Free Learning Difficulties Including Dyslexia webinars

La Trobe University and the Victorian Department of Education have this year collaborated to run workshops across Victoria about learning difficulties including dyslexia. The workshops have been available to teachers and other Department of Education staff.

The information from these workshops is now being made available free online via YouTube as webinars. Wow. Amazingly generous of both the University and the Department, since most professional development of this type and quality is paywalled. So thanks to all involved.

The webinars are presented by Dr Tanya Serry from La Trobe University, and the workshops on which they are based were developed with Professor Pamela Snow, Ms Emina McLean and Assistant Professor Jane McCormack also from La Trobe, and Dr Lorraine Hammond from Edith Cowan University in WA. Continue reading →

The definition of decoding (or “glamping with David Hornsby”)

8 Replies

Last May, educational consultant David Hornsby spoke at Sydney University about “The Role of Phonics in Learning to be Literate”, and his talk was recorded and put on YouTube.

I recently heard from the Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy Network that the video was being shared widely by teachers on social media. So I took a look.

Mr Hornsby begins by explaining that his definition of decoding is “making meaning or comprehending”. Here’s his slide saying this, in case you think I made it up:

In the solidly-evidence-based Simple View of Reading, the term “decoding” usually means word identification, whether this is achieved by sounding out words, or instantly and without conscious effort, once a familiar word’s spelling, pronunciation and meaning are bonded in memory (via orthographic mapping, or in dual route models, via the lexical route).

Sometimes researchers use “decoding” to mean only sounding out words, but in both its broader and narrower definitions in the reading research, decoding’s key focus is linking print to speech.

Decoding is not about semantics, syntax or context, which fall on the Language Comprehension side of the Simple View of Reading equation (Decoding multiplied by Language Comprehension equals Reading Comprehension). Continue reading →

Dyslexia Victoria Support volunteers win Premier’s award

A Simple View of the Phonics Debate

7 Replies

If you missed last week’s ACE/CIS Phonics Debate, you can still watch it online, and read these interesting blog posts about it:

The ‘Phonics Debate’: a lesson in irony
Phonics science v/s “the feels”,
Science v/s slurs: The Phonics Debate, and the delightful follow-up Phonics Advocates Have Something To Sell, and
Phonics debate embracing the evidence.

Prof Pamela Snow’s latest blog post isn’t about the debate, but instead directly addresses the future with an open letter to student teachers.

The debate took me back to my halcyon, pimply youth at Warrnambool High School, where our public speaking teacher, Mrs Melican, used to say, “You don’t win a debate by ignoring the topic and debating something else”.

The Phonics Debate’s topic was “Phonics in context is not enough: synthetic phonics and learning to read”. The theoretical backdrop to this is the robust, evidence-based Simple View of Reading, first proposed by Gough and Tunmer in 1986, showing that reading comprehension is the product of two separate skills: decoding and listening comprehension.

Here’s my favourite analogy for the Simple View of Reading: reading comprehension (RC, apparently AKA in the Ed Biz as “meaning-making”) is the gold in a treasure chest with two separate locks: a decoding lock (D) and a listening comprehension (LC) lock. Continue reading →

Pom pom phonemes

2 Replies

For a while I’ve been trying to think of a good way to represent individual sounds in words (phonemes) in a video.

First I tried using my toy fruit and vegetables. These showed nicely that actual productions of a phoneme (allophones) can be slightly different. A cob of corn is still a cob of corn, whatever its size or shape. An /n/ sound is still /n/, no matter where it’s found in a word.

Continue reading →

Dyslexie font, coloured overlays and Irlen Syndrome

25 Replies

One of the excellent Dyslexia Victoria Support folk was telling me the other day that she’s planning to write to public libraries asking them to stock decodable books.

This seems to work. All my local Yarra, Darebin and Moreland libraries now have some books with simplified spellings for beginning and/or struggling readers.

The DVS person was thinking about how libraries can help people with dyslexia because she found the following information on the Moreland website:

Of course this information is well-intended, but it’s not well-informed. Continue reading →

Nobody advocates phonics-only literacy instruction

9 Replies

An important article by Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle and Kate Nation summarising the process of learning to read from novice to expert, and seeking to end the “reading wars”, has just been published.

It’s written in plain English and freely available online. It says that phonemic awareness and phonics are vital and central during the early stages of learning to read, but that a lot of other things are involved in becoming a proficient reader. Please read it and share the link around.

Of course, the media’s antennae tend to be tuned to conflict not consensus, so one newspaper reports this with the headline, “Call off the reading wars, phonics wins: study“. The ABC also interviewed one of the authors, Anne Castles, who said a lot of tremendously sensible things as she always does (you can hear her in a radio report here), and also sought comment from Dr Paul Gardner of Curtin University’s School of Education.

Re ending the “reading wars” he said that, “the problem was with those who advocate phonics as the only approach” and added that “They tend to be people with no classroom experience … from speech pathology, cognitive psychology and think tanks”.

Now, I know not everything is about me, but I reckon I’m probably one of the people he is talking about, since I write a widely-read blog about phonics and am a speech pathologist.

If I wrote a blog about cycling, I’d be very surprised to hear anyone claim I was advocating cycling as the only means of transport. If I wrote a blog about pineapples, I doubt anyone would infer that I was advocating a pineapples-only diet. Continue reading →

Spelfabet

Learning the building blocks of words – sounds, their spellings, and word parts