Spelfabet

Free learning difficulties screener

For my sins, I’m now the President of SPELD-Victoria, our state’s peak not-for-profit organisation for people with learning difficulties. We met yesterday to talk about the next strategic plan (Melbourne in July, a good time to be indoors).

One topic we touched on was the cost of assessment for kids with learning difficulties. Unless it is provided by the school/education department, an educational assessment by a psychologist costs $1500+. Parents often don’t know whether this is necessary, or if it is, how much/what type of assessment to request. Screening for learning difficulties isn’t yet done consistently in schools. Some online screening tools cost $200+ (!!), and take a while to provide a report. Gah.

Happily, AUSPELD (the peak body for the state-based SPELDs) has a free online screener for learning difficulties.

I just tried it out, using an imaginary upper primary student with significant writing/spelling difficulties and a family history of learning difficulties, who I named “test” (so the good folk at AUSPELD know it’s not a real person).

It took a couple of minutes to complete, and here are screenshots of the report I was emailed straight away:

For a fast, computer-generated report for the imaginary child I had in mind, I thought this was fairly well-targeted, informative and helpful. The links in the report screenshots above aren’t active, but the links below are:

• AUSPELD bookshop (which also has Pam Snow and Caroline Bowen’s new book “Evidence-based support for children and young people with additional needs“, ask your local library to get a copy).

• Understanding Learning Difficulties for Parents

• Spelling Remediation for Upper Primary and Lower Secondary Students

• Written Expression Remediation for Upper Primary Students

I didn’t take screenshots of the logos, addresses, phone numbers etc of the state-based SPELDs which were at the bottom of the report, but they’re in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia as well as Victoria.

Unfortunately, the Victorian SPELD waiting list for assessment is months long, not sure about other states. SPELD Vic staff are still in temporary accommodation following a building fire, but finding permanent premises (know somewhere great? tell us!) and hiring more psychologists are in the plan.

If you’re in Melbourne and want a briefer, more affordable assessment of phonological processing, word-level reading and spelling with a report and recommendations (but not a full Specific Learning Disorder diagnostic report), our waiting list at Spelfabet is currently weeks not months. We can also assess speech and language. Click here to make a referral.

Please encourage relevant people/schools to use AUSPELD’s free learning difficulties screening tool.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Spelfabet 2026 EOFY sale – 2 days to go

For 20% off anything in the Spelfabet shop, select what you want in the shop, go to the checkout, then type ‘EOFY 2026’, in the Coupon Code box before July 1.

The printable, decodable Phonics With Feeling books were already amazing value, and with the discount cost 32c per print for the parent/aide version (print up to 5 copies), and 16c per print for the teacher/clinician version (print up to 30 copies). These books will not be available after June 30 2026.

If you came to our workshop at the recent DSF conference in Perth and played some of our games, and would like them, they’re all on special now. We have games targeting morphology, flexing/Set for Variability and polysyllable words as well as phonemic awareness and phonics.

If you’re teaching Sounds-Write Initial Code Units 1-10, our 100 printable A4 quizzes (10 per unit) match this sequence and are now 16 cents per quiz. Most sentence-reading materials include statements, but these quizzes provide lots of experience with yes/no questions.

If you can’t find files you got from our shop a while ago, please log in now and download them again. We’re working on new games and activities for the shop, so some things that have been there for a while will no longer be available.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Inflectional suffixes: adjectives

This is the last of three blog posts about inflectional suffixes, which are part of the grammar of English. This post is about inflectional suffixes for/creating adjectives.

The obvious ones are the comparative and superlative suffixes added to words that are already adjectives, as in soft-softer-softest. Very straightforward, though ‘er’ is also a suffix that creates agent nouns, as in ‘dance-dancer’, and in ordinary speech, ‘est’ sounds the same as the agent noun suffix ‘ist’ as in ‘art-artist’ and ‘cycle-cyclist’. It’s worth instructing learners to stress the vowels in these suffixes, pronouncing them as you would if they were little words.

As discussed in the last blog post, the verb suffix ‘ing’ creates present participles, and the verb suffixes ‘ed’ and ‘en’ can be used to create past participles. Present and past participles are often used as adjectives, as in ‘a bleeding heart’, ‘a trusted friend’ or ‘there are known knowns, and unknown unknowns‘.

Here’s an almost four minute video about the use, pronunciation and spelling of suffixes that are added to/create adjectives. I hope it helps you explain them to kids. Again, sorry if Youtube shows you an ad during the video, I am trying to work out how to turn all ads off.

To see the first video in this series, about inflectional noun suffixes, click here.

To get the letter/spelling/suffix tiles used in this video, go to www.spelfabet.com.au/materials/moveable-alphabet-affixes-mnemonics.

For 20% off anything in the Spelfabet shop until June 30 2026, use the code “EOFY 2026” at the checkout.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Inflectional suffixes: verbs

Eight inflectional suffixes are part of the grammar of English, so you can’t write many sentences without them. Four attach to verbs, but they aren’t just letters or letter strings. They carry meaning, and their pronunciation and spelling often depends on what our mouths are saying before them, at the end of the base word.

Teachers often aren’t taught much about these suffixes, which are more flexible than they look e.g. some can be used to create nouns and adjectives. Most parents are even more poorly equipped to explain how they work.

Here’s an eight minute video about the use, pronunciation and spelling of the four English inflectional verb suffixes. I hope it helps you explain them to kids. Sorry if an ad appears because the video is on YouTube, I am trying to work out how to turn them off.

To see the first video in this series, about inflectional noun suffixes, click here.

To get the letter/spelling/suffix tiles used in this video, go to www.spelfabet.com.au/materials/moveable-alphabet-affixes-mnemonics. For 20% off anything in the Spelfabet shop until June 30 2026, use the code “EOFY 2026” at the checkout.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Plural, possessive & the greengrocer’s apostrophe

We usually put a letter ‘s’ at the end of regular plural and possessive nouns. Often these get mixed up, for example by greengrocers selling orange’s, banana’s and apple’s.

Here’s a five minute video explaining allomorphs (different versions) of these two inflectional noun suffixes, and how they combine. I hope it helps you explain them to kids.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Last chance to get Phonics With Feeling books

The affordable, download-and-print Phonics With Feeling decodable books will sadly disappear from the Spelfabet shop on June 30th 2026.

Their talented author and illustrator, Gaia Dovey, has decided that the small amount of income they now generate for her is more trouble than it’s worth at tax time. Fair enough. There are a gazillion decodable books on the market these days, and extra funding has been provided to buy them. Maybe everyone now has what they need, at least for a while.

In case you want more decodables and have time/volunteers to print, fold and staple them, here are 10 reasons to get some Phonics With Feeling books now, before they disappear.

1. The 66 books (11 sets) all contain high repetitions of their target sound-spelling relationships. Plenty of ‘decodable’ books don’t contain many words (sometimes none!) with the sound-spelling relationships stated on their covers.

2. Their author and illustrator has a PhD in English Literature, so she worked hard to include coherent and cohesive narratives, entertaining plots, engaging characters and themes worth talking about (her grandchildren gave her frank and fearless feedback). The books include words which might be beyond children’s everyday vocabulary, encouraging them to try out new words and think about/discuss what they mean. There are also playful ‘sound effects’ and rhymes.

3. The series starts with a set of Initial Code Review books suitable for late Foundation and early Year 1. The rest of the books work through vowel sound-spelling relationships in small steps, ending up in Set 11 with some tricky consonant spellings. Vowel spellings are the hardest thing about English spelling, and some children need to practise them A LOT. These books are also useful for extension work for children who have read all your decodables for current phonics targets, but aren’t yet ready to move on to the next targets, or considerably harder books.

4. Each set of books comes with printable quizzes about their stories. These can be used to check for comprehension and spark discussion about the characters, settings, events and ideas in the books. The quizzes are also available free on Wordwall, which is more fun for kids than a written quiz (but more screen time). You can set the quizzes as homework if you have a Wordwall subscription and students have internet access at home.

5. The Phonics With Feeling books contain more words than most decodable books, so they offer extra reading practice. There are also more polysyllable words than typical decodables e.g. the VCe book targeting e/these has millipede athletes competing on concrete and trapezes. The books can be used for fluency activities (there’s even a play in set 3) for children who aren’t yet ready to transition to books containing harder spelling patterns.

6. They’re perfect for sound searches: guess how many words in the book will contain the target sound before you read (like guessing the number of jellybeans in the jar) then read the book and write out all the words with the target sound. Count them up. The winner is the person whose guess is closest to correct. I usually let kids change their guess halfway through the book, then moan about having done so, after they win by miles.

7. I often use these books for dictation activities, especially with kids who can read fairly well but struggle with handwriting, punctuation and spelling. There are no spelling trip wires in these books, so they’re great for transcription practice. I first ask them to read the book aloud and draw their attention to any potentially tricky spellings (asking ‘will you be able to spell that?’). I usually tell them where to put all punctuation except full stops and capital letters, at least at first.

8. Some of the books target frequent patterns that are missing or late in other phonics sequences e.g. Extended Code Set 1 targets c/cent and ce/voice, g/gem and ge/large, le/little, o/love and a/wall. These are all very common, in fact o/love is more common than u/up among the words near the top of high-frequency word lists. The single-letter a/apron spelling is by far the most common spelling of the sound /ae/, and the VCe spelling as in a/ate is next, but some teaching sequences start with far-less-common ay/day and ai/rain. Because each book contains a stand-alone story, rather than the sets being one continuous story, these books can help you adjust for this, and fill gaps.

9. To print a class set of 30 copies, get the Teacher/Clinician files (20c per print, plus printing, folding and stapling). If you only need 5 copies of each book, get the Parent/Aide files (40c per print, plus printing, folding, stapling). Very affordable.

10. (Misc) No need for a colour printer, they print in black and white. If a young child will be keeping one of the books, they can colour it in. Some kids love that. If a Phonics With Feeling book gets lost or wrecked, print a replacement. All 11 sets fit into a colourful, foldable book box available from major stationers, like the one pictured at left. You can download more information about the Phonics With Feeling books, including printing and assembly instructions, here.

To reward you for reading right to the end, and make the Phonics With Feeling books even more affordable, please use the Coupon Code “EOFY 2026” at the Spelfabet shop checkout for 20% off these and any other items before June 30.

Alison Clarke, Speech Pathologist

DSF conference – Day 3

Here’s a sample of interesting things from the last day of the DSF Language Learning & Literacy conference.

Oral language from preschool to adolescence

Pam Snow and Tanya Serry from the SOLAR Lab gave an overview of oral language development for teachers. Most of it was familiar content to any speech pathologist, but I hadn’t seen the 2005 Snowling and Hulme Reading Is Language (RIL) model:

or their interesting article about language and literacy as connected and interdependent, concluding that “language and reading interventions need to be seen as inextricably linked”. I couldn’t agree more.

Analysing children’s narratives with AI

I missed Jenny Baker from Freo Speech Pathology‘s session on analysing narrative samples using AI, but reading her overheads (available to all conference attendees) I wish I hadn’t. She trained Claude AI to analyse productivity, comprehension, macrostructure and microstructure in 3-5 year old children’s narratives, from a total of 518 children, and 43,000 words. This makes large-scale language sample analysis feasible, and opens the door to norm-referenced narrative assessment tools based on large samples. Speech Pathologists who have done LARSPs will all want to give Jenny a GOLD MEDAL.

Early years school readiness

Simmone Pogorzelski and colleagues are researching the impact of the Y WA School ReadY program, which targets pre-literacy and language, social and emotional wellbeing and numeracy in 3-5 year olds. The program focusses on morning mat time and storytime, and uses dialogic book reading. Results suggest the program has a positive impact, despite subject age and teacher qualification differences between the WA experimental groups and the Victorian control group. School ReadY is also in Nepal (yay Simmone!).

Reading Doctor software

Emma Grace and colleagues from Flinders University got a Channel 7 Children’s Research Foundation grant to study 390 children aged 4-7 using the Reading Doctor online letter-sound activities at home or school. They found using the software significantly improved children’s letter-sound knowledge. So far the only online information I can find about this study is on the Reading Doctor website, but it was an independent study.

Learning morphology

In her keynote, Prof Kathy Rastle (whose slides are here) said that the language of books is much richer than the language of everyday conversations, and morphemes (meaningful word parts) are more obvious in print than speech. Understanding morphology vastly increases vocabulary (by 7x). It is the main way we develop and understand new words. Skilled readers rapidly analyse words’ morphological structure.

As the classic Wug Test showed, four-year-olds can apply inflectional suffixes, but few 7-year-olds can manipulate derivational morphemes. The Cyp-Lex Corpus is a large-scale database of the language of popular children’s books in the UK. This shows that there are many complex words in children’s books, few used repeatedly. However, few prefixes/suffixes are used with many different stems, few are easy to detect, and many have inconsistent meanings.

It’s clear that phonics must come first. There is evidence that morphology instruction improves reading and spelling, but the quality of this evidence is generally low. Teaching varies greatly, many poor-quality materials are available, and it’s not yet clear what the key ingredients of good morphology teaching are, or whether it warrants much instructional time.

Vocabulary in phonics lessons

Dr Holly Lane from UFLI said the process of storing words in long-term memory involves fusing words’ pronunciations, spellings and meanings, so phonics lessons need to consider all three aspects. UFLI teachers must check the lesson plan for words children might not know, homophones, polysemy (e.g. ‘bark’ might mean trees, or dogs) and consider which words might need picture support.

Student-friendly definitions should be provided, giving the most common meaning of the word in plain language. The Collins dictionary gives such explanations (e.g. at right), with blue dots indicating the relative frequency of the word.

Definitions and picture support need to be made locally relevant e.g. a ‘rig’ might mean a big rig (truck) in some places and an oil rig in others. The UFLI toolbox now has a Foundations Vocabulary Resource. Discussion of vocabulary during phonics lessons should enhance the lesson, not slow its pace, so teachers need to be well-prepared.

Measuring outcomes in DLD

Australian researchers including Prof Suze Leitão of Curtin Uni are involved in an international study to develop and adopt consistent terminology in research about language intervention. They have done a systematic review of the literature, and are now consulting with people with language disorder and their families, teachers, speech-language pathologists and other researchers. More details are here.

Free webinar for teachers on DLD

1 in 14 students have DLD but few teachers have been trained to support them. Shaun Ziegenfusz and colleagues at the DLD Project thus developed a free, 90-minute online webinar for teachers, and studied its impact on 198 participating teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and educational practices, as well as whether it was considered socially valid. Results were positive, though more research is needed into its impact on classroom practice and student achievement. The webinar is still free online.

Motivation to read

I couldn’t attend her session but Speech Pathologist Dr Katrina Kelso discussed the Motivation to Read Profile, which gathers information on motivation to read, reading self-concept and perceptions of the value of reading. Understanding these factors can boost the quality of intervention.

Speech Pathologist-Teacher collaboration

Harriet Naylor of James Cook University reported on use of Dr Julia Starling’s Link-Up program in which teachers and speech pathologists collaborate to make classroom language more accessible to students with language difficulties. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. Here’s a nice poster summarising useful strategies from this research.

And that’s a wrap!

Sorry it took me two weeks to write this, I was exhausted. If you also attended, please feel free to add other highlights in the comments below. Thanks to my colleague Elle for her hard work on our games and workshop, to Gloria, Megha and Wanyima for lugging stuff to Perth and back, and Jo for being head chef at our Freo sharehouse. Also huge thanks to Mandy Nayton, Gemma Boyle, Renée Pole, Genevieve McArthur and all the DSFers for organising an excellent conference.

Alison Clarke