2025 Teaching as Inquiry - Developing Comprehension skills in New Entrant readers.

This year I have decided to undertake an inquiry with a Literacy focus as my akonga have a need to build literacy skills to allow them to be successful in both reading and writing.

By reflecting on the results of my 2024 students and comparing the entry assessments of my 2025 cohort I could see some parallels. Namely students who last year struggled to answer comprehension questions had low literacy capital, difficulties with expressive language, limited vocabulary and English was not their home language. This allowed me to identify four target students with the similar intersectionalities. These students are often reluctant to answer questions in group lessons, or may only answer with one or two words. Whilst they may be having some success with decoding using the BSLA pedagogy they are not attending to the meaning of the story or making inferences about the text.  This is compounded by the fact that in BSLA lessons the text is read over one week, ie only 2 pages per reading lesson are read on any given day and so the narrative is somewhat disjointed.

My target students are three females, and one male.  Two are categorised as ESOL students, two have passive communication styles and do not volunteer their opinions.  Two have low literacy capital displaying few concepts of print and a lack of familiarity with text forms.  

I have obtained baseline data for this group from the BSLA Oral narrative assessment and am also collecting observational data from small group reading lessons.  

So this has lead me to developing this Inquiry Question:

What strategies can I use to assist my students to successfully answer comprehension and inferential questions about their BSLA text?