What are the High Reliability Literacy Teaching Procedures?

HRLTP is not a program that comes with resources and a sequence of lessons.

HRLTP are a set of explicit teaching procedures that can be used by teachers in any curriculum area designed to develop the strategies that strong readers use and to aid comprehension of text.

Each procedure is intended to cue and to foster the use of a matching literacy strategy by students. Students are instructed explicitly to:

  • Get their knowledge ready for learning about a topic
    • by organising and recoding what they know to a verbal form.
  • Add unfamiliar verbal concepts to their vocabulary
    • by studying new vocabulary that relates to the content to be covered in the lesson. During the lesson the students say accurately each word or phrase, read and spell it, suggest synonyms and antonyms for each, clarify its meaning and link it with other concepts.
  • Read aloud short portions of written text related the focus of the lesson
  • Paraphrase or say in their own words selected sentences from the text.
  • Create questions that answer selected sentences in the text.
  • Summarise the text, usually paragraph by paragraph.
  • Review, consolidate and show comprehension of what has been learnt.

These teaching procedures work by suggesting how students can ‘act on’ what they are reading in a number of systematic ways. They can remind the readers to work on making sense of a ‘digestible’ amount of text at a time. They can suggest actions that students can take to do this, very gradually. They can suggest that readers make lower level links between the ideas initially and then more complex links. They can also remind the readers of what to do to store what they have just read and understood in long term memory. In this way the new knowledge will be available for later use and for further learning.

The Key Principles outlining Gillen Primary School’s adoption and implementation of HRLTP:

  • All teachers are teachers of literacy
  • All teachers need to incorporate opportunities for teaching, reading, writing and oral language in every subject.
  • Students learn literacy strategies more effectively and purposely when those strategies are taught within the context of specific subject and academic learning tasks.
  • By purposefully engaging in these procedures, students will acquire the domain knowledge required to further boost their reading comprehension.
  • Reading comprehension is not a set of skills that exist in a context vacuum. Reading comprehension relies heavily on the domain knowledge students bring to the text. The domain knowledge they bring to the text will determine how well they can infer, summarise, reflect, critically analyse, compare, contrast etc.
  • Building the domain knowledge of students sits in the foreground of HRLTP. The procedures sit in the background and are there to support knowledge building.