Theory & Resources

Welcome to SharpReading Stage 4 ONLiNE Course
(Updated March 2024) 

DOWNLOAD YOUR COURSE BOOK
CLICK HERE
to download your Stage 4 Course Book (March 2024).
This includes all the teaching templates (Teacher Scripts, cover cards, Planning and Assessment) and texts for practice.

 

SETTING THE SCENE

When are students ready for Stage 4?
Before making a start on Stage 4, it is important that your students have developed a reasonable fluency with Stage 3 “I think that means…” (the ‘In-the-Moment’ skill of Unpacking Sentences) at a level of text difficulty that is appropriate to them.

I you are using SharpReading School-wide our Scope and Sequence suggests that Stage 4 can be introduced at Year 4 with students who have  developed reasonable ITTM fluency with text at a RA 8-10 yr level.

Here are the fluency indicators you should be looking for

  • They are quick and convincing with their ITTM statements
  • They unpack all the pieces of information
  • They stay with the sentence
  • They identify the ‘who’ in the sentence
  • They use gestures as shortcuts
  • They acknowledge their own possible roadblocks during ITTM
  • They have freed themselves from synonym substitution and word-by-word unpacking and are showing some ability to ‘tell the story’ in their ITTM statements.
  • They can use the four sources of information and attempt to clear roadblocks during ITTM
    – What clues are there in the sentence?
    – What clues are there in the word? 
    – What sort of word is it?
    – Where have I heard that word before?

That means that they can regularly generate a 3 but not necessarily every time, and it doesn’t have to be at the very top end of text complexity (RA 14+ yrs).

Stage 4 Theory
In Stage 3 we made a point of identifying how we could strengthen the intuitive language comprehension skills that students bring with them to the reading situation.

Our contention is that oral language comprehension has been developing since birth and students will have achieved different levels of mastery. Now that they have learnt to lift the words off the page (decode fluently – SharpReading Stages 1&2) they are now able to apply these language skills to written text.

Unpacking Sentences in Stage 3 was the vehicle we used to integrate those skills. 

The idea of comprehension strategies is more recent, and it has a substantial body of research behind it.  Strategies, defined in the literature as the intentional actions students can use during and after reading to guide their thinking, provide a metacognitive set of actions that are different from the automatic language comprehension skill set we have been working with in Stage 3.

As we have said already, there are many many of these strategies that have been uncovered by research and deemed to be beneficial in the act of comprehension.  

Our approach is very different from most strategy instruction which tends to revolve around a release of responsibility model. Random strategy instruction involves lots of teacher modelling and cueing and prompting students to use an increasing number of strategies that have been added to their toolbox.

Unfortunately, this can have some unwanted spinoffs.

  1. Lots of Teacher Talk
    A comment from a teacher undertaking a Comprehension Strategy program – “All we seem to do is sit around talking about the strategies we COULD be using.”
  2. A Piecemeal approach – a bit of this and a bit of that
  3. Difficult to come up with a routine that allows for the integration and the systematic practice of all of these strategies.

To make this manageable, we have selected four that we (and the research) suggest are the most useful at a sentence level, and bolted them on to our 5 Steps routine.

Once the strategy has been introduced, understood and practiced, the reader is forced to drill the skill as we try to develop a mental habit. Initially, we remove the choice and force the use of one particular strategy in every sentence. Some sentences of course may not provide great opportunities for that strategy, but we have a go anyway.

Once our learners have developed some fluency with each of the Deep 4 we introduce fluency practice where the student can choose to use what they consider to be the most appropriate of the four to assist with deep unpacking of the sentence. 

Other big-picture or text-level strategies that encourage critical thinking are introduced in Stages 5 and 6.

NEXT:  UNIT 2 “I have a picture…” (Creating Mental Images, the first of the Deep 4).