Spelfabet

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!

Phonics Intervention Symposium: Day 4

Sadly, I was too busy to attend the recent international Sounds-Write Phonics Interventions Symposium while it was live and free online. Happily, it was all recorded. A great thing about recordings is that you can watch them at high speed, slowing down and rewinding the best bits, and learn a lot quickly.

It’s school holidays here, so I’ve started working my way through the presentations, starting with the most recent, and helping myself focus by writing notes/thoughts for this blog post. I find restaurant menu codes (V, GF etc) helpful, so have made up codes to suggest who might be most interested/benefit most from each presentation (which could be wrong, so feel free to ignore them):

• SL = school leaders;
• T1 = early years classroom teachers (Tier 1);
• T2 = early years small group/keep up intervention providers (Tier 2);
• T3 = individual intervention providers for older/catch up and neurodivergent learners (Tier 3).

I’ll also note the length of each speaker’s actual presentation, minus the (often very interesting) Q&A.

Laila Sadler succinctly summarises things UK schools are doing to ensure all their kids learn to read. Engaged school leaders and shared belief systems are key, as well as type and timing of teaching/intervention. (SL, 26 minutes)

Lindsay Springer talks about 4-year, school-based research in Canada showing they’re preventing reading failure with screening, high-quality teaching and early intervention. Includes classroom videos and teacher interviews, graphs like this one (applause!), attention to kids’ academic self-concept and agency, and gorgeous quotes from kids at the end (SL, T1, T2, 33 minutes).

Wendy Bowen is from the Orkney Islands, which had close to Scotland’s worst reading results in 2018-2019. Then they read books by Diane McGuinness, trained teachers in Sounds-Write, got decodable books, started gathering data, organised small group and 1:1 intervention, and overcame various obstacles. Now their reading and spelling results are among the best in the country, and fewer kids need intervention (SL, T1, T2, 29 minutes). P.S. Wendy has a wonderful accent.

UK intervention teacher Sarah Horner talks about overcoming the dread forgetting curve with a team approach to little-and-often practice sessions. Each child has a Follow Up Folder, and everyone available, including volunteers, office staff and capable peers, is roped in to grab the folder and help the child do a few minutes’ practice (read a book, play a game, do some writing etc) whenever they can (T3, 15 minutes).

The UK’s Tricia Millar talks about delivering fast, shame-free, life-changing intervention to teenagers in secondary schools, giving them a sense of belonging and the ability to participate. My main thoughts were 1. OMG I need to make time to do That Reading Thing/That Spelling Thing training (yeek, I’ve been saying that for years), 2. Everyone who is interested in literacy in secondary schools should watch this, and 3. I need to find out about the Powell Phonics Checker. (SL, T3, 34 minutes).

Krystal Brady works in an Australian school that had devastating 2021 NAPLAN results. All their teachers, including casuals, were trained in Sounds-Write in 2022, which was rolled out across the school in 2023. At first their focus was Tier 1, but they also ran Keep Up and Catch Up groups, collected DIBELS data, did formative assessment, instructional coaching, collaborative planning, all the good things. They have reaped the rewards, both in student skills and staff satisfaction. More applause! (SL, T1, T2, T3, 39 minutes).

Gail Williams is Principal of an Australian secondary school for students with intellectual disability which uses the Sounds-Write phonics program. She says her school presumes student competence, including for nonspeaking students, and that “The term ‘presuming competence’ is most commonly associated with the work of Anne Donnellan and Douglas Biklen”. Eeek. Biklen promoted facilitated communication (FC), a discredited and unethical Augmentative and Alternative Communication approach, and googling suggests Donnellan condoned it. Happily, there is no mention of FC or its derivatives in this presentation. People with intellectual disability who can understand spoken language can usually learn at least basic literacy skills when these are taught well. They are very useful life skills, so it’s great to see explicit, systematic phonics being taught in a special school. (SL, T3, 27 minutes).

Sue White is an Australian writer and mum of a neurodivergent son who wasn’t learning to read at school. Realising he wasn’t being taught effectively, she tried tutoring, then started homeschooling him at age 7. Jacinda Vaughan from Sounds-Write supported her, and they used age-appropriate decodable books (starting with good old Magic Belt). He’s now 11 and reads Harry Potter. A fun, heartwarming session, full of useful tips for parents of neurodivergent striving readers/spellers (e.g. break it up, stay active, work in the car if need be), and their intervention providers. (T3, 40 minutes).

New Zealand Speech Pathologist and literacy consultant Emma Nahna discusses measuring students’ literacy skill growth precisely and efficiently with free DIBELS 8 assessments. Whole classes do benchmark assessments three times a year, and intervention students are monitored more frequently e.g. fortnightly. One minute Nonsense Word Fluency and Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) subtests are especially useful. A child’s ‘goal line’ is graphed by marking their start point and peers’ average skills at the end of the year/intervention period, and joining the dots. Many children are highly motivated to reach or exceed their goal lines. This talk includes when and how to adjust intervention; strategies for scaffolding fluency and access to text; and links to amazing progress monitoring resources and free training. Wow. (SL, T2, T3, 51 minutes).

UK educational leader Sonia Thompson uses the EEF’s Reading House (a bit like Pam Snow’s Language and Literacy House without the social-emotional aspects) as a framework for discussing the importance of phonics in achieving fluency, and thus reading comprehension. Her overview covers a wide range of important literacy topics including oral language, cognitive load, general knowledge, feedback, prosody, and comprehension strategies. (SL, T1, 52 minutes).

OMG DISK FULL of things to think about and follow up, and that was just the last day. Thanks so much to the good folk at Sounds-Write for organising this event. We’re now on school holidays, so I’m hoping to get through and write up at least Day 3’s presentations in the next week or two. I also hope this post helps others who missed the realtime sessions decide whether to get an All Access or Group Pass to all the 2025 Symposium recordings, and whiz through the whole thing, finding the best bits from your POV. If you do, please share your thoughts in the comments!

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Free Flex-It game, holiday assessments and spelling boosters

It’s the last week before our school holidays, a good time to play educational games, so I’ve just put a free sample Flex-It game in the Spelfabet shop.

Download and print it on 3 sheets of light card, laminate it if you like, and cut it up. Use it to explicitly teach learners to approach the letter ‘a’ flexibly in words of more than one syllable, trying the sound in ‘apron’ if the sound in ‘apple’ doesn’t yield a real word. The ability to think flexibly and try other plausible sounds is essential for successfully sounding out long words.

Hope you and your learners like it!

(The next part of this blog post is only relevant to people in Victoria, Australia)

Holiday assessments

The Spelfabet Speech Pathologists in North Fitzroy have some availability to do speech and language assessments in the school holidays, if you need a report to accompany a funding application, or are just concerned that a child might have listening/speaking difficulties. We can also screen a child’s hearing using the Sound Scouts app, and assess phonological processing and word-level reading/spelling skills.

We know there can be a long wait for school-based Speech Pathology services, and that many applications for extra support at school are due soon. Assessment cost depends on session length, but reflects the NDIS rate for therapists. Private health insurance rebates may apply, or GPs may provide Medicare Care Plans. Click here to make a referral.

Spelling boosters

It’s hard to enjoy writing when you’re struggling with spelling. Also in the school holidays, we’re offering a small number of three-hour individualised spelling booster sessions, to clear up misconceptions about spelling evident from writing samples and/or standardised tests, build spelling skills and confidence, play some games and have some fun. The cost is $650 including a report. Again, rebates may apply if you have health insurance or a Medicare Care Plan. Click here to make a referral.

That’s it! I’m learning to write short blog posts! Happy holidays!

Alison Clarke, Speech Pathologist

New OECD adult literacy report

At the recent launch of the OECD International Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) report, OECD Secretary-General and former Australian Finance Minister Mathias Cormann spoke of the survey’s importance and value. You can watch the launch here:

You can download the “Do Adults Have the Skills they Need to Thrive in a Changing World?” report to find out about adults’ literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills in participating countries, but here’s a summary chart:

I blinked, cleaned my glasses, looked again. Where are the data for Australia? We’re in the OECD. We were in the last PIAAC survey, and were meant to be in this one. In 2018, our peak adult literacy organisations urged the government not to withdraw from PIAAC, and were assured we wouldn’t.

(The rest of this blog post is about Australia, but if you’re elsewhere, try these articles about the US, UK, Canada and Aotearoa/NZ results, or just google PIAAC 2024 and your country of interest).

Here’s a screenshot of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website information on the latest PIAAC survey:

No information about why the survey was ditched, though they’d already started selecting participants.

In March 2022, the Parliamentary Inquiry into Adult Literacy and its Importance report recommended:

After a change of Federal government in May 2022, the government’s November 2023 response to the Parliamentary Inquiry report said (on page 7):

Sorry, pardon? Didn’t the Australian Bureau of Statistics already have high cyber security standards? They had a decade to prepare for PIAAC. How did 31 countries, many with larger populations and lower per capita GDP than us, manage to sort out their PIAAC cyber security, but we couldn’t? Weird.

The Reading Writing Hotline website says there was “a lot of concern in the field about who may be surveyed about what, and how; and to what use the data will be put”, mainly because the last PIAAC survey showing 44% of Australian adults couldn’t read very well resulted in sensationalist headlines, but no serious government action, except in the state with the worst results (Tasmania). In an underfunded sector, why prioritise another expensive survey? (more on these arguments here). But when governments don’t measure something, it can mean they have no plans to manage it, and/or no idea how.

Roy Morgan Research, not the ABS, is now conducting the Understanding Skills Across Australia survey on behalf of Jobs and Skills Australia. This is also weird, given the government’s commitment to rebuilding the public service, and cutting back on private consultants.

The Morgan survey will almost certainly find that Australian adults are no more literate than they were a decade ago, and are perhaps less literate. The adult literacy sector still seems to mostly teach from the Ken Goodman and Marie Clay playbook (listen to Sold a Story if you don’t know what that means), so that won’t be a surprise. Check out the “How do we read?” section of the government-funded Reading Writing Hotline’s online tutor training program, here are a couple of screenshots with quotes to give you the idea:

After I’ve smashed a bit of crockery about this (taxpayer-funded, last year!), I’m going to calm down and put “encourage the Reading Writing Hotline to learn about the science of reading and programs for adults like That Reading Thing” in my New Year’s resolutions. If you have ideas about how to best do this, please put them in the comments.

Alison Clarke

Benchmark Assessment: often wrong

It’s the end of the school year in Australia, so children are getting their end-of-year reports.

Many Australian schools use the American Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) to evaluate reading skills, but a new American Public Media (APM) report says it fails to identify most struggling readers.

If teachers rely on the BAS results, they will be advising many parents not to worry about their children’s reading skills, though there’s good reason to be concerned.

If you’re in this situation, please seek more reliable and valid assessment. Early intervention is highly effective, and ‘late bloomers’ are more likely to wilt and suffer than catch up.

There are plenty of more cost-effective, efficient, reliable, valid literacy skill assessments available for school use. The excellent, Australian Reading Science in Schools website has an assessment list you can download here. Chances are that teachers using the BAS don’t know about researchers’ adverse findings on it, or good alternatives. Do them a favour, send them the APM report and RSS assessment list.

If your school can’t provide valid, reliable reading/spelling assessment, try asking local Speech Pathologists, Educational and Developmental Psychologists or Specialist Educators for a second opinion. Very young kids can do quite a lot of learning in the summer holidays with good professional guidance and/or by attending programs like our holiday groups. The sooner they catch up with peers, the happier they’ll be in 2024.

Does this child need formal assessment?

It’s the last week of term here in wintry Melbourne, and many parents will be getting school reports saying their child has some reading and/or spelling difficulties, and suggesting further assessment.

Others will be worrying about their child’s skills, but being advised to wait and see if they catch up. Children often don’t catch up, and waiting for them to do so can waste valuable early intervention time.

A full developmental and educational assessment needs to be done by a psychologist, but can be quite expensive, and there are usually long waiting lists. If you think your child might have dyslexia/dysgraphia, please make sure your child does at least six months of high-quality intervention before seeking a diagnostic assessment, as that’s one of the diagnostic criteria for Specific Learning Disorder.

Speech pathologists can assess speech-language related aspects of reading and spelling, and provide recommendations, but again there’s usually a wait (though we have a few appointments available in North Fitzroy in the holidays, contact us here to find out more). Special educators can also assist with many assessments, but again those in the private sector often have long waiting lists, and if they’re school-based, they’re probably about to go on holidays.

If booking an assessment, make sure you find out how long it will take, what it will cover/include and how much it will cost beforehand. You don’t want to spend $1000+ on a 50-page report you don’t really understand, containing so many recommendations that you don’t know where to start.

AUSPELD online screener and parent website

The AUSPELD website has a useful Next Steps Screening Tool designed to help parents work out whether to seek formal assessment and/or intervention for their child.

AUSPELD’s Understanding Learning Difficulties for Parents website also contains great information to help parents understand children’s learning difficulties, and think about what to do and who can help.

Words read accurately in a minute

The number of words a child can read accurately in a minute is a useful litmus test of whether a child may have a reading problem requiring further investigation. In very general terms (see detailed norms here), by the end of Grade 1 (second year of schooling), children should be able to read an age-level text at something like 50-60 words per minute, or one word per second. This should increase to about 80-100 words per minute by the end of Grade 2, and about 110-120 words per minute by the end of Grade 3.

By the end of primary school children should be able to read at around 150 words per minute. This is about a normal conversational speech rate, though of course auctioneers and people in paid political advertisements speak much faster. Our brains like to process language at about conversational speed, and find it harder to comprehend if it’s a lot slower. Try slowing a podcast down to 75% to experience this. It makes me want to throw my phone across the room.

Highly skilled readers can read much faster than people usually speak, up to 240-300 words per minute, though it depends on what they’re reading. A trashy novel is easier than a complex scientific article.

Don’t wait-to-fail

If your child seems to have a problem with reading and/or spelling, please don’t wait to see if they grow out of it. They might not, and reading and spelling are essential skills for school and life success.

Australian phonics screening and funding

I haven’t blogged for months because of a hard third COVID-and-flu-cancellations winter, staff changes (we still need another speech pathologist to help with the crazy waiting list, click here for the job ad), a complete website rewrite, and a death in the family. Sigh.

However, many blog-worthy things have kept happening in the science of reading/spelling world. Did you see any of the incredible, free, online PATTAN 2022 Literacy Symposium presentations? Do you know about LDA‘s seminars by US phonemic awareness guru Linnea Ehri and an explosion of local talent in Melbourne on 23 October, and Sydney on the 25th? Tickets are here (but may be close to sold out). I’m pinching myself to have the honour of MCing the Melbourne seminar.

A couple of recent local announcements prompted an excellent blog from Pam Snow, which you can read here, and I’ve been thinking about them too.

Victorian Phonics Screening Check

In 2023, all Year 1 students in my state will do a phonics screening test, to check they’re learning to sound out words, not just memorise and guess them. Excellent.

Many schools still actively encourage guessing and memorising by using predictable texts, multicueing/three-cueing/MSV strategies, and rote-learning of high frequency word lists, and assess early literacy with Running Records.

A Running Record is a bit like assessing a car by walking around it kicking the tyres. Smart kids with weak decoding can appear to be reading. Phonics screening is like lifting the bonnet and checking there’s actually an engine, and the previous driver wasn’t just doing a Fred Flintstone.

There is a federally-funded Literacy Hub Phonics Screening Check, but Victoria’s Phonics Screening Check will consist of items added to the existing English Online Interview. Only employees of the Victorian Education Department can access this, so I can’t tell you much about it. Victoria’s phonics test was piloted earlier in the year, so I hope valid and reliable test items were identified to add to English Online.

Are the skills to be tested in the curriculum?

Victoria’s Year 1 phonics test will be administered in weeks 3-7 of Term 1, so children will have little more than Foundation (first year of schooling) knowledge of phonics. The two Foundation Reading and Viewing Phonics and Word Knowledge standards in the Victorian Curriculum set a very low standard:

1. Recognise all upper- and lower-case letters and the most common sound that each letter represents (VCELA146)
2. Blend sounds associated with letters when reading consonant-vowel-consonant words (VCELA147)

Taken at face value, these might restrict the Victorian Year 1 phonics screening test’s words to CVCs with spellings like ‘run’, ‘hop’ and ‘fig’, and pseudowords like ‘nim’, ‘wep’ and ‘vab’. Most children who’ve been taught well in Foundation can read much longer/harder words than that.

I hope the process of formulating and using this test, and adapting the state curriculum to the new, taking-phonics-more-seriously Australian curriculum, will prompt our Education Department to spell out which phoneme-grapheme correspondences and morphemes are expected to be learnt, at least in each of the first three years of schooling.

For example, will early Year 1 students be expected to read words with up to five sounds e.g. ‘crust’ and ‘spend’? Words with consonant digraphs like ‘sh’, ‘ch’ and ‘th’? Any vowel digraphs? What about inflectional morphemes like jump-jumps-jumped-jumping, or soft-softer-softest, and compound words? At the moment, this is unclear.

Phonics screening elsewhere

After a long push for more emphasis on early phonics in the UK, the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check was first done across England in 2012. Past versions of UK phonics screening tests are freely available online, here are links to the 2022, 2019 and 2018 versions (2020 and 2021 tests were didn’t happen because of the COVID-19 pandemic).

A 2018 National Foundation for Educational Research report said of the UK’s 2016 Progress in Reading Literacy (PIRLS) data for Year 4 students, “The average reading score of students in England was significantly higher than in PIRLS 2006 and 2011, and higher than the majority of other countries.” As you can see from the screenshot of the p5 table of an ACER report on PIRLS 2016 here, English children achieved a Mean score of 559, significantly higher than Australia’s 544. Their extra emphasis on assessing and teaching phonics hasn’t done them any harm.

Two Australian states already screen Year 1 children’s decoding skills. South Australia ran a trial in 2017, then rolled a test out to government schools in 2018, and other schools in 2019. New South Wales had a pilot in 2020 and rollout in 2021. Both tests only seem to be accessible to education department staff, but seem similar to the UK test.

In SA in 2021, 67% of children got the expected 28 out of 40 test words/pseudowords correct. In 2018 only 43% of children got 28 items right. Last year, only 2% of kids couldn’t read any words, down from 4% in 2018. Rural, indigenous and lower socioeconomic kids tended to score below average, more details are here.

In NSW in 2021, 56.7% of students were at or above the expected achievement level, up from 43.3% in the 2020 trial. More details are here. I hope we see a similar early lift in skills in Victoria, and that extra attention and resources for rural, indigenous and disadvantaged kids bring their results closer to average.

Administering and following up the test

Australian Year 1 teachers have been given a couple of days and some training to administer the Year 1 Phonics Check, which is a good start, but more needs to be done to help them make optimal use of the test’s data. Gaps in teachers’ knowledge of scientific approaches to teaching early reading and spelling are now being filled by teachers themselves, in droves, in their own time if necessary. They’re voting with their feet for evidence-based practice, and demanding teaching resources to match. Universities, education departments and publishers should take note, and catch up.

We have a state election at the end of November, and the state Opposition has just promised $220 million for systematic, synthetic phonics training and resources. The downstream benefits of preventing reading failure with such measures are massive, for education, employment, the justice system, health and mental health, you name it.

This election promise is most welcome, and in the context of a ~$90 billion (with a b) state budget, I hope all parties contesting the election will match it. After all, this is The Education State, and all children deserve best educational practice.