If you’re working in a school with a synthetic phonics Early Years literacy program and a Response To Intervention (RTI) approach to literacy strugglers, you’re very lucky. There shouldn’t be too many children getting through to the Middle Years in your school without being able to read and spell competently.
However, if your school teaches early literacy using mainly:
- a sound for each letter of the alphabet,
- high-frequency words and
- predictable/repetitive texts,
then you probably have more students who are struggling, especially if the school offers more of the same sort of approach (Reading Recovery, Leveled Literacy Intervention, L3 etc) to kids who are struggling (Tier 2 intervention). The exception might be if most of your students are from high socioeconomic groups and pay for more effective intervention outside school.
Kids with more severe difficulties in your grade (e.g. students with Intellectual Disabilities, Developmental Language Disorder or Specific Learning Disorder) probably still need intensive intervention in the middle years to keep improving their decoding and spelling skills. However this might not be available.
This makes your life a lot harder, because the curriculum you’re teaching requires strong reading and spelling skills, and differentiating activities to allow your weaker readers/spellers can participate and succeed is a lot of work. You might also be trying to backfill the decoding and spelling skills they lack, again adding to your workload.
It’s in your interests to argue for a whole-school literacy policy that includes first-and-fast, explicit, systematic linguistic/synthetic phonics in the early years, followed by effective Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention, for as long as it takes. The free PhOrMeS curriculum is one way to overcome the “we can’t afford it” argument. However, that’s not going to help you with the strugglers in your grade right now.
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)
DLD is the new, internationally-agreed term for what was previously called a number of different things, including Severe Language Disorder or Specific Language Impairment. These children have problems with listening, expressive language, or both.
About 3% of children have a Developmental Language Disorder, so chances are you have one in your class. There is lots of good information about DLD on this excellent YouTube channel.
Kids with DLD often find it hard to learn to read and spell, unless they get explicit, systematic teaching about how sounds, letters and word parts work in our spelling system.
If you suspect you have a student with DLD in your class, please refer them to a Speech Pathologist straight away for an assessment of their expressive and receptive language, phonemic awareness, and if possible also their word and pseudoword reading, spelling, working memory and rapid automatised naming. This should then inform their ILP.
Specific Learning Disorder/Dyslexia/Dysgraphia
Kids whose problems with reading and writing can’t be explained by language, cognitive or other difficulties, and whose problems persist despite high-quality intervention for at least six months, should be sent to a psychologist or neuropsychologist for an assessment. The ensuing report will be helpful in writing the student’s ILP.
If there’s a student who already has a formal diagnosis of dyslexia in your class, ask for a copy of the report explaining what assessments they’ve had, what their main areas of difficulty are, and what intervention they need, and again use this information when writing their ILP. Bring the school’s specialist staff on board, including the Speech Pathologist if you can.
If the student has a report saying they are dyslexic/dysgraphic, but recommends coloured overlays, special glasses, vision therapy, or hopping on one leg or any activity other than working on reading and spelling, the best approach may be to just ignore it, especially if it recommends that expensive intervention be provided by the report’s author. Have a look at the MUSEC briefings or get your hands on a copy of Making Sense on Treatment Choices to find out more about which interventions are based on good evidence, and which are just snake oil.
“Garden variety” poor readers/spellers
If you’re concerned about the decoding or spelling skills of any or all of the kids in your class, there’s nothing to stop you from administering the assessments of Phonemic Awareness and Decoding/spelling pattern knowledge listed here, and then using the results to guide what you teach about spelling, and what books you ask them to read, and patterns you ask them to study (they may need books with simplified spelling patterns).
However, kids who don’t know a lot of the spelling patterns that everyone else in the class has mastered will need these taught systematically. You probably can’t do much of this yourself, and will again need to call for reinforcements from the student support/welfare team or the student’s family. There are lots of good decoding catch-up materials available.
Finally, please teach spelling by explicitly and systematically showing children how spelling patterns work, and giving them plenty of practice with each patterns. See this blog post for more on this topic, and click here for free spelling lists that focus on one spelling pattern at a time.
5 responses to “Middle Years”
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The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
As a student teacher who is about to graduate this will be hugely helpful. I only wish our university courses spent more time on explicitly teaching us practical approaches for the classroom like you have provided here!
As an experienced classroom teacher, SPELD tutor, Special Needs Teacher and holder of a Masters in Education- Literacy, who now works in schools providing PLD to teachers, I was beginning to feel comfortable with the idea of recommending your site to schools I work in until I came across this comment from the page above;
“If the student has a report saying they are dyslexic/dysgraphic, but recommends coloured overlays, special glasses, vision therapy, or hopping on one leg or any activity other than working on reading and spelling, the best approach may be to just ignore it, especially if it recommends that expensive intervention be provided by the report’s author.”
While I absolutely agree that working on reading and spelling must be the priority, for you to completely and dismissively group together visual issues with “hopping on one leg” and ‘touting for business’ is potentially damaging and marginalising for those students for whom visual difficulties are contributing to their reading difficulties.
I would encourage you to look at the quote from this page and to consider rewording it. Significant percentages of students (particularly in marginalised communities) have visual problems which contribute to their literacy learning difficulties and remain undiagnosed until the student is sent for a special needs assessment. While you may dismiss coloured lenses or overlays, for some students these make a huge impact, the percentages of students who benefit from these may be small, but every one is an individual and it can make a huge difference to their life and lifelong learning.
Dear Karen, thanks for your comment, I’d be interested to know if you have any objective, scientific evidence that coloured lenses and overlays can be effective. Every claim I’ve seen so far about this has been based on subjective, anecdotal evidence. Until there is objective scientific evidence for these interventions I can only repeat that they seem to me to be a waste of time and money. My training in Speech Pathology requires me to only use and recommend interventions based on sound scientific evidence and current models drawn from it. I’m aware that this is not such a strict requirement or part of the culture of education, but I wish it was.
Hi there!
How do work I out which Spelfabet workbook I need to help/support/teach my 2/3 composite class?
Even after 38 years of teaching, I am fascinated by English and word study. I have to admit to being a real ‘word-nerd’. I love your moveable tiles and am just about to purchase the latest set to use in my classroom, but I am really not sure where to begin with my kids, given all the holes that exist in the knowledge due to covid interruptions to their learning in the past 2 years. Can you please point me in the right direction?
Hi David, thanks for the nice feedback, and sorry I can’t give you a very definite answer to your question, but it would be unprofessional of me to give specific advice about kids I don’t know anything about other than their age group. My guess would be that vowel spellings and word-building are the things causing your students trouble, and you’d be better off getting some training in a systematic synthetic phonics program, and some of their resources, than buying my workbooks, as they’re not a proper program and are meant to be supplementary resources for those kids who need HEAPS of practice, but just can’t keep doing the same activities multiple times. The Sounds-Write training is very good, and you don’t need to buy much beyond the training as heaps of resources are supplied, you’d just need some decodable books. This would allow you to work your way through all the vowel sounds, learning their main spellings, and then noticing that some spellings are shared by more than one sound. You could use my new moveable alphabet to add prefixes and suffixes to words as you go along. https://sounds-write.co.uk/ has a list of all their upcoming training, including online sessions you can do at your own pace. They just had an online symposium which you can still see some of for free, or all of it at a fairly low cost: https://symposium2023.sounds-write.com/?sc=ItwEM3Xr&ac=x3Hkj2OK. Hope that’s useful, all the best, Alison