From observations to teaching action: Five ways of examining and developing reading teaching practices

Abstract

The results of the ‘Gary’ research (Dufays, Brunel, Capt & Fontanieu, 2020; Brunel, Dufays, Emery-Bruneau & Florey, 2024) shed new light on the current state of the skills of 1,787 pupils and the practices of their 69 teachers, as well as on the relationships between these two groups at three levels of schooling (9, 12 and 15 years) in four French-speaking countries or regions (Belgium, France, Quebec and Switzerland). Although the research was primarily intended to be descriptive and comprehensive, it also enabled researchers to take an evaluative and qualitative look at the impact of certain trend choices made by teachers that were highlighted. In this instance, we will present five changes that we feel should be proposed to teachers and their trainers in relation to the five ‘focal points’ we used to analyse their practices. These developments concern reading operations and methods, cross-curricular patterns or forms of school work, fundamental didactic gestures, genres of school activity and aspects of the text being taught.