Marie Clay Literacy Resources

Marie Clay was an influential literacy researcher and educationalist who pioneered the Reading Recovery programme. Best of all, she was a Kiwi. Her research and books have changed the experience of learning to read for many children around the world. 

Essential Resources is the sole distributor of Marie Clay books and sheet pads in New Zealand. Her most popular titles include Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals – a valuable resource for those teachers who wish to design individualised Reading Recovery literacy lessons. 

Running Records for Classroom Teachers is a tool for teachers to assess how learners read independently – for example, what is a child looking at when they read? Similarly, Record of Oral Language helps teachers to observe and understand the changes in oral language development. 

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What is the Reading Recovery programme?  

Marie Clay’s Reading Recovery literacy programme is a proven early literacy intervention. It is for children with the lowest achievements in reading and writing at the end of their first year of primary school.  

The programme involves individual, daily instruction from a specially-trained Reading Recovery teacher for 12 to 20+ weeks. First, the teacher does an assessment to identify the child’s literacy strengths and needs. They then design a series of literacy lessons adapted to the child’s capabilities. In each 30-minute lesson, the child receives explicit instruction in re-reading, reading, writing and word work activities.  

The Reading Recovery programme aims to bring struggling literacy learners to the average bands of literacy performance in a relatively short time. The emphasis is on developing confident readers and writers who are independent problem-solvers.  

Who is Marie Clay?  

Dame Marie Mildred Clay was a New Zealand researcher known for her work in educational literacy. She was born on January 3rd, 1926, in Wellington. 

Clay’s research centred on the formative years of literacy learning. Through her dissertation, “Emergent Reading Behaviour” and subsequent research, she developed reliable observation tools for the assessment of children’s early literacy learning over time. Today, this can be seen in An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement. 

In her later research, Clay formed a theoretical description of how young children develop control over literacy learning. This is presented in Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control. 

Reading Recovery is one of Clay’s major contributions to education. She, along with research assistant Sara Robinson, began the work in 1976. They conducted field trials across Auckland schools. Reading Recovery became a national education program in 1983.  

Clay was the first female professor at the University of Auckland when she became a professor of education in 1975. Clay was appointed Dame of the British Empire (1987), awarded the first New Zealander of the Year (1994), and became a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (1995).  

How do I conduct a Running Record reading assessment?  

Marie Clay developed Running Records as a standard means of coding, scoring and analysing what a young reader said and did while orally reading a text.  

As explained in Running Records for Classroom Teachers, to conduct a running record reading assessment:  

  1. A text is selected that the student has previously seen but not taken home to practice.  
  2. The student is then invited to read the text aloud to the teacher. They either read a passage of 100 to 200 words or the entire book if it is less the 100 words. Teachers do not intervene while the student is reading.  
  3. As the student reads, the teacher uses a set of universal conventions developed by Clay to record the student’s reading behaviours. This is done on one of the Marie Clay sheet pads, Running Record Sheet Pad. At the end of the Running Record, the teacher writes how the reading sounded, i.e., whether it was smooth or word-for-word. 
  4. The Running Record is analysed and scored. A conversion rate is used to calculate a percentage accuracy score. 
  5. The information from the Running Record is used to inform future teaching practice. For example, it helps match future texts to students’ capabilities and cater for their differences.