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PETAA’s Authentic Texts to Support Teaching Phonics

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The Primary English Teaching Association of Australia has produced a new, downloadable list of Authentic Texts To Support Teaching Phonics, which:

“…maps examples of rich authentic texts to the Federal Government’s Literacy Hub phonics progression, which presents a structured sequence of letter–sound correspondences and phonics skills for development across Foundation to Year 2. This free download provides early years teachers around Australia with a quality text list for teacher read alouds that support the phonics instruction that they’ve done that day/week.”

The guide is a downloadable spreadsheet listing phonics targets and books to support them. Here’s a screenshot of how it starts:

I’m so happy that PETAA recognises ‘Systematic, direct and explicit teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics is more likely to result in successful literacy outcomes’, so I was keen to see what kind of books they recommend to support this teaching. I popped into my local kids’ bookshop and bought three of the first six titles on their list.

PETAA recommends these books to support teaching of the the earliest sound-letter relationships in the Literacy Hub phonics teaching sequence, which I write as s/snake, a/apple, t/tiger, p/penguin, i/insect and n/noodles (AKA satpin, I use the reference words from our Embedded Picture Mnemonics, which help little kids remember sound-letter links). These are the first sound-letter relationships taught to five-year-olds in VC and CVC words (V=vowel, C=consonant) in this teaching sequence, and several others. Children are also taught four high-frequency words in this Phase: ‘is’, ‘a’, ‘I’ and ‘the’.

I did some word counts so I could figure out how many words a child taught these phonics and high-frequency word targets should be able to read in each of the three books I bought.

Hedgehog or Echidna?

• 573 total words
• 11 Decodable VC words (2 X ‘at’, 3 X ‘it’, and 6 X ‘in’)
• 0 decodable CVC words
• 57 pre-taught high-frequency words: 57 (14 X ‘is’, 19 X ‘a’, 12 X ‘I’, 12 X ‘the’).

Turbo Turtle

• 973 total words
• 31 decodable VC words (9 X ‘at’, 1 X ‘an’, 10 X ‘it’, 11 X ‘in’)
• 0 decodable CVC words
• 71 pre-taught high-frequency words (5 X ‘is’, 17 X ‘a’, 2 X “I”, 47 ‘the’).

Give me some Space!

• 1007 total words
• 47 decodable VC words (5 X ‘at’, 8 X ‘an’, 11 X ‘it’, 23 X ‘in’)
• 0 decodable CVC words
• 88 pre-taught high-frequency words (18 X ‘is’, 17 X ‘a’, 8 X “I”, 45 X ‘the’).

The only readable words in these books for the target beginners are prepositions, pronouns, articles and auxiliary verbs, i.e. unstressed function words that glue sentences together, but don’t mean much on their own. Interrupting a rollicking story to allow children to read such words just seems tedious and confusing.

A young child focussing on a storybook’s print (which young kids are disinclined to do) and thinking about phonics, rather than looking at the pictures and listening to the story, will be able to see lots of letters ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘t’, ‘p’, ‘i’ and ‘n’ in any book. But can they connect these letters to sounds in spoken words at story pace? When nobody is pointing to each word as it’s read? Srsly?

Stopping a good story to talk about phonics seems more likely to annoy children than help them, but anyway, let’s keep thinking about this. The PETAA list of Authentic texts to support teaching phonics includes example words which illustrate letter-sound relationships. Here’s a screenshot of the list for teaching about s/snake, a/apple, t/tiger, p/penguin, i/insect and n/noodles (in that order):

As you can see, the list includes s/scent, a/astronomical, a/gravity, a/intergalactic, t/turbo-charged, t/nectar, i/cylindrical, i/familiar, p/palomino, p/pinto, and n/nectar again. Interrupting a good story to talk about a letter-sound relationship in a probably-unfamiliar and/or polysyllabic word? Hmm. Not likely to win anyone Most Favoured Teacher Status.

You might have also noticed ‘a/astronauting’ on the list, which the Macquarie Dictionary says is not a real word. The list also suggests that a/after is pronounced like a/apple in Australian English (it’s not), that there’s a t/tiger sound in ‘clutched’* (there isn’t), and that we say/hear an i/insect sound in the second, unstressed syllables of ‘rabbit’ and ‘hermit’ (nope, it’s a schwa).

Teachers should read great storybooks aloud to little kids to boost their oral language skills and share knowledge and enjoyment.

They should give little kids decodable text so they can practise the skills taught in phonics lessons.

There’s no need to mix up these two very different types of books.

_{* If you’ve studied phonology, you’ll know that the sound /ch/ starts off as /t/ and is released as /sh/, so technically it does contain a /t/ sound, but that’s slicing it too finely for children. For them, ‘tch’ is just the main way we spell /ch/ after a ‘short’ or ‘checked’ vowel, as in batch, fetch, itch, scotch, hutch. You can see what the Macquarie Dictionary says about the pronunciation of ‘clutch’ at right.}