To what extent do secondary PGCE PE students develop young people’s literacy skills through PE?

Abstract

This study aims to research, to what extent do secondary PGCE PE students develop young people’s literacy skills through PE? The standards of literacy and numeracy was classed as poor by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate for Education and Training in Wales (Estyn) (2012). This lead to the Welsh Government (2013) creating the Literacy and Numeracy Framework (LNF) in order to increased literacy and numeracy development throughout Wales. Teachers are expected to apply the LNF across the curriculum. There is a lack of research about Physical Education and how it can develop literacy skills in young people. Furthermore, there is a restricted amount of knowledge related to the perceptions of secondary Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) PE students regarding literacy development through PE. Furthermore, four key areas have been selected to focus on during the review of literature: Literacy development, the LNF, teaching styles and High Quality Physical Education (HQPE). This study adopted semi- structured interviews with four secondary PGCE PE students selected at random. Four key themes emerged from the data analysis: applying the LNF in PE lessons, developing literacy skills in PE, teaching styles in PE and aspects that effect HQPE. The findings summarised the participant’s perceptions of how each theme influences the literacy development within their PE lessons. In addition, each theme was found to have an influence on the literacy development of young people. Limitations of the study were the size of the sample group. In order to increase the validity of the findings, it would be advisable to increase the sample size to more than four participants. Secondly, three participants were female and one was male. In future studies the findings may have been more balanced if there was an equal amount of male and female participants. Furthermore, this could highlight whether the perceptions of male and female secondary PGCE PE students differ to each other. Future research would be to assess the validity of the Programme for International Assessments (PISA) methodology in order to decrease concern regarding the validity of the PISA tests and in turn, increase the relevance of applying the LNF over schools in Wales.