In 2025, 75% of pupils in Year 6 met the expected standard for reading. A small improvement since 2024, and up from 73% in 2019, this is still a concern. 25% of pupils did not meet the expected standard for reading and those pupils will struggle to access the secondary curriculum, embedding educational disadvantage.
Secondary schools recognise the value of reading and their role in building on the expert work of primary colleagues and continuing to support students who are not yet confident readers. But for teachers in the classroom, the barriers pupils face to reading are not easy to overcome. It may feel tempting – and easier – to avoid teaching with text. As Alex Quigley (2020) notes,
In secondary school, driven by expediency, teachers …distil complex texts on to the narrow, limited boundaries of the PowerPoint slide. …Though PowerPoint presentations may offer useable tools for teaching, if they serve as a primary method to reduce the complexity of what our pupils read, then it will inhibit our pupils undertaking the necessary practice of reading extended, complex texts.
The last post in this series discussed the evidence for the cognitive impact of hearing text read aloud. Today’s post explores the evidence for the impact that reading aloud can have on pupils’ ability to read and on their knowledge of vocabulary. It makes the case for reading aloud as a powerful form of intervention to support struggling readers and remove the barriers they face to accessing text and the curriculum.
Why pace matters: the Faster Reading study
One of the more striking pieces of evidence on reading aloud comes from a study carried out by 20 teachers in schools in Sussex, working with Year 8 students. Teachers read fiction texts aloud at a fast pace, without stopping frequently to discuss or field questions, while students followed the text. The results were remarkable. Comprehension and fluency improved significantly, and especially for weaker readers, suggesting that sustained exposure to the relationship between sound and text, at pace, has an effect that slower, discussion-heavy approaches sometimes do not. These findings have been replicated in other schools following similar methods, for example at Scalby School with Year 7 students.
That finding is worth sitting with. It cuts against some common instincts: the impulse to pause, check understanding, and handle difficulty as it arises. The evidence suggests that reading on is often the more powerful choice.
The vocabulary problem
Isabel Beck’s work on vocabulary instruction helps to explain why this might be the case. Vocabulary is closely linked to reading ability: students need it to make sense of text. But Beck (2013) points out something important about what happens as students get older. By secondary school, most students already know the common words used in everyday speech. The problem is that they rarely encounter new words in spoken language after that point. New vocabulary is almost exclusively encountered in written texts, and learning vocabulary from written texts is genuinely difficult.
In a related but distinct argument about classroom practice, Doug Lemov (2017) explains how reading text aloud addresses this challenge directly. Hearing a word spoken aloud, in context, with appropriate emphasis and intonation, makes a significant difference to whether students are able to remember and use that word themselves. Unfamiliar and sophisticated vocabulary becomes meaningful when the surrounding sentence is read with expression. That probably helps to explain why the Faster Reading study produced the results it did.
Taken together, Beck and Lemov point to the same conclusion from different directions: students need to hear rich, complex language spoken aloud, in context, and at pace. That is not incidental to reading aloud. It is the mechanism through which much of the benefit is delivered. Reading aloud thus emerges as a key means of facilitating access to the secondary curriculum for weaker readers, and an effective means of intervention to improve their literacy – one, moreover, that can be delivered within the wider curriculum rather than alongside it.
While the evidence is striking, reading aloud in a secondary classroom presents practical challenges and takes teachers out of their comfort zone. So next week, we will turn to the practical question: what does this actually look like in the classroom, and what should teachers do, and avoid, when reading aloud with their classes?
References:
Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G. and Kucan, L. (2013) Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Huntington Research School ‘Case study: The Faster Read programme at Scalby School’. Available at: https://researchschool.org.uk/huntington/news/case-study-the-faster-read-programme-at-scalby-school (Accessed: 23 June 2026).
Lemov, D. (2017) ‘Why reading aloud to students is so critical to vocabulary’. Teach Like a Champion. Available at: https://teachlikeachampion.org/blog/reading-aloud-students-critical-vocabulary/ (Accessed: 23 June 2026).
Murphy, J. and Murphy, D. (2018) Thinking Reading: What Every Secondary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational.
Quigley, A. (2020) Closing the Reading Gap. Abingdon: Routledge.
Westbrook, J., Sutherland, J., Oakhill, J. and Sullivan, S. (2017) ‘“Just reading”: the impact of a faster pace of reading narratives on the comprehension of poorer adolescent readers in English classrooms’, Literacy, 53(2), pp. 60-68.
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