily reading lesson where students read whole narratives they selected themselves, raising their reading ages and creating a reading culture.