Supporting pupils with Reading

We can break down the different areas of knowledge in top-down and bottom-up processing
when dealing with reading languages into a specific set of knowledge areas. We can then
come up with ideas for how to support our pupils in each area. Please add any more ideas
that you have to the table below.

Knowledge area Example of teaching and learning strategy

Knowledge about the Pre-teach difficult or new vocabulary and leave it written on
combination of letters the board for pupils to refer to.

Knowledge about Use substitution tables, gap-fills and ‘complete the sentence’
sentence structure tasks to help pupils’ understanding of sentence structure.

Knowledge about Pre-teach language chunks (e.g. collocation and certain

word combinations grammatical structures).

Expose pupils to suitable examples of a range of text types.

Knowledge about text
structure Use activities to teach the structure, features and language
associated with specific text types.

Use a short warm-up task linked to the topic of the text to

focus pupils on the general area that they are going to read
about.
Knowledge about the
world or topic
Allow pupils to share what they already know about the topic
in pairs or groups.