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When teachers provide frequent questioning and affirmative feedback, this encourages students to engage actively in a learning experience while maximising the time spent attending to the work at hand (Rupley et al., 2009). Teaching in this way positions students to be involved in the learning experience and accountable for their actions. They are less able to coast since they may be called upon at any time to contribute to the discussion (Mesmer & Griffith, 2005). Through constant teacher-student interactions, the teacher is able to track student engagement and understanding (Heward & Wood, 2013). If students appear disengaged or confused, the teacher can adjust their instruction, reteaching or remodelling the target skill or strategy, and assisting students to apply the new learning meaningfully.

Providing opportunities for independent practice

Clear teacher modelling, think-alouds, scaffolding, questioning, and affirmative feedback are important practices that help students understand the cognitive, social, and physical processes involved in literate practices like speaking, listening, reading, writing, viewing, and creating. Students are unlikely to develop deep understandings, however, without opportunities to practise the skill or strategy on their own (Archer & Hughes, 2011). Including independent tasks after carefully structured explicit teaching enables students to retain and generalise new or existing skills and knowledge (Hattie et al., 1997). Such tasks are more successful when they follow teaching with sufficient guidance by the teacher, since students are less likely to practise errors or misconceptions (Rosenshine, 2001). In primary English teaching, it is crucial that students can apply their learning about language, literacy, or literature concepts without direct assistance from the teacher.

Summary

Explicit instruction ‘does not leave anything to chance and does not make assumptions about skills and knowledge that children will acquire on their own’ (Torgesen, 2004, p. 363). In this way, teaching explicitly has been described as the ethical approach for teachers since it is often not possible to know which students will or will not struggle to develop crucial literacy skills without a high degree of teacher guidance and support (Buckingham & Castles, 2019). Does this mean everything in English education should be taught explicitly? As a number of experts have argued, not everything will need to be taught in this highly structured manner (Purcell-Gates et al., 2007; Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986). But explicit instruction using frameworks like those outlined in the reading and writing overview chapters of this text (Chapters 2 and 10) will enable effective student learning on the many occasions when teachers wish to teach students new English skills, strategies, and understandings.