Spelfabet

One teacher’s early literacy epiphany

I recently met an experienced Melbourne primary teacher, Berys Dixon, who told me the delightful story of how she came to be an advocate of explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics.

Returning to work after raising her family, she was instructed to use a multiple-cues, guided reading approach with her class of five-year-olds. Many spoke a language other than English at home, and the school was in a low socioeconomic area.

One day, a parent complained that her child couldn’t sound out the words in his home reader. Berys advised the parent not to expect the child to sound out, but to encourage him to look at the picture, read ahead, have a guess etc. Then if he still couldn’t get the word, just read it for him.

Berys realised that what she had just said made no sense. She went home and started googling.

Rather than me paraphrasing the rest of Berys’s lovely story, which has a very happy ending, please take five minutes to listen to her telling it herself.

Because we’re all humans, we tend to understand and believe the personal stories other people tell us more than we understand and believe data and graphs.

I hope that Berys’s story (which is consistent with the very best data and graphs) will help persuade teachers of beginners and young strugglers to include explicit, systematic synthetic phonics in their literacy curriculum.

If her super-affordable and funny Pocket Rockets make that more possible, great. Each child’s set can be stored in a little photo album from the $2 shop, making them durable yet very small and lightweight for young children’s (often heavy and full) school bags.

The teaching sequence these booklets follow is from the UK government’s Letters And Sounds program. There are many free teaching resources for this program available online, click here, here and here for examples. Or just start googling, like Berys!

Update April 2019: Berys now has a website and her books are available in larger size and parent packs. I’ve also made a free downloadable beginners’ workbook following the same teaching sequence as her books, which you can print and use with the first set of her books (phase 2, the orange ones).

Reading Recovery Revisited

Two years ago I wrote a blog post about Reading Recovery, after two children in their fourth year of schooling were referred to me with the reading and spelling skills of the average six-year-old.

Both had done Reading Recovery, but it obviously hadn’t worked.

When I read about what Reading Recovery entails, it was obvious why not.

Only five minutes of each half-hour daily Reading Recovery session involves work on sounds (phonemes) and spellings (graphemes), the areas in which these students (and most young strugglers) needed most help, just to be able to get words off and onto the page.

The rest of the session involves activities that are unlikely to be of much benefit to such learners. Some of the strategies encouraged, like guessing from pictures, context or first letters, are counter-productive.

I kept thinking about these students this week while listening to US literacy expert Louisa Moats talking about the need to improve literacy instruction in schools, and make sure children like these don’t fall through the cracks.

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Dr Louisa Moats: We need to be outraged

Learning Difficulties Australia has just marked its 50th anniversary with a national speaking tour by US literacy expert Dr Louisa Moats.

Dr Moats is the author of many influential papers and articles about literacy, and has been a key advocate for better language education for teachers in the US.

I've written a couple of previous blog posts about some of her work, here and here, but you can just google her name to find out lots more.

I spent all of Saturday and this morning in workshops by Dr Moats, so my head is kind of exploding with good information and ideas, in particular about how to align literacy-teaching with the scientific evidence about what works best.

I tend to get very focussed on sounds and spellings because they're the area of greatest need for most strugglers, and because of the lack of accurate information and systematic teaching about them. Teachers and the curriculum are focussed on letters, but letters are not the basic units for decoding, sounds (phonemes) and their spellings (graphemes) are.

However, Dr Moats' workshops reminded me about the broader context of what constitutes a good literacy program. It's good to get a bit of an "eyes up" now and then.

Dr Moats was very frank: Reading is one of the most studied aspects of human psychology, so we know a great deal about how novices learn, how proficient readers read, what' s going on in the brain when we read and what causes reading difficulty.

So, she says, "At a certain point (or a certain age) you begin to wonder: if we know so much about reading, how come there are so many poor readers?"

Her answer is that the science of reading is not well-reflected in classroom practices.

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Echo reading

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry recently upon discovering a video from the University of Canberra called “Echo Reading”.

OK, I thought, Whole Language/Balanced Literacy has finally jumped the shark.

In this video, an adult reads a book that is too hard for a student aloud, pausing after each sentence for the student to repeat the sentence:

If you are the sort of person inclined to notice things such as emperors not having any clothes, you will have noticed that all the student has to be able to do to succeed at “Echo Reading” is be able to repeat spoken sentences. They don’t even have to look at the text.

In Speech Pathology and linguistics circles, we call this skill “verbal imitation”. Not “reading”. (more…)

Outside the Square

A three-part documentary about dyslexia called Outside The Square will be of interest to everyone who knows a struggling reader/speller, or who wants to make sure a beginner doesn’t become a struggler.

It was made by Gold Coast mother and teacher Tanya Forbes, using funds raised on crowdfunding website Kickstarter, and (2019 update) is now freely available on YouTube, as free teacher PD.

The documentary’s cast includes kids who’ve struggled with literacy and their parents as well as teachers and enough serious experts and well-known advocates to make your head spin. It aims to change the way literacy is taught and make sure children with dyslexia have their needs met and are given the best chance to succeed at school. (more…)