Free & cheap word-building games

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It’s the silly season, time to play more games. Excellent Spelfabet Speech Pathologists Georgina Ryan and Elle Holloway have devised and tested a set of download-and-print word-building card games which are now available in the Spelfabet shop. Each game can be printed on 3 sheets of A4 cardboard and handed to a group of kids to cut up and play, or you can laminate them first, if you want them to last.

The simplest game is free, and requires learners to add productive suffixes -ed and -ing, and Olden Days suffix -le (not used to produce new words any more, but still in heaps of words), to base words with ‘short’ vowels, adjacent consonants and the consonant spellings ss, sh, ck, ng, and tch. Here’s a video of how to play it:

Here’s a video of the other Initial Code game in the set, in which players add the suffixes -ed, -ing, -er, -y and -s/es to base words, doubling final consonants if required. If they have both -y and -er suffixes, they can stack these to create words like ‘bumpier’ and ‘jumpier’, changing -y into i before adding the -er.

Here are videos of two other games in the set, we hope this gives you the idea of how they work, and that they will work well with your learners. The whole set is available here. Happy silly season from all of us at Spelfabet!

Therapists’ duty of care means we must recommend evidence-based teaching

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A local school leader recently contacted me ask that my colleagues and I delete one of the recommendations we often put in assessment reports, because it is prompting parents to question the school’s teaching approach.

The recommendation reads:

(Child name) should not be taught using a ‘whole language’ or ‘balanced literacy’ approach (Reading Recovery, Leveled Literacy Intervention, Guided Reading, PM Readers, Running Records, etc.) as this approach does not control adequately for word structure and phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and encourages the strategies of weak readers, such as guessing and rote-memorising words. This approach is not explicit or systematic enough in its teaching of sound-spelling relationships or word structure.

The school leader explained that her school system requires staff to use approaches we recommend against, so our reports were putting their Reading Recovery teachers and other staff in a difficult position.

We have no desire to put anyone in a difficult position, but our duty of care is to our clients. We must make recommendations which are in their best interests, based on the best available scientific evidence.

It’s completely unfair to a child to have one set of adults teaching them to sound words out, and another set of adults teaching them to memorise and guess words. Memorising and guessing words are the habits of weak readers, but are encouraged when high-frequency word lists are used as spelling lists, and children are given predictable/repetitive texts containing spelling patterns they’ve never been taught.

Undoing bad habits and building strong foundational skills is hard work, especially when we only see clients for 40 minutes once a week or fortnight. They’re at school five days per week. It would be professionally irresponsible not to tackle this issue in our reports.

I agreed to send the school leader evidence supporting our recommendation, but this is the second request of this type, so it probably won’t be the last. Answering the question in this blog post, and linking to it in our reports, should help parents argue kindly and clearly for science, and help school leaders learn about reading research, and discard programs and practices that don’t help children thrive.

Reading Recovery

Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI)

  • Research its authors call the independent, gold standard evidence for LLI received funding from the program’s publisher, and was published on a university website, not in a peer-reviewed journal. The valid, reliable, objective measure of progress used in this research – DIBELS – showed that LLI was not effective. Children only improved on the subjective, LLI-devised measure. Here’s a video explanation.
  • Pedagogy Non Grata’s Effect-Size-based meta-analysis of LLI research is here, which concludes, “The program is not research based”. The author discusses this analysis in this video.

Fountas and Pinnell Classroom

Other balanced literacy strategies/resources

Science of Reading

  • American Public Media journalist Emily Hanford’s* six years of reporting on this issue, including her podcast Sold a Story, can be found here. Recently interviewed in New Zealand, home of Reading Recovery (now rapidly being replaced by Better Start and other programs), Hanford said this:

Switching to evidence-based teaching

I hope leaders of Australian schools still using balanced literacy (an ill-defined mishmash of things that work, and things that don’t, some of which can be harmful) find the knowledge, resources and inspiration to switch to science based teaching of reading and spelling in 2024.

* No, Emily Hanford and Pedagogy Non Grata’s Nathaniel Hansford (who writes/speaks as Nate Joseph) are not related.

A Voice on First People’s literacy and more

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Australians will soon vote on whether to recognise our First Peoples in our Constitution, and set up a permanent indigenous advisory committee (Voice) to Federal Parliament.

An estimated 40 per cent of indigenous Australian adults have minimal English literacy, and it can be as high as 70 per cent in many remote areas. According to Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2021 data, our Year 4 First Nations students scored 491 points on average, while students from other backgrounds averaged 547 points. It’s a similar, shameful story for most other indicators of wellbeing: First Nations Australians get a raw deal.

Respected indigenous leader and Senator Patrick Dodson explains some of the appalling back story, and the evolution of the referendum proposal, in this podcast. There’s a shorter video explaining the referendum here. No-one seems to be arguing against Constitutional recognition, but there is a campaign against an indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Some progressives, like Senator Lidia Thorpe, say the Voice will have no actual power, so governments will be able to ignore it if they don’t like its advice. That’s true. Within the limits of the Constitution, Parliament has the power to make, amend or repeal any law, and the Voice won’t change that.

Some conservative opponents argue the proposal is divisive and lacks detail, so “If you don’t know, vote no”. I’d rather finish the sentence, “If you don’t know” with “find out”. The Voice proposal is not about detail, it’s asking about an in-principle decision. Ballot papers will say: “A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”.

Sadly, some opponents are saying things which are not true. It’s legal to spread campaign lies.

However, it seems clear that the majority of First Peoples support the Voice proposal, the first step in a process towards truth and treaty outlined in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. There’s been a surge of electoral enrolment in areas with high First Peoples populations. High-profile non-partisan First Nations people like Cathy Freeman and Michael Long, and most First Peoples organisations, seem to support a ‘yes’ vote.

I want to be an ally to First Nations people in their quest for educational and other justice, so I need to listen to the majority. If I pick and choose which First Nations opinions I listen to, I’m really just listening to myself.

Speech Pathology Australia, my professional association, has taken a stand on the upcoming referendum, saying, “Speech Pathology Australia stands with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and communities in favour of both the Voice and Treaty.”

In primary school, I made friends with Gunditjmara and Kirrae Whurrong artist Fiona Clarke. Victorians might have seen her public art in train stations and elsewhere, and if your Victorian school would like a colourful mural on a dull wall or water tank, please let her know. Her designs have also appeared on Australian Cricket Team outfits. I was delighted to catch up with her at a “Vote Yes” concert organised by her brother on the weekend, where we put our heads together to say this:

Why doesn’t NAPLAN start in Year 1?

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It’s too late to find out a child is struggling to read and write in Year 3. The horse has bolted. It’s no longer possible to provide effective, cost-effective early intervention. Intervention is harder, less effective and more expensive. The damage done to a child’s confidence and motivation can be even harder to undo.

Why don’t we collect national data on reading and spelling skills earlier, in order to better understand learning in the vital early years? There’s been a lot in the media lately about the latest NAPLAN results, which show that a third of Australian kids are still struggling to read and write well. Indigenous, rural and low socioeconomic kids are struggling more than most. This is a serious social justice issue.

Reading and spelling problems start long before NAPLAN shines a light on them. Don’t the NAPLAN people know exactly what all children are expected to know and be able to do in Year 1, in order to measure it?

Well, maybe not. Our National Curriculum contains learning area and content descriptions, but not specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timed (SMART) goals for phonemic awareness, word-level reading and spelling. The content descriptions for phonic and word knowledge for the first year of schooling are in the red text in the table below. I’m glad I don’t have to work out how to assess them! I’ve added the italics, and in the second column have put some of the kinds of goals for this skill area I’d want if I were teaching Foundation (which I’m not, so I’m sure they can be improved upon).

National curriculum Foundation phonic and word knowledge content descriptionsPossible SMART Foundation phonic and word knowledge goals
Recognise and generate rhyming words, alliteration patterns, syllables and sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. (AC9EFLY09)

Rhyme and alliteration are important in poetry, but in early literacy teaching, phonemes are what matter.

Segment sentences into individual words; orally blend and segment single-syllable spoken words; isolate, blend and manipulate phonemes in single-syllable words (phonemic awareness). (AC9EFLY10)

English one-syllable words can be up to seven phonemes long (e.g. ‘sprints’, ‘strengths’, ‘glimpsed’). Blending and segmenting even two or three sound words is very hard for many young children, and manipulation is even harder. How many sounds/what word structures (VC, CVC etc) are meant here?

Recognise and name all upper and lower case letters (graphs) and know the most common sound that each letter represents. (AC9EFLY11)

Vowel letter names are relevant sounds represented by these letters, so are useful when sounding out words. But when kids apply the same logic to consonant letters, they tend to write ‘car’ as ‘cr’, ‘left’ as ‘lft’, and ‘enemy’ as ‘nme’. Some research suggests letter name knowledge can interfere with children’s ability to apply the alphabetic principle. Kids must recognise letters, but is letter name knowledge essential in Foundation, especially for at-risk kids who are easily confused by too much information?

‘The most common sound each letter represents’ isn’t always what you might think. Fry’s 1966 large phoneme-grapheme count found 1801 instances of the letter Y as in ‘very’ (/ee/ sound), 211 of Y as in ‘my’ (/ie/ sound), 100 of Y as in ‘system’ (/i/ sound) and only 53 instances of Y as in ‘yard’. The letter O represented /oe/ as in ‘open’ 1876 times, /u/ as in ‘other’ 1723 times, and /o/ as in ‘not’ 1558 times in this count. Our National Curriculum needs to be more precise about sound-spelling relationships.

Write consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words by representing sounds with the appropriate letters, and blend sounds associated with letters when reading CVC words. AC9EFLY12

If taught well, most Foundation kids can also learn to read and spell at least VC, CVCC and CCVC words like ‘in’, ‘at’, ‘help’ and ‘from’. Many can even spell /sh/, /ch/, /th/ and /ng/, though the National Curriculum doesn’t count these as consonants, which it defines as: “All letters of the alphabet that are not vowels. The 21 consonants are b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z”. Yet ‘vowel’ and ‘consonant’ are terms from linguistics for speech sounds, of which there are 44 in General Australian English.

Use knowledge of letters and sounds to spell words. (AC9EFLY13)

I guess it doesn’t hurt to state this while there are still kids out there being asked to memorise high-frequency word lists. But which letters, sounds and types of words?

Read and write some high-frequency words, and other familiar words (AC9EFLY14)

Which high-frequency words? How many? Three? Fifty? How many other familiar words?

Understand that words are units of meaning and can be made of more than one meaningful part (AC9EFLY15)

Which prefixes and suffixes should be taught in Foundation? Will teachers using lists like the Oxford Wordlist start teaching how words are built? The Oxford Wordlist includes ‘lot’ and ‘lots’, ‘cousin’ and ‘cousins’, ‘live’ and ‘lived’, ‘play’, ‘played’, ‘playing’ and ‘playground’, and ‘friend’, ‘friends’ and ‘friend’s’, as though they’re unrelated words.
Blend, segment, read and spell at least 90% of vowel-consonant (VC), CVC, CVCC and CCVC words containing the following sound-spelling relationships:

Vowel sounds as in ‘at’, ‘red’, ‘him’, ‘on’, ‘up’, ‘put’.

Consonant sounds as in ‘bib‘, ‘cat’, ‘did‘, ‘frog’, ‘got’, ‘him’, ‘jump’, ‘kit’, ‘leg’, ‘mum‘, ‘nest’, ‘pop‘, ‘run’, ‘sift’, ‘is‘, ‘ten’, ‘vet’, ‘win’, ‘yet’, ‘zip’, ‘shop’, ‘chin’, ‘thin’, ‘them’, ‘swing‘.

Blend, segment, read and spell at least 60% of words with:

CCVCC, CCCVC and CVCCC structures and the above sound-spelling relationships.

Position-related consonant spellings as in ‘quit’, ‘box‘, ‘off’, ‘well‘, ‘mess‘, ‘buzz‘, ‘luck‘, catch, dodge, ‘when’, ‘bank’, ‘solve‘.

Inflectional suffixes: regular plural (s, es), past tense (ed), third person (s, es), present progressive (ing), possessive (‘s, ‘), comparative (er), superlative (est), past participle (en).

Derivational suffixes: agent noun (er), adjective (y), adverb (ly).

Final syllable -le as in bottle.

Contractions as in ‘isn’t‘, ‘can’t‘, ‘don’t, ‘it‘s‘.

Read at least 60% of these not-yet-fully-decodable words in connected text:
the, we, she, he, me, be, a, of, are, you, your, for, or, more, before, her, sister, over, under, after, were, to, do, who, two, room, zoo, too, soon, what, was, want, where, there, here,
came, name, made, make, ate, I, like, time, side, so, go, no, home, hope, one, once, love, some, come, say, day, play, they, boy, toy, now, down, new, few, out, our, house, about, found, first, girl, car, park, look, good, book, could, should, would,
saw, all, call, ball, my, by, try, very, only, family, happy, see, been, three, sleep, eat, real, said, because, school, friend.

If you’re in Melbourne and your Year 1 or 2 child can’t do the things in the right-hand column above, you might like to bring them to one our school holiday groups.

It’s up to each state to interpret the National Curriculum, so they can add more clarity and specificity, I guess. Two states – NSW and SA – now test all Year 1 students’ phonics skills, and there is a free, online Australian Year 1 Phonics Check available for anyone to use, along with a phonics progression.

My own state, Victoria, has devised its own, watered-down version of the Year 1 Phonics Check (10 questions not 40). I agree with critics’ description of this: hopeless, and encourage Victorians to tell the current Parliamentary Inquiry into the state education system this, and whatever else you think needs saying, before 13th October. We’re supposed to be the Education State, but our Education department is still recommending the use of Running Records, and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority website still promotes guessing words from pictures and first letters. The picture and black text annotation below is a screenshot from the VCAA website (the cranky red additions are mine).

Year 1 children’s word-level reading and spelling skills will probably only be assessed consistently across the country if this becomes part of NAPLAN. In the meantime, the growing number of teachers around the country who understand learning science (often thanks to grassroots groups like RSS, TFE or SBP) will keep setting high, SMART reading and spelling goals for young learners, teaching directly, explicitly and systematically, and checking their progress with more valid and reliable assessments than Running Records. I just wish they had more system-wide clarity and help.

Photo at top: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-oyqyx

Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference: day 3

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I’ve finally found time to summarise the sessions I attended on the last day of the SSSR conference. Here’s what I learnt (sorry if I’ve misunderstood anything).

Parent advocacy about literacy in preschools

Dr Stacey Campbell from Queensland University of Technology said preschool teachers report increasing pressure from parents to teach literacy skills. She collected data about parents’ literacy beliefs and expectations from six early childhood services, using a survey and follow-up interviews.

Most parents agreed that both phonics and what Dr Campbell called play-literacy learning (I’m not sure exactly what that includes) were important. Parents of kids in school-based settings were more likely to endorse formal phonics instruction. Most parents wanted play-literacy, rhymes and name writing (poor little Phoebe, Niamh, Jose and Xavier). At home, they used a range of home literacy practices, as per the above graph (sorry it’s a little blurry). I was a bit sad to see that the most common home literacy practice was “recites and sings the alphabet song”, having known so many learners who get letter names and sounds mixed up.

Dr Campbell was asked what preschools in Australia are required to teach regarding literacy. She said we have an early years learning framework, but it’s very generalised/broad/open to interpretation, and what’s taught can depend on whether the educator has a degree or a diploma.

Implementing the Ontario Right To Read report

In February 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission released the Right To Read report, finding that reading instruction in Ontario was not meeting student needs. It made 157 recommendations e.g. stop using leveled readers, cueing, and running records, and introduce phonemic awareness and phonics work with decodable text, plus screeners, small group (Tier 2), and individualised (Tier 3) intervention.

A/Prof Deanna Friesen from the University of Western Ontario surveyed 30 teachers about their level of confidence in implementing the report’s recommendations. Beliefs were raised as one major barrier, but respondents felt teachers would try things they thought would make a difference. Other major barriers were lack of training and resources, and class sizes. Providing relevant training and resources were considered the most likely facilitators of change.

Some of the teachers surveyed had done evidence-aligned training since the release of the report, more than half with external providers. Some had funds to buy evidence-aligned resources, but some did not. Some had good resources, but didn’t know how to use them, or feel they had time to learn.

Teachers commented that initial teacher preparation needs to improve, as they paid for their degrees, but didn’t get value. They wanted training including coaching, support and concrete examples at school level. They wanted the school system to provide a list of quality training and resources, and relevant funding, rather than teachers having to find, and sometimes fund, training and resources themselves.

Dr Friesen said the Right To Read report had been an influential catalyst, but implementation will depend on listening to educators about their needs for success. The new 2023 Ontario Language Curriculum is better aligned with scientific research than previous versions, but Ontario school boards have a lot of control, which leads to variability in teaching, and sometimes non-co-operation with top-down directives.

Reciprocal learning relationships in reading and maths

Prof Arne Lervåg of the University of Oslo spoke about statistical models for measuring reciprocal relationships between phonological awareness and beginning word reading, and between Approximate Number Sense (e.g. having a rough idea which picture has the most dots) and number knowledge.

569 Brisbane beginning readers’ skills were measured five times at six month intervals, and the data analysed. The results support a causal relationship between phonemic awareness and word reading in the early school years, but (surprisingly) not between Approximate Number Sense and number knowledge.

Gail Gillon and Brigid McNeill of the Better Start Literacy Approach at the conference

Aotearoa/NZ Better Start Literacy Approach

Prof Gail Gillon of Canterbury University spoke about the implementation of the Better Start Literacy Approach with five-year-olds across Aotearoa/New Zealand. Both the World Health Organisation and the UN are calling for systems-wide action on literacy teaching. COVID-19 had profound adverse effects, especially for poorer kids. Advocacy for the science of reading across schools is critical.

Better Start uses a “Braided Rivers” approach, taking into account indigenous and scientific knowledge, and has ecological, cognitive and psychological streams. Culturally responsive teaching practices and resources, positive learning experiences and family engagement are key in high deprivation contexts. A strengths-based approach is needed, with quality professional development, and online assessments adapted for children with special needs.

Better Start was developed between 2015 and 2019. Feedback from schools about its positive impact led to its national rollout commencing in 2020. It’s now used in more than 833 schools, especially in high deprivation areas. 36,500 teachers and literacy specialists have done Better Start online training, for which they are awarded a micro-credential. They are required to pass the course, which provides some quality control. The training is professionally-produced, with subtitled videos, and available to all professions.

Tier 1 structured lesson plans are implemented four times weekly from school entry until the end of grade 2. See photo at right for the lesson components. They’ve developed and provide culturally relevant Ready To Read Phonic Plus readers, plus there are some free online readers.

In the first 10 weeks of the program, Tier 1 of Better Start aimed for 30 minute lessons per day. Most teachers managed this, with 80+% including all key lesson components.

In one research cohort, 28% of children could identify initial phonemes at school entry. After 10 weeks of teaching, this rose to 72%. About 20% of kids could blend phonemes at school entry, but 57% after 10 weeks of teaching. Children from Maori and Pacific Islander backgrounds began with lower skills, but caught up with peers.

Children start school on their fifth birthday in Aotearoa/NZ, so teachers are used to scaffolding/differentiating to support new children, and this is a key part of the Better Start program. Schools are now usually choosing between Reading Recovery and Better Start. Reading Recovery is in decline, with only 41% of schools, whereas 46% of schools are now doing Better Start.

Selfie with David Kilpatrick, who very kindly gave me lifts to and from the conference venue, and made a lot of driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road jokes.

Phonemic Proficiency and word reading skills

Dr David Kilpatrick from the State University of New York at Cortland has been working with the WIAT-IV test developer and a statistician on a timed Phonemic Proficiency subtest involving phonemic manipulation. Remembering written words requires rapid and automatic access to their sound structure, in order to link sound to print.

Pseudoword decoding subtest results were the strongest predictor of performance on word-level reading subtests and the oral reading fluency test, though phonemic proficiency scores added some validity for ages 12-17.

Set for Variability: relationship to word complexity and grade/age

Set for Variability (SfV) is the ability to figure out a word’s actual pronunciation from the way it’s said when it’s decoded (the “spelling pronunciation”). SfV is a robust predictor reading skills.

When children start learning to read words with more than one syllable, they have to contend with unstressed syllables, syllable boundaries, and words with prefixes and suffixes, all of which can make decoding words harder. If one pronunciation doesn’t make sense, the child has to try another pronunciation. It’s a mystery why some kids do this easily, and others don’t.

A/Prof Laura Steacy of the Florida Centre for Reading Research discussed studies with school beginners and grades 2-5 students which examined how well SfV predicted word reading skill. SfV was more important for the older children, which might be related to having had experience of reading instruction. The transparency of words also made a difference.

She said there were three main developmental hypotheses about SfV:

  1. It’s highly related to phonological processing, through the process of phonological clean-up.
  2. It’s a metalinguistic skill, and significantly overlaps with phonemic awareness and vocabulary.
  3. It captures dynamic changes in word reading, and has a bidirectional relationship with word reading.

The results of the studies A/Prof Steacy discussed tend to support hypothesis 3.

I’m not sure I’ve done this paper justice, so if you have questions, please ask lsteacy@fcrr.org.

Pronunciation correction and Set for Variability

I accosted Devin Kearns to say my friend in Aotearoa/NZ Voon Pang and I are big fans of his work on syllables, and got a selfie.

Mispronunciation Correction Tasks (MCTs) are used to evaluate a reader’s Set for Variability, and are strongly correlated with polysyllable word recognition. Most polysyllable words contain something, usually a vowel, needing phonological cleanup (e.g. changed stress).

A/Prof Devin Kearns of the University of Connecticut’s research explored whether this is because SfV gives the reader access to a word’s phonology and semantics, or whether orthographic information plays a greater role.

When children sound out a word incorrectly, they can correct it by trying (a) different sound(s), or using knowledge of vocabulary and/or phonotactics/orthotactics (permissible sound/letter sequences). Kearns developed an Incorrect Pronunciation Correction Task (IPCT) using words/pseudowords differing by one phoneme. The incorrect part of the mispronunciation had a different spelling from the target word (e.g. “planket” for blanket). Sometimes a sound’s manner was changed (e.g. a stop sound became a fricative), in others a sound’s place in the mouth was changed (e.g. alveolar to velar), and in others voicing was changed.

117 grade 3 and 4 children’s IPCT scores didn’t predict their word reading better than their MCT scores. This suggests SfV has an orthographic component, and that print and sound continue to interact in the process of decoding words. Item analysis showed kids could correct a word more easily if a sound’s manner changed (e.g. /t/ to /s/), rather than changing its place (/t/ to /p/) or voicing (/t/ to /d/).

Eye tracking evidence of mispronunciation correction

Eye movements give clues to cognitive processes during reading. The eyes fixate for longer, and look back more, at long, uncommon or unfamiliar words. Dr Lyndall Murray from Macquarie University explored whether kids’ eye movements suggest they are correcting mispronunciations as they read.

Four classes of Year 5 students were taught 16 novel spoken words used at ‘Professor Parsnip’s invention factory’. Each class learnt a different pronunciation of the words. For example, one class saw a picture of a contraption with an arm and a sponge for cleaning fishtanks, and were told it was called a ‘vake’. Another class was told it was called a ‘vike’. They then had to read the words, and a set of untrained words, in sentences that included contextual information e.g. ‘The fish in the dirty tank swam around the vaik as it worked’, and in neutral sentences. For the kids told it was a ‘vake’, the spelling of the word was considered regular. For the kids told the machine was a ‘vike’, the spelling was considered irregular.

The children’s eye movements, as well as their audible mispronunciation corrections, suggested that they were correcting mispronunciations when reading irregular words, even when reading silently. This research has been published here, if you’d like to find out more.

Tessa Daffern with manuals for her new, online-scored Early Years and Years 3-6 Components of Spelling Tests. She also has a personal spelling &vocabulary book – see photo below.

Targeted and explicit spelling teaching

Spelling is important for its own sake, but also in compositional writing, with 24-43% of the variance in NAPLAN writing data explained by spelling. It is more influential than grammar or punctuation.

Dr Tessa Daffern of the University of Canberra researched the usefulness of spelling error analysis data in teaching spelling. A 10-week intervention study involved 572 Year 3-6 students in 31 classes across four schools.

Teachers from two schools participated in intensive professional learning about spelling informed by Triple Word Form Theory, which proposes that children draw on phonological, orthographic and morphological knowledge from when they first begin to learn to spell. These teachers then used spelling error analysis to plan and implement spelling instruction. Short, sharp, focussed teaching took 15-20 minutes per day. The intervention included spaced learning/review so there were opportunities to consolidate skills, handwriting activities, visible learning intentions and immediate, specific and ongoing feedback.

Teachers from the two other schools taught spelling in a ‘business as usual’ way, for about 30-60 minutes per week. Teaching was mostly via rote-learning and/or incidental phonics, although one teacher was interested in and knowledgeable about spelling, and used spelling error analysis to inform teaching. Two classes had no spelling instruction.

The intervention groups’ spelling improved significantly. Only one comparison class had significantly improved spelling: the one whose teacher used spelling error analysis to inform teaching (surprise, not).

More thoughts on Set for Variability

Professor Anne Castles from the new Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy at ACU was the discussant for the sessions about Set for Variability. She spoke about Carsten Elbro’s hypothesis that we store a ‘spelling pronunciation’ (how you’d sound a word out when first encountering it) for a word when we learn its printed form. It’s hard to test whether this is actually stored in the lexicon, or assembled on the fly by converting graphemes to phonemes, but that could be tested with timed tasks in the lab.

Lots of research on Set for Variability has been done on adults, but it’s hard to know how relevant this is to children, who have smaller vocabularies and less reading experience. However, it’s clear that Set for Variability is not just an oral language Thing.

Carsten Elbro pointed out that people who speak different variants of English can still talk to each other fluently. We aren’t phased when a New Zealander counts “one, two, three, four, five, sex”, because we’re aware of pronunciation differences, and also different word choices e.g. “lift” versus “elevator”. We can think of learning orthography as being similar to learning a dialect or variant of the language. What we try to learn is the dialect of orthography – a different sort of language that speaks from the book – so that we can ‘speak orthographic’.

The last five conference sessions I attended were all presented by researchers from La Trobe University’s Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) lab.

Problematic ideas about the teaching of reading

Dr Nathaniel Swain from the SOLAR lab conducted a review of highly cited papers and reference books about the teaching of reading. He found that popular texts for teachers, such as The Next Step in Guided Reading, The Daily Five and Reading Strategies, often contain non-evidence-aligned ideas, and ideas that directly contradict scientific reading research e.g. three-cueing, guided reading, teaching a ‘range of reading strategies’, and teaching a love of/joy in reading rather than relevant skills. A common theme is hostility to systematic, explicit, teacher-led instruction.

It’s very concerning that such texts are still popular among teachers, and on reading lists for Initial Teacher Preparation courses. More research is needed into teacher beliefs and ideas which inform practice. Teacher-centred practice studies, research syntheses for teachers, and observational studies of classroom practice in research-aligned schools are also needed to bridge the gap between research and teacher professional discourse.

Teacher perspectives on reading comprehension

Reid Smith from the SOLAR lab and Ochre Education (an amazing Australian not-for-profit/free resource hub, created by and for teachers) wanted to find out what the average Australian upper primary school teacher knows and does about reading comprehension.

In early 2020 he used a web-based survey to collect data from 284 Australian primary school teachers. This was built on the Propositions About Reading Instruction Inventory (Rupley and Logan 1985), and asked about:

  • teachers’ beliefs about reading comprehension.
  • their instructional practices and apportionment of time to teaching reading comprehension.
  • their use of commercial reading programs.
  • how they gained their knowledge about reading instruction.

There didn’t seem to be a commonly agreed view of how reading comprehension develops, how to monitor progress, or what teaching should look like in practice. Teachers mixed and matched strategies into a real bricolage. About 40% reported a student-centred approach, another 40% were more content-centred, and some teachers were in both camps.

Assessment practices were also variable e.g. some teachers thought reading for enjoyment was a good measure of reading comprehension. Only 3.7% of teachers said their pre-service education was where they got their knowledge about reading comprehension instruction. 5.3% said they got their knowledge from reading coaches, and 42% from their own research. About two thirds of schools had commercial programs, but there was a lack of coherence between Tiers.

There seems to be no clear and common set of beliefs and practices that underpin reading comprehension instruction in Australian schools. A journal article about this research can be found here.

Running records

Tanya Serry

Running Records are widely used to assess children’s reading, though they’re steeped in discredited ideas, concerns have long been expressed about their validity and reliability, and they have very little empirical support. A/Prof Tanya Serry from the SOLAR lab conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 teachers and 16 education academics about the utility of Running Records, and analysed the data for common themes.

Three teachers and four academics thought Running Records were valuable in describing children’s reading progress, and guiding ongoing instruction. 16 teachers and 12 academics opposed the continued use of Running Records because of their association with discredited ideas about reading, flawed psychometric properties and poor objectivity. However, some people had no idea what else to use.

More work is needed to ensure theoretically sound reading assessments are used instead of Running Records in Australian schools.

Literacy interventions for struggling adolescents

10-30% of adolescent students are unable to access the secondary school curriculum because they can’t read well enough. They’re in every secondary classroom, and under-achieve at school, and long-term. Many secondary teachers don’t have access to the evidence about how to close the literacy gap between these students and their peers, and there’s limited policy direction to guide them.

Melanie Henry from the SOLAR lab, who also works with education research and consulting group Learning First, conducted an umbrella review of evidence available to teachers of teens with poor literacy. She synthesised 10 review articles, coding literacy intervention, primary studies, setting, agent, group size, dosage, social validity (or the kids won’t show up and the teachers won’t do it), maintenance effects/longevity of skill improvement, findings and recommendations for practice.

She found huge gaps in the research. It suggested that older students need 1:1 teaching, but it was hard to draw conclusions about other things. She will now conduct a qualitative study with secondary teachers to find out about current intervention practices in schools.

Higher education students’ literacy skills

Literacy proficiency is required for academic success in higher education. About 40% of Australian secondary students are struggling according to PISA, and their skills have been declining over time. 50% of Australian secondary students now go on to higher education. It’s to be expected that some students in higher education are struggling with literacy.

Emina McLean of the SOLAR lab conducted an online survey and follow-up semi-structured interviews with university education academics about the literacy skills of tertiary students. She found that academics are concerned, especially about writing, and note a decline in skills over time. Undergraduates’ skills are worse than postgraduates’ skills. Of the 17 academics interviewed, most said students are not arriving ready for the reading and writing requirements of higher education.

And that’s a wrap! Sorry there aren’t many photos, I planned to take more at the conference dinner on the last night, but fell ill. It was a great conference, and if anyone can think of a good excuse for me to go to Denmark for the next one, even though I’m not a reading researcher, I’m all ears.

Chances are your child’s school uses programs which lack strong evidence to support teaching: what parents should know

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Photo: screenshot from the article discussed below, which is fair use under the Trade Practices Act as reporting the news.

An article appeared in The Conversation last week called “Chances are your child’s school uses commercial programs to support teaching: what parents should know“.

At first I did a double-take. Parents should be aware, and very concerned, about the variable quality of literacy-teaching programs and approaches used in Australian schools. Many parents now know this, thanks to activism by parent, teacher and other professional groups, plus US journalist Emily Hanford’s brilliant reporting on what’s known generally as Balanced Literacy, and specifically programs by Marie Clay, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell and Lucy Caulkins.

Fountas and Pinnell’s Benchmark Assessment System and Classroom and Leveled Literacy Intervention programs, Caulkins’s Units of Study programs (all sold in Australia by Pearson), and other Balanced Literacy approaches (e.g. three-cueing, Running Records, Guided Reading, rote-memorisation of high-frequency wordlists), are widely used in Australia. A few Australian schools might still use Clay’s Reading Recovery program, despite recent research showing its long-term impact, and petitions like this one from my local Dyslexia Victoria Support (please sign if you’re in Victoria). Caulkins has now seen the scientific writing on the wall, and added systematic phonics to her early years program, but I’m not rushing out to buy it.

However, The Conversation’s authors last week, three Education academics from Edith Cowan University in WA, were not objecting to poor quality programs. They were objecting to commercial programs.

Are they just anti-commerce?

Are the authors anti-commerce in general? Do they grow their own food and make their own clothes, avoiding the stench of filthy lucre? Maybe they think all educational programs should be free. This would make writing programs the province of overworked teachers and the independently wealthy. Is earning a living writing educational programs wrong? Aren’t teachers entitled to the best available tools?

The article’s stated concern is that “the content and the way students are being taught is outsourced to a third-party provider, who is not your child’s teacher.” Interesting use of the passive tense. Outsourced by whom? Are they seriously suggesting that teachers should make, not buy, all programs? What about programs consistent with the best available scientific evidence, and extensively classroom-tested? Do they seriously think it’s OK for the nation’s children to be here’s-a-program-I-made-earlier guinea pigs?

Well, no. They write:

It is easy to see why schools use commercial programs. They offer efficient, consistent delivery of content across year levels. They also save teachers planning time and come with ready-made resources for lessons.

But schools often adopt these programs to reduce workload or because they have become widely accepted by other schools, rather than investigating whether they are endorsed and peer-reviewed by Australian or international education experts.

The evidence pyramid

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I did another double-take. Programs “endorsed and peer-reviewed by experts” are the best schools can do?? But expert opinion is right at the bottom of the evidence pyramid. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but experts get stuff wrong all the time. We’re talking about the nation’s kiddies here. I respectfully submit that schools should focus on evidence from (ideally) the top of the evidence pyramid, much of which is readily accessible in plain-English explanations like this one from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. We should all simply ignore experts when they disagree with the best available scientific evidence.

I’m sorry, but what exactly is being argued?

The Edith Cowan academics’ article goes on to argue against (strongly evidence-based) direct instruction because of “broad understanding” that play-based experiences are better. What exactly is “broad understanding”? Once upon a time, we had a broad understanding that the earth was flat.

It says using a commercial program limits a teacher’s ability to meet individual needs. I would have thought that not staying up all night writing programs, or having to think through every aspect of their delivery, would help rather than hinder a teacher’s ability to differentiate.

And then the old chestnut: commercial programs are “taking autonomy away from teachers, while devaluing their professional knowledge and skills”. Is teacher autonomy really a core value for parents? Do the authors realise that highly-valued, knowledgeable and skilled professionals like surgeons and engineers can’t just do what they like? They must keep their checklists and procedures strictly aligned with current research and best practice, lest they be sued for malpractice or build something that falls down and kills people. Yet they’re still highly valued.

The article says teachers receive evidence-based training at university. The 2021 report of the Quality Teacher Education Review disagreed, and recommended universities improve (among other things) what they teach about reading, including phonemic awareness and phonics as essential in the early years.

Like most unconvincing articles, this one wraps up with a grab bag of unsubstantiated claims: commercial programs are generic, repetitive, irrelevant, and make it hard for kids to learn “at their natural pace” (does this mean “let the slower kids go slow?” Surely that’s a recipe for letting them fall further behind?). They could harm engagement and social and emotional development. Hmm. Links provided are to very general articles about good practice, but no research highlighting the evils of commercial programs in schools.

Hooray for all the teachers who know better, and are doing better

The teachers I talk to are hungry for information about evidence-based practice, and determined to be accountable to their students and the wider community. They’re joining groups like Reading Science in Schools in droves, and booking out Sharing Best Practice and ResearchEd events. They’re critically evaluating the programs available in their schools, dumping poor-quality ones, and replacing them with better quality programs. Some of these are free, and some are bought with money (AKA commercial).

These teachers are amazing, parents should know about them, and we should all be cheering them on.

Does this child need formal assessment?

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Photo: Bulat Khamitov, www.pexels.com/photo/a-boy-leaning-on-the-table-4547163

It’s the last week of term here in wintry Melbourne, and many parents will be getting school reports saying their child has some reading and/or spelling difficulties, and suggesting further assessment.

Others will be worrying about their child’s skills, but being advised to wait and see if they catch up. Children often don’t catch up, and waiting for them to do so can waste valuable early intervention time.

A full developmental and educational assessment needs to be done by a psychologist, but can be quite expensive, and there are usually long waiting lists. If you think your child might have dyslexia/dysgraphia, please make sure your child does at least six months of high-quality intervention before seeking a diagnostic assessment, as that’s one of the diagnostic criteria for Specific Learning Disorder.

Speech pathologists can assess speech-language related aspects of reading and spelling, and provide recommendations, but again there’s usually a wait (though we have a few appointments available in North Fitzroy in the holidays, contact us here to find out more). Special educators can also assist with many assessments, but again those in the private sector often have long waiting lists, and if they’re school-based, they’re probably about to go on holidays.

If booking an assessment, make sure you find out how long it will take, what it will cover/include and how much it will cost beforehand. You don’t want to spend $1000+ on a 50-page report you don’t really understand, containing so many recommendations that you don’t know where to start.

AUSPELD online screener and parent website

The AUSPELD website has a useful Next Steps Screening Tool designed to help parents work out whether to seek formal assessment and/or intervention for their child.

AUSPELD’s Understanding Learning Difficulties for Parents website also contains great information to help parents understand children’s learning difficulties, and think about what to do and who can help.

Words read accurately in a minute

The number of words a child can read accurately in a minute is a useful litmus test of whether a child may have a reading problem requiring further investigation. In very general terms (see detailed norms here), by the end of Grade 1 (second year of schooling), children should be able to read an age-level text at something like 50-60 words per minute, or one word per second. This should increase to about 80-100 words per minute by the end of Grade 2, and about 110-120 words per minute by the end of Grade 3.

By the end of primary school children should be able to read at around 150 words per minute. This is about a normal conversational speech rate, though of course auctioneers and people in paid political advertisements speak much faster. Our brains like to process language at about conversational speed, and find it harder to comprehend if it’s a lot slower. Try slowing a podcast down to 75% to experience this. It makes me want to throw my phone across the room.

Highly skilled readers can read much faster than people usually speak, up to 240-300 words per minute, though it depends on what they’re reading. A trashy novel is easier than a complex scientific article.

Don’t wait-to-fail

If your child seems to have a problem with reading and/or spelling, please don’t wait to see if they grow out of it. They might not, and reading and spelling are essential skills for school and life success.