13th November 2024

IREd is pleased to announce that IREd member, Dr Audrey Wood, has been awarded £5,000 as part of the University of Bedfordshire’s Research England Participatory Funding for the project ‘Embedding Oral Reading Fluency in KS3’ to be undertaken by Dr Audrey Wood and colleagues from the Secondary PGCE team at the school of Initial Teacher Education from October 2024 to June 2025. Read more about the project below.

This will be a pilot project with a focus on Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) that combines the code-based and language comprehension strands of Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001). ORF helps reduce the cognitive load associated with reading development and is essential for the acquisition of skilled reading comprehension (Mehigan, 2013). Rasinski (2022) has emphasised the importance of developing reading fluency as a critical skill that acts as a bridge between decoding and comprehension. A fluent reader can accurately and automatically decode words, allowing them to focus their cognitive resources on understanding the text's meaning.

Beyond automatic word recognition, fluency also encompasses prosody, which refers to expressive oral and silent reading. Fluent readers not only decode words automatically but also read with expression and phrasing that reflects and enhances the meaning of the text. This expressive reading requires the reader to engage with the text's meaning. Readers with strong automaticity and prosody tend to be the most proficient, while those with weaker skills in these areas often struggle with comprehension. Difficulties with reading fluency can persist into secondary school and hinder students' reading proficiency across all subjects.

This funded research study will be a collaboration between the secondary PGCE team at the Bedford Campus and a secondary school in the Faculty’s Schools’ Partnership. School colleagues will implement key strategies from the project and adapt their planning and practice to give Year 7 pupils multiple regular opportunities weekly to read aloud texts that are relevant for their own subject areas for 10 to 15 minutes. Tutors and school colleagues will work collaboratively to capture data to track quantified gains in pupils’ reading fluency and comprehension, and qualitative data will investigate stake holders’ perceptions of project outcomes and implications.

The aim of the research project is to embed oral reading practice in Key Stage 3 (year 7) across a range of subject areas within a local secondary school as a means of improving reading fluency and comprehension, leading to greater pupil engagement with and enjoyment of reading. Ultimately, this will result in improved educational outcomes across subjects.

9th October 2024

IREd is pleased to announce that IREd member, Dr Kay Calver, has been awarded £7,285 as part of the University of Bedfordshire’s Research England Participatory Funding for the project ‘Students as co-producers: constructing the university student in British television dramas’ to be undertaken by Dr Kay Calver and Dr Bethan Michael-Fox (Open University) from October 2024 to June 2025. Read more about the project below.

Williams (2010, p.170) has emphasised that media representations of students should be analysed because they ‘reflect back to society some of the dominant ways in which what it means to be a student is understood’. In response to this, we created the ‘Students on Screen’ project which examines how screen representations of university students produce, frame, inform and contribute to complex understandings about what it might mean to be a university student. Initiated in 2019, the project has resulted in a range of peer reviewed publications (see Calver and Michael-Fox, 2021a; 2021b; Michael-Fox and Calver, 2023), two invited research seminars at the Open University and University of Winchester and we are currently co-editing a journal special issue due for publication in late 2024. Building on the success of the Students on Screen project, we have secured funding from Research England to cover the costs of participatory, co-produced research with university students. A limitation of previous research focused on media representations of students is that little of this work involves students in co-analysing their positioning as university students. This funded research study seeks to address this limitation by following Dargahi, Horne and Smith's (2024) approach of working with students to collaboratively co-produce knowledge, supporting students to develop skills in critical media analysis and to share their own knowledge and experiences. Students will be appointed as research assistants and will be involved in selecting and analysing the television dramas and co-producing the research outputs.

The aims and objectives of the research study are:

1. To identify and analyse dominant constructions of university students in British television dramas;
2. To utilise existing research to relate these constructions to current political, cultural, and social factors.

10th November 2023

Please see Patrick Creamer’s (12 October) Knowledge and English review in Changing English of Dr Oli Belas’s book: ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into Subject English and Creative Writing’, London: Routledge, 2023.