Spelfabet

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

PETAA’s Authentic Texts to Support Teaching Phonics

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.}

“Fully decodable” just means “buy our books”

Educational publishers now know there’s strong demand for decodable books, and are marketing many as ‘fully decodable’. But fully decodable to whom?

A book is only ‘fully decodable’ if its intended reader has been taught the sound-spelling relationships and high-frequency words it contains. Books that are fully decodable to Year 2 students aren’t fully decodable to Year 1 students, let alone students in their first year of school. It depends on what’s been taught, and each phonics teaching sequence is different.

So, buyers: beware. Avoid books marketed as ‘fully decodable’ that don’t clarify for whom – according to which teaching sequence, and at which point. Otherwise, it’s a meaningless term.

I also wish book covers didn’t list graphemes without example words clarifying the phonemes they represent. What exactly is the point of a cover that says ‘ea’, ‘oo’ or ‘ear’? Does the book practise ea/sea, ea/head, ea/break, or all three? oo/moon or oo/good, or both? ear/hear, ear/learn and/or ear/bear? You often have to look inside the book to find out, which is hard if you’re ordering online.

Another common problem is that many ‘fully decodable’ book covers list target graphemes THAT ARE NOT EVEN IN THEM, or appear only in one or two words. The Mog And Gom Library looks like a real bargain, but Book 41 targeting ‘ur’ has only the word ‘turns’ in it, and Book 63 targeting ‘ph’ has the word ‘elephant’ six times and no other words containing ‘ph’. If your lesson was about ‘ur’ or ‘ph’, these books don’t offer much lesson-to-text match. When a book cover lists multiple target graphemes that don’t/can’t all represent the same phoneme, maybe it’s really a mainstream book with a retrofitted decodable cover? Again, where’s the lesson-to-text match?

The rest of this post aims to help teachers in my home state of Victoria, Australia, choose decodable books to match our local Phonics Plus sequence. Apologies to interstate and international readers, please listen to/sing your favourite song and have some chocolate instead of reading on.

Phonics Plus aligned decodable text in Year 1 and 2

The Victorian Education Department has been rolling out materials for its F-2 phonics and morphology teaching sequence, Phonics Plus, for over a year. No published decodable books neatly match this teaching sequence (though they do provide other decodable text, and some are probably in the pipeline), but this helpful document was made available to help schools choose and sequence decodables for children in their first year of school (which I’m learning to call Foundation, not Prep).

There’s no similar document for Year 1 or 2 of Phonics Plus, which I’ve been worrying about because our school year finishes in less than two weeks, then it’s the silly season, then summer holidays, and then the kids who just did Phonics Plus in Foundation will start Year 1. I don’t want anyone to rush into buying poor-quality books, or for teachers all over the state to have to spend hours researching better options and matching their lessons to these texts.

I’ve therefore drafted a Phonics Plus decodable book alignment for Year 1 (click here to download it), and started work on Year 2. These are suggestions only, and not comprehensive. We don’t sell decodables except the affordable, download-and-print Phonics With Feeling books, from which the author/illustrator receives 50% of income (not the usual 5-15%, which is still not much given the work she put into them, and their high repetition of targets, so her books appear first on my lists). Nobody paid or lobbied to have their books listed, and I’d love you to put any feedback or suggestions you have in the comments.

Books from Australia and the UK

The Year 1 list has Australian books first, as they’re most relevant to our accent, spelling, vocabulary and culture. Books from the UK are listed next, as their accent is quite similar to ours (non-rhotic, i.e. they don’t say word-final /r/), and most people here (except the Labor Party) follow their spelling system. Our vocabularies are also fairly similar, though they differentiate ‘chips’ and ‘crisps’, and think cars have trunks, and thongs are underwear.

I haven’t found time to include books from America or elsewhere, but the American English accent, spelling system, vocabulary and culture are all fairly different from ours (I still can’t believe the US has school active shooter drills instead of sensible gun laws). I suggest investigating American decodables if suitable books from Australia and the UK, and maybe Aotearoa/NZ, can’t be found. At some stage I might find time to add some US books to lists.

List colour-coding

A book can include some or all of the targeted spellings in a given Phonics Plus Set, and many contain extra spellings not in this teaching sequence. I’ve therefore colour-coded book titles as follows: green = contains one/some of the Phonics Plus targets; black = contains all the targets; red = contains extra targets for that phoneme. I hope this colour-coding helps teachers find easier and harder books for kids who need differentiation, as well as books that cover all target spellings.

To be certain you’re spending your school decodable books budget wisely, read all books yourself before bulk ordering. You can read the ones on our display in North Fitzroy, if we have the books of interest to you. Our waiting room has comfy couches, and some days we even have an empty room you could use. On my list, the colour of book series’ names indicate which ones we have on display (black = whole sets, purple = partial sets, pink = none yet, so information is based on catalogues or online sources).

Supplier links

My list also includes links to suppliers/publishers – just click on the series name the first time it appears. Most nonprofit AUSPELD members supply decodables – see the SPELD VIC, SPELD NSW, SA SPELD and DSF bookshops – and their bookshops help fund other services they offer to people with learning difficulties and their families/teams. If you can get your books from them, please do.

Alison Clarke

Revised Affixit 20 game

As soon as you finish making something, you think of ways to improve it. Always. Sigh.

Affixit game 20 was meant to focus on building words like music-musician, magic-magician, and Egypt-Egyptian, but there weren’t enough suitable words, so -al/-ial as in centre-central, deny-denial, finance-financial became the focus. While making the label for our Affixit games storage boxes (download it free here if you like), I realised -al/-ial was already in Affixit game 17. Gah.

This meant I had to make a new Affixit game 20, which teaches how words ending in ‘mit’ change to ‘miss’ (as in admit-admission, permit-permissible, submit-submissive) before some suffixes (Latin ones). The wonderful Saoirse helped me make a video to demonstrate the new game:

You can download this new game free here.

I’m now stopping myself from thinking about ways to improve the Affixit games so I can focus on revising our phonics playing cards (more compact sets with larger font, words facing one way, difficult words replaced, and extra game instructions). Always ways to improve…

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Free Affixit game

Hooray, you can now download and print Game 1 of our new Affixit word-building games for $0. Players build and spell words by adding suffixes -s, -ed or -ing to base words, doubling final consonants when necessary (e.g. stop-stopped), and knowing when not to double (e.g. mend-mending, back-backs).

Base words are spelt in basic/initial code – the alphabet plus ff, ll, sh, ch, th, ng and ck – and are CVC, CCVC or CVCC words, with one CCCVC word (‘strum’). Many common one-syllable verbs like ‘win’, ‘swim’ and ‘bend’ have irregular past forms, so don’t take suffix -ed, and these were excluded. We don’t want to confuse kids with language delay/disorder who still sometimes say things like ‘swimmed’ and ‘runned’.

Game 1 targets the suffixes and juncture changes taught in Foundation Term 4 of my state’s Phonics Plus teaching sequence. Our Term 4 starts today, so I hope this game is well-timed and widely used. It should also slot neatly into other phonics teaching sequences, towards the end of the basic/initial code.

Here’s a video of me playing Affixit 1 with student Saoirse (thanks, Saoirse!):

Sorry about my messy handwriting, I was trying not to bump our wonky tripod (very hi-tech here, not).

There are 24 Affixit games in total, grouped in two sets. They target almost all the prefixes and suffixes in Phonics Plus (I’m still thinking about prefixes sub-, non- and mis-), and a few extras. They should be easy to slot into other phonics sequences, as base word spelling complexity increases gradually, and each game only targets a small number of affixes. The games took weeks to develop and test, aiming to maximise the number of common words players can build and spell in each game.

All the Affixit games are available in two download-and-print sets of a dozen from www.spelfabet.com.au/product-category/games/affixit. They cost two Australian dollars per game (plus GST if you’re in Australia) which is about USD$1.30. Each game prints on three sheets of A4 light card. We printed ours on photo paper, so we didn’t have to laminate them (quicker and less plastic, yay!). They fit neatly into two craft storage boxes we got from a hardware store, here’s what they look like:

I’ve put videos demonstrating each game on YouTube, just click on these links:

Affixit game 1          Affixit game 2          Affixit game 3          Affixit game 4

Affixit game 5          Affixit game 6          Affixit game 7          Affixit game 8

Affixit game 9          Affixit game 10        Affixit game 11        Affixit game 12

Affixit game 13 Affixit game 14 Affixit game 15 Affixit game 16

Affixit game 17 Affixit game 18 Affixit game 19 Affixit game 20

Affixit game 21 Affixit game 22 Affixit game 23 Affixit game 24

Georgina Ryan devised the original version of this game, with help of Elle Holloway.

Feel free to print multiple copies of any Spelfabet games purchased for your own class/students. I hope this makes them an affordable way to provide lots of well-targeted reading/spelling skills practice, cleverly disguised as fun. Please don’t share them across a school or school system. They take time and expertise to make, and their sales help pay for the Spelfabet website.

Alison Clarke

Fact and opinion in educational news

If you’re a reader of Education HQ and expect it to clearly differentiate between fact and opinion, you might have been surprised by its 14 July 2025 article “‘It changed my life’: all students should be screened for Irlen Syndrome, teacher says’“.

The article says Irlen Syndrome is “a disorder that manifests as a cluster of symptoms that occur when the brain has trouble processing light and visual stimuli efficiently”. Sounds like a fact, right? Something Education HQ’s fact-checkers would have thoroughly checked out.

Opthalmologists are vision experts. Their Australian and NZ professional association, RANZCO, says that ‘There is no scientific evidence that Irlen Syndrome exists’. Read all about it here.

The RANZCO position is summarised in 122 words halfway through the 1165 word Education HQ article, but seems to be playing the role of the sceptical* curmudgeon in an epic story about a young person who struggled and overcame significant difficulties after a life-changing discovery, and now wants to help others do the same. Yay, I love those kind of stories! No need to interview any RANZCO curmudgeons, or let scientific evidence (or lack thereof) get in the way.

Other statements in the article which should have set off fact-checking alarms:

• “To receive Irlen Syndrome diagnosis and treatment, you must visit a licensed Irlen diagnostician.” (Yes, and to see the Great Pumpkin rise through the air, you must visit the pumpkin patch at Hallowe’en).

• “One Year 12 student studying physics with Kneeshaw recently found out he too had Irlen Syndrome.” (Hmm, did he also visit the pumpkin patch?).

• “Kneeshaw now knows the genetic origin of her diagnosis.” (Yes, dyslexia runs in families, but Irlen Syndrome doesn’t, because it’s not a Thing. The Placebo Effect, however, is a Thing, but sugar pills don’t cost $700).

I asked ChatGPT to summarise the Education HQ article in 100 words, and got this:

Dr Samantha Kneeshaw, head of science at Ulladulla** High School, advocates universal screening for Irlen Syndrome, a visual processing disorder affecting reading due to light sensitivity. Undiagnosed as a student, she faced humiliation and learning struggles until tinted lenses transformed her reading. The Irlen Method, costing around $700, is disputed by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, which questions its existence and warns against delaying proven interventions. Kneeshaw, however, has seen dramatic improvements in students and colleagues after diagnosis. She believes early detection could prevent academic underachievement, behavioural issues, and wasted potential, urging schools to implement nationwide screening.

If my googlesleuthing is correct (wow, she survived a bushfire by scuba diving in a swimming pool, as well as getting the last laugh over that mean teacher! She is seriously cool, I’d much rather hang out with her than those RANZCO curmudgeons), Dr Kneeshaw’s expertise is in marine science, not learning difficulties or opthamology. She believes Irlen Syndrome exists, that she has it, and that coloured lenses changed her life. This is an opinion, or what witty Radio National science journalists like to call an “N1 study”. It’s an anecdote. Her reports of other people experiencing the same thing are also anecdotes. Every scientist and journalist should know that the plural of anecdote is not data.

If you were a parent desperate to help your child overcome learning difficulties, would you believe the warnings of the faceless data-waving opthamologists at RANZCO, or Dr Kneeshaw’s wonderful success story? Most people love, believe and want to read great stories. Facts, not so much. But many great stories simply don’t align with scientific evidence, and in the age of Fake News, it’s more important than ever that journalists clearly delineate between fact and opinion. In my opinion (and yes, it is just an opinion) this Education HQ article reads more like an Irlen advertorial than education news.

If you’re in/near Ulladulla, or anywhere in NSW, and worrying about someone’s reading or spelling skills, the excellent folk at SPELD NSW know all about evidence-based assessment and intervention for learning difficulties, and should be able to help.

^{* Yes, we do spell it as “sceptic” in Australian and UK English, because this word came into English via French sceptique from Latin scepticus, though they got it from Greek skeptikos. For once, I think Noah Webster was right and we should go with the US spelling “skeptic”.}

^{** If you’re not an Aussie and wonder how to pronounce “Ulladulla”, I recommend listening to Gleny Rae Virus’s hilarious parody of the it’s-beaut-to-shoot-roos-in-a-ute genre of Australian country music, “Redneck Lovesong”.}

When are professional reports TL;DR?

Today I spent over an hour reading and summarising ten reports and letters about a complex new client, to prepare for our first session. The longest report was 15 pages, but some professional reports contain 50 or more pages. Gah. Paediatricians’ reports are usually only one or two pages, while the really long reports tend to be by Psychologists.

Reading takes time. Everyone’s time-poor. How fast can a skilled reader read and understand a complex professional report? There’s a great, 54-page study guide to the first half of Mark Seidenberg’s important (though not very succinctly-titled) book “Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It” which says:

If you are a good reader, texts can be comprehended more rapidly than speech. Listeners are at the mercy of speakers who control how rapidly they talk and how clearly ideas are expressed. Reading can go faster because readers control how fast they read: there’s no “speaker” to wait for.

The catch, however, is that the visual system imposes hard limits on how fast we can read. Properties of the eye limit how much can be seen at a time, creating a major bottleneck. The perceptual span–the amount of information that registers during an eye fixation–is surprisingly limited, with only 2 or 3 words clearly visible, at best. Our eyes don’t allow us to take in entire lines of text at a time.

Reading consists of a succession of fixations (pauses) and saccades (jumps to the next fixation). Most words in texts are fixated at least once, with the exception of short words like ‘of’ and ‘an’. Many words are skipped when we skim a text, which results in shallower comprehension.

Good readers average about 4-5 words per second (240-300 words per minute). People do not read faster by making fewer fixations or larger saccades. Rather, faster readers spend less time on each fixation because they recognize and comprehend words more rapidly.

Reading speed also depends on the difficulty of the text, the reader’s familiarity with the topic, and how deeply the text is read (one’s goal in reading it).

Click to access Language-at-the-Speed-of-Sight-Study-Guide-Chapters-1-6.pdf

The 15-page report I read today contains 5,167 words, so at 300 words per minute, it takes 17.22 minutes to read. That seems fairly reasonable, especially since it contains clear sections/headings and tables. SPELD-Vic literacy assessment reports are also now clear and succinct, with appendices and attachments containing extra information only relevant to some readers (they’re also now running an online course for Psychologists about SLD assessment). But a 48-page report I received recently contains 16,605 words, or at least 55 minutes of reading. TL,DR. I just skimmed it, and I’m sure teachers did the same.

Too often, quantity seems to displace quality in exceptionally long reports, with cut-and-paste errors (e.g. wrong names or pronouns – a boy was suddenly called Grace in one I read the other day – or duplicate sections) and typos, suggesting that even the authors didn’t read them. Sometimes very long reports discuss a client’s learning style (not a Thing), recommend coloured overlays, or include pages of very general lists of resources which may or may not be suitable. I’ve seen Dandelion readers, most suitable for 4-7 year olds, suggested for tweens or teens. Another sigh.

I suggest parents ask professionals to keep their reports under 5000-6000 words, including a maximum of a couple of pages of recommendations, and to only recommend specific resources/programs if they are confident they’re directly relevant. There’s no point paying $1000+ for a report nobody will read, or lots of poorly-targeted recommendations. Besides, reading difficulties run in families, and many parents of struggling readers also struggle to read long, complex reports.

The inimitable Anita Archer has many concise, compelling sayings about teaching, and one of her best is “Teach the stuff and cut the fluff”. I’d love not to find myself paraphrasing this as “write the stuff and cut the fluff” when reading some professional reports.

Alison Clarke

PS Thanks to Cathy Basterfield of Access Easy English for pointing out Speech Pathologist Harmony Turnbull’s blog on the accessibility of allied health reports. Lots of useful links and great food for thought!