Spelfabet

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

DSF conference – Day 2

Here’s a sample of interesting things from Day 2 of the DSF Language Learning & Literacy conference. There were many other interesting sessions, and a great trade display, but I couldn’t get to everything.

Building environments that cultivate strong minds

Dr Tara Thiagarajan of Sapien Labs gave what I thought was the standout keynote of the conference. She talked about mind health as the emotional, social and cognitive capacity to navigate life’s challenges and function productively. She shared international research showing dramatically declining mind health in younger people in wealthy countries. Young adults in sub-Saharan Africa now have better mind health than young people in Australia, NZ/Aotearoa, the UK and the US. The red on pie charts above means ‘distressed/struggling’, blue is ‘succeeding/thriving’. Key contributors are smartphones, ultra-processed food, sedentary lives, disintegrating social bonds, and plastics and plasticisers, see this short video. The combined effect of these five factors explains 80% of the increase in distress. Kids need less screen time, fast food and plastic (no hot food in plastic!), and more outdoor time, sport and IRL relationships.

High-repetition reading/spelling games

The four pillars of learning according to Stanislas Dehaene are attention, active engagement, error feedback and consolidation. Disguising work as fun helps kids pay attention and engage. My colleague Elle Holloway is great at gamifying therapy activities, giving kids enjoyable, motivating, high-repetition practice of therapy targets, and giving us plenty of opportunities to provide corrective feedback.

Elle and I presented a workshop about our games targeting phonemic awareness, phonics, set for variability, syllabification and morphology. Attendees played a range of these games, and took home samples.

Is studying a foreign language good for maths?

Curtin University researchers studied PISA 2018 data to find out whether studying a foreign language is related to maths achievement. They found that sustained, culturally enriched foreign language instruction has a significantly stronger association with maths scores than extra maths time. It should be seen as a crucial partner to STEM subjects, not a competitor for teaching/learning hours.

Prewriting intervention

Occupational Therapist Berenice Johnston of Curtin University discussed a pilot RCT into the effectiveness of her Peggy Lego prewriting intervention. All the children’s prewriting skills improved, but there wasn’t a significant difference between the children doing Peggy Lego and the control group. Too many studies with results that surprise/disappoint the researcher aren’t talked about, so I thought this was impressive.

Creating supportive learning environments

Stuart Kime from Evidence-Based Education in the UK gave a keynote about creating learning environments that are high in trust, support, challenge and expectations. This means they draw on the best of both ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ educational ideas. His free, downloadable Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review outlines four priorities for teachers who want their students to learn well:

• understand the content and how it is learnt
• create a supportive environment
• manage the classroom
• activate students’ thinking

Reading fluency

Prof Kathy Rastle of Royal Holloway University, London said we need to read at 90+ Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) to begin to understand what we read. Children should read at 110+ WCPM by the end of primary school, but many English kids can’t. The strongest 25% of readers in England are almost as fluent at the start of primary school as the weakest 25% at the end of primary school (Hilton et al 2024).

Fluency means accurate, automatic reading with appropriate stress and intonation, not just reading fast. Fluency frees up cognitive resources for comprehension and enjoyment. To become fluent, kids need to read aloud often at school, rehearsing and performing texts, and discussing what they read. Prof Rastle’s slides for this talk are here, and include links to UK Research Schools’ classroom videos, and the free Unlocking Reading online training for secondary teachers.

Preservice teachers use of the Reading Ready program

SOLAR Lab researchers have also been investigating the feasibility of preservice teachers using the Reading Ready program by US Professor Katie Pace-Miles for 1:1 intervention with struggling readers in their first two years of school. 49 children in 2 schools were involved, and preliminary student data collected using DIBELS and MOTIF assessments are promising. Useful information has also been gathered about the practicalities of scaling up this intervention.

Early writing – from scribbles to sentences to stories

Drs Alison Madelaine and Anna Taylor from MultiLit discussed AERO’s summary of NAPLAN writing development data showing student achievement in writing has declined, and AERO’s writing instruction literature review, showing teaching writing is very complex. They are developing an InitialWrite explicit writing instruction program for F-2 which includes work on sentence construction and combining, a Daily Sentence, and other high-impact practices as described in AERO’s writing Practice Guides. It aligns with InitiaLit, is currently being piloted and will be available later this year (for F-Yr1) and in 2027 (for Yr2).

Tomorrow: Day 3 (the last day)

Alison Clarke

DSF Conference – Day 1

All but one of the Spelfabet team were able to attend this year’s DSF Language, Literacy and Learning conference in Perth (we missed you, Mel!) so it was great both for team-building & professional learning.

Here are some (I thought) interesting ideas and links from the first day.

How we learn maths, and why girls fall behind

Keynote speaker Prof Stanislas Dehaene said to help kids understand maths we should anchor it in humans’ natural numerical and geometric intuitions e.g. even numbers are made up of pairs, an odd number has a spare; square numbers can be represented geometrically in a square; prime numbers can’t form a square or rectangle. Teaching should work from concrete materials to pictures to symbols.

There’s no difference in kids’ maths abilities at school entry, but girls quickly fall behind after starting school. There was no maths gender gap during COVID, so the gender gap is cultural. Girls and boys need to be engaged equally, emphasising the playful aspects of maths and insisting that mistakes help us learn. More details in Dehaene’s book The Number Sense.

Language/literacy difficulties and mental health

Prof. Genevieve McArthur from the Language and Literacy in Young People (LaLYP) research team said poor reading often leads to low reading self-concept, anxiety and reading disengagement. Red flags include talk of being a ‘bad reader’ and feeling scared, worried or sick about reading. The free MOTIF Reading Anxiety Tests and Reader Self-Perception Scale can be used to monitor reading-related mental health. The Black Dog Institute and DSF have been developing reading-related mental health tools.

Dr Samuel Calder discussed his research into the functional impacts of language difficulties, which are necessary for a diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), but require better definition and measurement. Dr Shaun Ziegenfusz said secondary students with DLD find literacy and numeracy difficult, but language and social-emotional tasks less hard. They valued extra time, visuals and individualised supports, and felt connected to school. They thought technology was more helpful than adults did. Shaun’s DLD Project has heaps of high-quality online training about DLD, some of it free.

Dr Adrienne Wilmot emphasised that ‘Talk therapy’ focussed on mental health doesn’t suit language disordered kids. Mental health professionals need to understand language disorder, and personalise students’ mental health care. Dr Emily Jackson said mental health promotion materials for students with DLD should not be ‘language heavy’. She discussed the development of a small group intervention for Year 5, 6 and 7 students called The Code To Me: Cracking the Code to Confidence and Wellbeing. Perth families can click here to find out how to participate in its pilot, and they’ll run an RCT next year.

Dr Elizabeth Hill said Curtin Uni’s Psychology Masters courses now include teaching about language/literacy and mental health needs, emphasising professional cross-collaboration. They also run a Community of Practice on accessible mental health services for people with communication difficulties.

Student-focussed coaching

The La Trobe SOLAR Lab’s Profs Tanya Serry and Pamela Snow and team are researching the impact of teacher Student-Focussed Coaching on early years’ students’ reading and spelling, assisted by Dr Daryl Michel, co-author of the book Student Focused Coaching. 80% of Year 3 students who struggle with literacy continue to struggle, so high-quality early teaching is vital. The 22 schools in this randomised control trial (RCT) all had access to Solar Lab short courses and quality teaching materials. Ten also had fortnightly, in-school coaching. Qualitative data collected showed the importance of relationship-building and leadership buy-in, the high administrative load of coaching, and variability in how coaches work. Teacher knowledge and confidence improved as a result of coaching. A report including student data will be available later this year.

Talk for Reading

Susie Hillard and Janet Gethin from DSF discussed the Talk for Reading approach, which expands language and reading comprehension through a dialogic approach to read-alouds, think-alouds and the development of mental models. Texts such as those on the Australian Reading Spine are used to build the habit of listening, talking, writing and deep thinking about what they read.

Literacy instruction for EAL students

Melbourne-based educational consultant Leah Myers reviewed research on literacy instruction for students learning English as well as their home language. No surprise: evidence-based instructional techniques also work for EAL students, especially MTSS and RtI approaches. Useful resources highlighted included AERO’s How long it takes to learn English while learning the curriculum.

Secondary school literacy intervention checklist

The SOLAR Lab’s Melanie Henry is researching literacy intervention in secondary schools. She has developed, piloted, and is now revising a 2-part checklist which gathers information about (1) classroom setup and resources and (2) instruction, via classroom observation.

The art and science of explaining stuff

Keynote speaker Zach Groshell gave an entertaining summary of key instructional ideas. Explicit instruction. Worked examples, and counter-examples. Reducing cognitive load. Task analysis. Visuals and gesture. I do, we do, you do. Working from isolated to integrated, and supported to independent. You can read more about all these good ideas here.

Early oral language screening and instruction

Lauren Cook from Catholic Education Sandhurst and Lauren Mirabella from Pearson talked about the rollout of OxEd & Assessment’s LanguageScreen and Nuffied Early Language Intervention (NELI) across 52 primary schools. Many children had oral language delays/difficulties at school entry, and thus were at risk of also developing literacy difficulties. These resources were devised by Oxford University Professors Charles Hulme and Maggie Snowling and team using RCTs. They now have Australian and NZ norms. The UK research found that NELI participants made 3-5 months extra language progress in six months.

Starting in 2024 in Sandhurst Diocese schools, the 5-10 minute screener was administered by teachers via iPads. Children identified by the screener as having oral language difficulties then did 20 weeks of NELI oral language intervention (3 X 30 minutes in small groups, and two 15 minute individual sessions), delivered by trained school staff and supported by speech pathologists. Despite timetabling and staffing constraints, and challenges ensuring fidelity of implementation and consistent data use, there are early signs of improved student outcomes, and increased staff confidence and collaboration in supporting language in the classroom.

Lauren Mirabella emphasised Pearson’s commitment to effective, evidence-based teaching, so I asked why they still sell Fountas and Pinnell resources. She said F&P products would be taken off their website in a week. Click here, here and here to see if it’s happened, and send them applause when it has.

Tomorrow: Day 2

Alison Clarke

New, improved phonics playing cards

Our new download-and-print phonics playing cards include 8 free sample decks, the first one of each of 8 sets (90 decks). These first target basic VC and CVC words, then consonant blending, consonant digraphs like ‘sh’ and ‘ng’, several sets targeting vowel spellings, then less common consonant spellings. We now have other games targeting prefixes/suffixes, syllabification and flexing sounds.

Each card deck prints on four sheets of light A4 cardboard, and can be used for any game that uses a standard deck of playing cards (e.g. the games here). We use Sounds-Write and Phonics With Feeling printable decodables as well as Phonic Books, so our card sequence dovetails well with them, but can be reorganised if teaching a different sequence.

Learners focus more on sounds and spellings when words are presented in lists, not sentences. Turning lists into games boosts attention and engagement, two of Stanislas Dehaene’s four pillars of learning.

Our revised cards have:

• Larger print words, facing in only one direction (having words facing both ways confused some kids).

• More common words – word choice based on frequency as well as sound-spelling relationships.

• More polysyllable words, including plenty of Tier 2 words.

It takes me a couple of minutes to print and laminate a deck of these cards, then eight minutes to cut a deck up while having a cuppa, listening to a podcast or watching telly. I now have a full set in these neat craft storage boxes, for use in word sorts and spelling quizzes as well as games.

We have colour printers, so I often print a deck of phonics playing cards on 4 sheets of light cardboard for a client’s family to cut up and use at home.

If you’re coming to the Perth Language, Literacy and Learning conference next week, please come and try out these and our other games at our exhibition stand.

Thanks once again to now-Dr Caitlin Stephenson (applause!) who had the original idea for these games.

Hope to see you at the Language, Learning and Literacy conference

I’m taking the whole Spelfabet team to Perth for the Language, Literacy and Learning conference next month (Thursday 7th to Saturday 9th May). We’re really looking forward to it.

Online learning is good, but you can’t beat getting right away to learn and catch up with colleagues at a world-class, in-person conference.

I’ve only managed to attend this conference in person once (COVID & family stuff got in the way) and it was brilliant. I wrote blog posts about it here and here. Profs Stanislas Dehaene and Kathy Rastle are among this year’s international keynote speakers again.

I think I’d cross the Nullarbor again just to hear from them, and maybe ask them a burning follow-up question or two during a meal break (and maybe embarrass myself asking for a selfie).

My wonderful gamify-everything colleague, Elle Holloway and I will present a workshop called “It’s all about the reps”, about high-repetition games we use in phonics and morphology intervention. We’re also proud to be a sponsor of the conference, and madly prepping new games and updated phonics playing cards for the trade exhibition. We’re going to donate some of our resources to the conference prize draw.

The venue will be the splendid Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle (try their virtual tour here). Other international speakers are Prof Stuart Kime from Evidence-Based Education in the UK, Dr Zach Groshell of the Education Rickshaw in the US, children’s mental health expert Tara Thiagarajan from Sapien Labs in the US, and maths expert Kristopher Boulton from Unstoppable Learning in the UK.

A total of 60 sessions will be presented by a multitude of experts. It took us quite a while to decide who’d sign up for which session. Too many interesting options. A good problem to have.

You can learn more and register here: www.dsfconference.net.au, and their socials are:

• Facebook: @dyslexiaspeld
• LinkedIn: @dsf-literacy-and-clinical-services
• X: @DyslexiaSPELD

P.S. I realise this blog post sounds a bit like an ad for the conference, sorry. I’ve just become President of SPELD-Vic, sister organisation of DSF, the conference organisers. Their CEO, Mandy Nayton, has put in a colossal effort moonlighting as volunteer SPELD-Vic CEO, and provided heaps of DSF staff time and expertise to SPELD-Vic, to pull it out of a bit of a slump. I want their conference to be a huge success for that reason as well as because we’re all going, and I’m pretty sure it will be.

Hope to see you there!

Alison Clarke