Spelfabet

Tell publishers to stop selling predictable texts!

Someone from a major educational publisher rang me today to extol the virtues of their new range of decodable texts. I think she was hoping I might help promote them.

I’ve had a look at their decodables, but haven’t bought any for our decodable books display, because (A) our budget is tight, (B) I’ve been fairly underwhelmed by the new decodables from mainstream publishers I have bought, and (C) the last time I checked, they were still selling predictable/repetitive texts.

The only thing I like about predictable/repetitive texts is making spoof AI ones:

I consider predictable/repetitive texts harmful products for vulnerable beginners. Anyone who works in literacy intervention can tell you that undoing the bad habits encouraged by these books is hard work. They encourage children to memorise and guess words, not decode them. Here’s a daggy video I made nearly a decade ago explaining what’s wrong with them:

As education academics Simmone Pogorzelski, Susan Main and Janet Hunter wrote in their excellent 2021 AARE blog post Decodable or predictable: why reading curriculum developers must seize one: “there is no instructional value in using ‘levelled’ predictable readers to support children’s development once formal reading instruction has commenced”.

Margaret Goldberg of the Right To Read Project has some great ideas for repurposing predictable/repetitive books already in schools. By now there should be no market for new predictable/repetitive books for beginning readers. Are they really still available? Check publisher/vendor websites for yourself, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.

If you’re speaking to publishers/vendors keen to get a slice of the booming decodable books market, but still selling predictable/repetitive texts, please tell them this is not smart marketing. It shows they’re newcomers to the difficult task of producing decodables, and not fully committed to teaching young kids to decode, not memorise and guess. If they want their decodables to be taken seriously, they need to ditch predictable/repetitive texts.

There’s now such a confusopoly of decodable texts available, I don’t envy teachers and librarians the task of deciding what to buy. I’m a bit confused myself, and we have heaps of them, we aren’t relying on website or catalogue information. Which are good quality? How many of each? Which ones are OK to use with older kids? What about struggling readers who will only read about gaming/unicorns/football/princesses/cars? Please share your thoughts and thorny questions in the comments.

Alison Clarke

7-11 April holiday phonics groups

Do you know a Melbourne* child in their first three years of schooling who needs a phonemic awareness and phonics boost?

During school holidays, the Speech Pathologists at Spelfabet in North Fitzroy run intensive explicit, systematic synthetic phonics therapy groups for children in their first three years of schooling needing extra help with learning to read and spell.

Each group runs for an hour a day for a week, plus daily homework activities. We provide all necessary resources, including sets of quality decodable readers. Children are carefully matched, with a maximum ratio of four children per Speech Pathologist, allowing for a high-intensity session.

The groups run at a fast pace with a mix of activities, and include plenty of games, fun and opportunities to make friends. On 7-11 April 2025, children will practise building, spelling and reading:

• VC and CVC words like ‘at’, ‘in’, ‘hop’, ‘bus’, ‘jet’, ‘fan’ and ‘zip’. Starting time: 8am.

• CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC, CCCVC and CVCCC words like ‘help’, ‘drop’, ‘crust’, ‘stamp’ and ‘bends’. Starting time: 10am.

• Words containing consonant digraphs like ‘fresh’, ‘champ’, ‘thing’, ‘quack’, and ‘when’. Starting time: 1.30pm.

Children not already on our caseload need to attend a short screening session before the end of term to check if our groups would suit them, and if so, which one. Please contact admin@spelfabet.com.au, call (03) 8528 0138 to book in, or see www.spelfabet.com.au/groups for more information.

^{* For overseas readers, we’re in an inner northern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.}

New OECD adult literacy report

At the recent launch of the OECD International Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) report, OECD Secretary-General and former Australian Finance Minister Mathias Cormann spoke of the survey’s importance and value. You can watch the launch here:

You can download the “Do Adults Have the Skills they Need to Thrive in a Changing World?” report to find out about adults’ literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills in participating countries, but here’s a summary chart:

I blinked, cleaned my glasses, looked again. Where are the data for Australia? We’re in the OECD. We were in the last PIAAC survey, and were meant to be in this one. In 2018, our peak adult literacy organisations urged the government not to withdraw from PIAAC, and were assured we wouldn’t.

(The rest of this blog post is about Australia, but if you’re elsewhere, try these articles about the US, UK, Canada and Aotearoa/NZ results, or just google PIAAC 2024 and your country of interest).

Here’s a screenshot of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website information on the latest PIAAC survey:

No information about why the survey was ditched, though they’d already started selecting participants.

In March 2022, the Parliamentary Inquiry into Adult Literacy and its Importance report recommended:

After a change of Federal government in May 2022, the government’s November 2023 response to the Parliamentary Inquiry report said (on page 7):

Sorry, pardon? Didn’t the Australian Bureau of Statistics already have high cyber security standards? They had a decade to prepare for PIAAC. How did 31 countries, many with larger populations and lower per capita GDP than us, manage to sort out their PIAAC cyber security, but we couldn’t? Weird.

The Reading Writing Hotline website says there was “a lot of concern in the field about who may be surveyed about what, and how; and to what use the data will be put”, mainly because the last PIAAC survey showing 44% of Australian adults couldn’t read very well resulted in sensationalist headlines, but no serious government action, except in the state with the worst results (Tasmania). In an underfunded sector, why prioritise another expensive survey? (more on these arguments here). But when governments don’t measure something, it can mean they have no plans to manage it, and/or no idea how.

Roy Morgan Research, not the ABS, is now conducting the Understanding Skills Across Australia survey on behalf of Jobs and Skills Australia. This is also weird, given the government’s commitment to rebuilding the public service, and cutting back on private consultants.

The Morgan survey will almost certainly find that Australian adults are no more literate than they were a decade ago, and are perhaps less literate. The adult literacy sector still seems to mostly teach from the Ken Goodman and Marie Clay playbook (listen to Sold a Story if you don’t know what that means), so that won’t be a surprise. Check out the “How do we read?” section of the government-funded Reading Writing Hotline’s online tutor training program, here are a couple of screenshots with quotes to give you the idea:

After I’ve smashed a bit of crockery about this (taxpayer-funded, last year!), I’m going to calm down and put “encourage the Reading Writing Hotline to learn about the science of reading and programs for adults like That Reading Thing” in my New Year’s resolutions. If you have ideas about how to best do this, please put them in the comments.

Alison Clarke

Holiday groups, new games, 30% off sale

A quick blog post about three things: therapy groups for Melbourne F-2 children in January 2025, 15 more Flex-It card games to teach Set for Variability/pronunciation correction in polysyllable words, and a bumper end of year Spelfabet online shop sale (use the code “Happy Holidays!” at the checkout for 30% off).

January therapy groups

We still have a few places in our 20-24th January therapy groups for young struggling readers/spellers (2024 Foundation to Year 2 children). If you know a young child in Melbourne whose school report says they’re not keeping up with peers on literacy, and who might like to join an intensive group, please let them know. More details are here.

We now have a bunch of kids who have been coming back most holidays, as young children are often too tired to do therapy outside school hours during term. Groups can be more fun than individual sessions, and allow children to make friends with peers who are also finding reading/spelling a bit tricky.

More Flex-It card games

A second tranche of 15 Flex-It card download-and-print games are now in the website shop, you can find them here. These games give children controlled practice trying a different target sound for a target spelling (Set for Variability/pronunciation correction), if their first attempt at sounding out a word isn’t successful, e.g. if they rhyme ‘very’ with ‘furry’ instead of ‘berry’.

Each printable game costs an Aussie dollar (or 70c for the rest of 2024) plus GST. Each prints in colour on three sheets of A4 cardboard. Print and laminate what you need, cut them up (or helpful older kids might like to flex their scissor skills) and you’re ready to play. The original 15 Flex-It games have also been improved slightly, so if you already have the first set, log back into the shop to download the new files (go to My Account, reset your password if it’s forgotten).

30% off everything in the Spelfabet shop

To congratulate everyone for getting through the year, we’re having a bumper 30% off everything sale in the Spelfabet online shop until the end of 2024.

Choose the things you want from the shop – embedded picture mnemonics, decodable books, games, quizzes, workbooks, whatever – then type “Happy Holidays!” into the coupon box at the checkout for the discount. If you dislike laminating and cutting up, we probably can’t post the printed Short Vowels game in the video below to you before Christmas, but postage on a class set costs the same as a single game, and would arrive anywhere in Australia before the 2025 school year (sorry we don’t mail them overseas).

May your festive season be full of rest, fun and love, from everyone at Spelfabet.

Literacy boosts language

Washington DC’s amazing Planet Word Museum has a great YouTube channel which includes a lecture called Eyes on Reading: Dr. Stanislas Dehaene with Emily Hanford about how learning to read changes the brain. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the many kids I’ve known with whose language test scores vastly improved after they learnt to read and write, so I sat up and paid close attention when Dr. Dehaene said (starting at 16.15 on the video clock):

“…because you’ve learned to read, you are processing spoken language better. You are hearing the phonemes better and you are able to do phonological awareness tasks, you’re able to move phonemes around in your mind, you’re able to play with phonemes, and we found that there is almost a doubling of the brain activity for spoken language as a function of how good a reader you are, as a function of reading score. So that’s a huge transformation. We don’t fully know at the cellular level what it means, but there is a huge enhancement of responses in this area. We also found that the connection between these systems, if we look just at the anatomy of the connections of the brain with diffusion imaging, was reinforced “.

Matthew Effects and Spiral Causality

We’ve known since Keith Stanovich’s classic 1986 Matthew Effects article that reading boosts both language and cognitive skills. He explains this here:

Conversely, failing to learn to read has a negative impact on language and cognitive skills, and other negative knock-on effects, as Stanovich wrote:

“Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performance on many academic tasks. In short, as reading develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behavior. Or, to put it more simply – and more sadly – in the words of a tearful nine-year-old, already falling frustratingly behind his peers in reading progress, “Reading affects everything you do.” (p390)

In 2011, Dutch researchers Suzanne Mol and Adriana Bus published To Read or Not To Read: A Meta-Analysis of Print Exposure from Infancy to Early Adulthood, in which they found:

“Print exposure explains 12% of the variance in preschoolers’ and kindergartners’ oral language skills,13% in primary school, 19% in middle school, 30% in high school, and 34% at undergraduate and graduate level…Although these outcomes do not permit conclusions about causality, the pattern of findings as well as a qualitative review of longitudinal studies suggests that spiral causality is plausible.”

Being literate helps us remember spoken words

In 2022 I was surprised by radio reports of a new, nationalist Italian Prime Minister with an Irish-sounding name: Georgia Maloney. OK, Italy and Ireland are both in the EU, but, mi scusi? Google to the rescue. Giorgia Meloni. Facepalm. I’d applied the wrong orthographic skeletons – ideas we form about a word’s spelling from its pronunciation. They’re what we correct/clarify when we hear an unfamiliar name, ask ‘how do you spell that?’, then don’t write it down. We’re just trying to mentally store a high-quality lexical representation (sounds, word structure, meaning and spelling).

Generating orthographic skeletons is linked to better word recall (see last year’s delightfully-titled article Déjà-lu: When Orthographic Representations are Generated in the Absence of Orthography), just as oral vocabulary knowledge boosts retention of written words (see other non-paywalled articles about this here, here, here and here). Words are learnt more easily, even by dyslexic children, when presented in both spoken and printed form. Spellings help us symbolise and store sounds/word parts in memory. Other research on this Orthographic Facilitation process can be found here, here and here.

We all know strong oral language is the foundation of strong literacy skills, but language and literacy intertwine across the lifespan in a reciprocal way, so that becoming literate boosts oral language skills, especially vocabulary. US education, cognitive science and fairness blogger Natalie Wexler’s recent post “Want children to be good speakers? Teach them to write” argues that writing instruction also improves comprehension and the ability to use formal spoken language. All of us at Spelfabet are about to do SRSD training, as research suggests their approach to writing also has positive spinoffs for other aspects of communication and wellbeing.

New NDIS guidelines

Australia’s new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) guidelines say supports related to school education are not funded by the NDIS. Having been in local government, I find cost-shifting maddening, so I agree that every cent of NDIS funding should be spent helping people with disabilities to become more independent, find work, study and have greater choice and control over their lives.

Ideally, schools should be able to teach all children with disabilities who can understand and use language to read and write. As well as this being great for the kids, it would save the NDIS a lot of money helping participants overcome consequences of poor literacy, like not being able to read signage, food labels, recipes, shopping lists, timetables, text messages etc., let alone study or find work.

Some children with disabilities have major difficulties with phonological processing, memory, speech, language, attention, perspective-taking, restricted interests, sensory overload, motor planning and/or anxiety, which interfere with learning to read and write. Even if they have high-quality classroom teaching and small group intervention in their first three years of schooling, they still fall behind their peers. Their disabilities require specialised, individualised intervention not always available in schools to learn to read and write, and thus improve their language and life prospects generally. The longer this intervention is postponed, the more difficult and expensive it becomes.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Decodables: you can’t judge a book by its cover

Many mainstream educational publishers have recently started marketing decodable books, to meet fast-growing demand for phonics practice texts. Having bought and examined hundreds of these books, I’m excited by how many good options are now available. Here are photos of books we have at the Spelfabet office:

In general, publishers who produced decodables before there was a lucrative market for them tend to offer better phonics practice/lesson-to-text matching than less experienced publishers. However, all major publishers now seem to recognise that kids need to be taught to decode words, not guess and memorise them.

One problem with the term ‘decodable’ is that a book containing lots of sentences like “A dog is in the mud” and “Tim did not sit the dog in the tub” can be decoded by many young learners, but may not offer much practice of the book’s stated phonics targets. Just as an example, the new Flying Start to Literacy Decodables Unit 3 states its phonics targets as ‘b’, ‘j’, ‘q’, ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘x’ and ‘y’. The letter ‘j’ appears in three of the ten books (in a total of four words, as ‘job’ appears twice), ‘v’ appears in only two words (‘van’ once and ‘vet’ eight times), and ‘q’ doesn’t appear in any words at all.

It’s hard to write high-quality decodable text including low-frequency targets – there simply aren’t a lot of CVC words containing ‘j’ and ‘v’. I’d still argue that more words like ‘jam’, ‘jab’, ‘jog’, ‘jet’, ‘jig’, ‘jot’, ‘jut’, ‘Jed’, ‘Jan’, and/or ‘vat’ and perhaps some clipped words like ‘vac’, ‘Ev’, ‘Viv’, ‘Bev’ or ‘Kev’ would have improved a book targeting ‘j’ and ‘v’. I don’t know why ‘q’ is listed as a target.

Busy teachers should be able to judge a book by its cover, and not have to check whether the targets listed on books’ covers are in multiple words in the books.

I also wondered about similarities between some of the new Flying Start decodables and existing books from the same publisher. Here’s a photo of six of the covers of Unit 6 Flying Start to Literacy decodables:

Here are covers of other texts from the same publisher. The pictures on them appear in the above decodables.

It’s hard to write high-quality decodables, let alone write them to match illustrations from an existing book. ‘Dad’ in the new decodable ‘At Our Farm’ looks quite old to have such a young son (yes, I know Charlie Chaplin’s youngest child was born when he was 73). Being an Australian dairy farmer’s daughter, I wondered about the dairy, calf shed and hay shed all being called ‘barns’, not a term I’ve known Aussie farmers to use. Real farmers’ kids will also scratch their heads at a photo of the ‘farmer’s son’ offering grain to a calf that looks far too young to consume anything but milk.

Please check out decodables before you spend a lot of money on them. Read a few from each level, and consider how well they match your phonics teaching sequence. Think about whether they make sense, and offer value for money. A single book can cost anywhere between $2.70 (yay the Pocket Rockets by Berys from Moonee Ponds!) and about $13. If getting printables, don’t forget to include printing and collating materials and time in your cost calculations. Consider whether relevant training and other matching teaching resources are available, their cost and quality.

The last of the 2024 Spelfabet decodable book workshops aren’t going ahead due to caseload pressures and low enrolments, but if you want a tailored session to help you choose books for a specific person or purpose, please contact admin@spelfabet.com.au.

Australian school handwriting

While the importance of handwriting is well-known, Australia’s Curriculum 9.0 is hilariously vague about it. After a year at school, children are expected to: “… correctly form known upper- and lower-case letters.” Which letters are expected to be known is unknown. Eight Handwriting and Keyboarding sub-elements are listed here. The first one says:

• produces simple handwriting movements (writing, or drawing?)
• experiments with pencils, writing implements or devices (up noses? down socks?)
• writes letters which resemble standard letter formations (how closely? what standard?)

Leaving handwriting style decisions up to the states has worked out about as well as letting states decide railway gauges. Australia now has five approved handwriting styles for beginners, most with manuscript, pre-cursive and cursive versions. This must be confusing for the thousands of young kids who move interstate each year. It must drive early learning publishers insane.

Since foxes are helping send our native wildlife towards extinction, I’ve devised my own every-letter sentence to demonstrate our five beginners’ handwriting styles, while promoting adorable marsupials.

The first style comes from my state. I’m not a fan. Beginners’ versions of Victorian Modern Cursive often make the letter ‘n’ look like ‘m’, ‘r’ look like ‘v’, ‘k’ look like ‘R’, and put a vertical line on top of letter ‘o’. Children don’t see writing like this in books, or much beyond school. I wonder if it’s based on the same teach-novices-to-imitate-experts logic as Whole Language. Does research show that learning to write cursive ‘p’ and ‘b’ helps you read non-cursive p/q and b/d in books? I’d prefer kids start with simpler letters, and get plenty of instruction about how to form and place them as they say and spell words, so that visual information, motor plans and articulation fuse nicely in their brains. Joiny bits can come later.

Educational Psychologist Murray Evely (a nice fellow, we once both worked at Footscray School Support Centre) led the development of Victorian Modern Cursive in 1985. NSW’s Foundation Style was devised two years later. Queensland’s 1984 handwriting handbook, with the above glorious cover photo, can still be downloaded here. South Australian Modern Cursive was devised in 1983 and updated in 2006. Tasmania’s 1985 style has been updated a few times, most recently last year, when Tasmanian Handwriting Guidelines were developed with the help of academic and consultant Dr Noella Mackenzie. I wonder why different conclusions about shape, size, spacing, slant and joins were drawn from (presumably) the same mid-1980s research?

Every state teaches cursive eventually, mainly because it’s considered more efficient. However, US handwriting expert Steve Graham et al’s 1998 research found that mixed handwriting was faster than both cursive and manuscript, and that a mixed style containing mostly cursive letters was also the most legible. Canadian research in 2013 by Bara and Morin also found that “cursive handwriting was the slower style, whereas mixed handwriting seemed to be more efficient”.

Steve Graham recommends teaching beginners traditional manuscript letters for four reasons (see p21-22 of this article):

1. Most children start school already knowing how to write some manuscript letters.
2. There is some (rather dated) evidence that manuscript is easier to learn (Researchers! This topic!).
3. Once mastered, manuscript can be written as fast as cursive, and possibly more legibly.
4. Manuscript may facilitate reading development, as kids’ reading material is manuscript, not cursive.

UK handwriting expert Dr Rosemary Sassoon (who Wikipedia says is 93 and now lives in Busselton, WA) researched handwriting styles children find easy to read in 1993, and based her fonts on this research. I wonder if any of the Australian font designers also had the novel idea of asking children which fonts they preferred. Sassoon wrote a book about teaching handwriting, which is now freely available online.

The Victorian Phonics Lesson Plans team is preparing early years systematic, synthetic phonics resources for our local schools. Great! They will be in Victorian Modern Cursive. Hmm. A free version of this font is freely downloadable here, but it’s pretty clunky so I hope the lesson planners have a better-quality version. There’s also a free Queensland handwriting font here, but otherwise Australia’s official school fonts aren’t freely available.

I rang Kevin Brown at Australian School Fonts and wasted about an hour of his time asking about handwriting styles, fonts and related topics (It’s OK, I then bought his fonts). He said since we’ve had a National Curriculum, (first drafted in 2010) schools can use whatever handwriting style they like. Judging from the orders he receives, many schools are using a different state’s style. He also said it’s not possible to copyright a handwriting style, only font installation files, which are difficult to write and need updates as software changes. Australian handwriting fonts are also available from the Schoolfonts website, and probably elsewhere – if you know of quality, affordable suppliers, please make a comment below.

Sticking to a specific beginners’ handwriting style promotes consistent teaching about letter formation, sizing and placement, and I doubt teachers ask kids who move interstate to unlearn their original handwriting style. Over time we all develop our own style. Explicit instruction and lots of practice seem to be the main things that lead to efficient, legible handwriting, whatever the starting style.

For times when kids say keyboards make handwriting obsolete, I like Bec from Talkin’ Chalk‘s recommended reply: “When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, there’ll be no tech. You’ll need handwriting.” And for an extra start-of-the-week laugh, here’s an AI generated version of my favourite handwriting cartoon: the Doctor’s Strike (OK, the eyes and fingers are weird, and the bot doesn’t understand “scribble on placards”, but the cartoons are all copyright and you get the idea).