The work presented here is part of a research project that studies the classroom practices of teachers in Primary Education. The paper studies the tasks involved in these classroom practices when teaching different learning subjects. One of the curricular aspects studied involves literacy; that is, an analysis is made of those teaching methods used to teach the written language to pupils aged from 6 to 12. The research has adopted an intensive case-study model that has provided access to a systematic analysis of the classroom practices of the teachers involved (a total of five teachers, from two different schools). The following procedure has been used: each case, involved the video and audio recording of three complete classroom sessions (from 9 am to 2 pm), which means a total of 15 hours of class for each case analysed (15 complete sessions, and a total of 75 hours recorded).

Literacy is a key component of education in all age groups (UNESCO, 2017). We no longer refer to a dichotomous state of literate/illiterate people, but instead to a continuum of knowledge, skills and capabilities linked to reading and writing processes (Morais, 2018). Over 30 years ago, Wells (1987) referred to different levels of literacy, which progressed from mastering the basic processes of coding and decoding the alphabet through to the metacognitive handling of the meaning of language, its value, and its use as a source of access to knowledge and an aspect that generates reflexive and critical thinking. We all want our pupils to have a sound grounding in reading and writing that will enable them to learn and enjoy texts effectively. Yet this level of literacy is difficult for pupils to achieve on their own, whereby it is essential to provide explicit teaching actions for this purpose (Sánchez, García, and Rosales, 2010). Schools are responsible for this literacy process, which means teachers are the ones that undertake the main task involved.

Although we have an ample corpus of knowledge for understanding best practices in the teaching of literacy (Cunningham, Zibulsky, Stanovich, and Stanovich, 2009; Gambrell, Malloy, Marinak, and Mazzoni, 2015), we cannot be sure it will have an impact on school contexts. It is vital to know what literacy processes teachers undertake and how they do so, as we can understand what learning opportunities pupils are offered, and thereby reflect upon the educational value of classroom practices in the teaching of literacy (Rodríguez, Clemente, Ramírez, and Martín-Domínguez, 2018). Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the amount of research into teaching practices (Hoffman, Maloch, and Sailors, 2011). Although the topics have been very diverse, the studies that use classroom observation as a source of information are a key procedure for understanding how teachers orchestrate their classroom practices and how curricular principles and beliefs on teaching-learning processes are defined in the actual classroom.

Knowing how teachers address literacy is essential for understanding how pupils are helped to develop optimum levels of reading and writing. The following research goals have therefore been formulated:

-        Describe and understand how the literacy process is undertaken in different classrooms across several levels in Primary Education.

-        Analyse the teaching strategies teachers use to address literacy in the classroom and compare them to our theoretical knowledge on the subject.

-        Develop a procedure that may help teachers to reflect upon their own performance and improve their teaching processes.

This research has adopted an intensive study model of classroom practices that has permitted a systematic analysis to be made of the teaching activities of our cohort of teachers (five teachers in total from two different schools). This method enables us to discover with some considerable depth and intensity the teachers’ practices in teaching literacy, at the same time as it furnishes us with an understanding of the practices within their own specific context, whereby we can understand how the decision-making processes involved in the management of teaching are tackled. This study considers several teachers’ classroom practices over a number of years in Primary Education in two schools, which among other things will enable us to understand how this teaching evolves and whether the school itself is a variable that informs this process. The following procedure was applied: a video and audio recording were made of three full sessions of classroom work (five hours per session, 15 classroom sessions, 75 hours in total) for each one of the cases. The recordings of the sessions were then transcribed with a view to analysing the practices by identifying specific teaching tasks in order to subsequently classify each one of the tasks into a system of categories. The first step for obtaining a general snapshot of what happens in the classroom, detecting the groupings and the time spent teaching literacy, involves breaking the classroom session down into Typical Classroom Activities (TCAs); each one of these TCAs in the teaching of literacy is, in turn, broken down into tasks that are finally analysed through our system of categories. Our system of analysis is structured around seven main categories: 1) functions of the language; 2) representational aspects of the written language; 3) oral language; 4) reading (teaching the code and phonological awareness); 5) reading comprehension; 6) writing; and 7) literary knowledge. These dimensions are, in turn, subdivided into a detailed set of categories and subcategories for analysing the complexity of practices that teachers may undertake in this educational process.

Although this is still a work in progress, certain advance conclusions may be reached on the trends in the data: - The teaching of reading and writing processes is addressed in an uneven manner throughout Primary Education: the first years focus on reinforcing the learning of the writing system, while later courses deal with aspects related to high-level processes: written composition and comprehension. - The explicit teaching of the code is fully addressed in the first year of Primary as a revision, while the topics taught throughout this stage are related to the lexical pathway: rule-based spelling, arbitrary spelling, and writing conventions. - The teaching of written composition and comprehension adopts a mainstream approach involving other subjects; whereas curricular aspects linked to the teaching of the language are explicitly taught in the class time dedicated to that subject. - Literacy teaching practices appear to be linked to individual working profiles; in other words, the teachers create their own personal teaching dynamics, which means that over the course of the literacy process we encounter a highly diverse range of practices across the different teachers. Although the research procedure does not allow us to generalise our findings, it does provide us with general pointers for understanding how literacy is taught in this stage. In turn, the analysis procedure used is a fundamental tool for helping teachers to reflect upon their performance, explain part of the results their pupils obtain, and introduce changes for improving the quality of their teaching.

Cunningham, A. E., Zibulsky, J., Stanovich, K. E., & Stanovich, P. J. (2009). How teachers would spend their time teaching language arts: The mismatch between self-reported and best practices. Journal of Learning Disabilities. 42 (5), 418-430 Gambrell, L. B., Malloy, J. A., Marinak, B. A. & Mazzoni, S. A. (2015). Evidenced-Based Best Practices for comprehensive literacy instruction in the Age of the Common Core Standards. In L. B. Gambrell & L. M. Morrow. Best Practices in Literacy Instruction. Fifth Edition. New York: The Guilford Press Hoffman, J. V., Maloch, B., & Sailors, M. (2011). Researching the Teaching of Reading through Direct observation. Tools, Methodologies, and Guidelines for the Future. In M. L. Kamil, P. D. Pearson, E. Moje, and P. P. Afflerbach. Handbook of Reading Research. Volume IV (pp. 3‐33). New York: Routledge. Morais, J. (2018). Literacy and democracy. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33 (3), 351-372. Rodríguez, I., Clemente, M., Ramírez, E., & Martín-Domínguez, J. (2018). How and for how long is literacy taught in early childhood education? A multiple-case study of the classroom practices of seven teachers. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 26 (5), 738-759. Sánchez, E., García, J. R., & Rosales, J. (2010). La lectura en el aula. Qué se hace, qué se debe hacer y qué se puede hacer. Barcelona: Graó. UNESCO (2017). Reading the past, writing the future. Paris: UNESCO. Wells, G. (1987). Apprenticeship in literacy. Interchange, 18 (1-2), 109-123.