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

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

Autonomy’s great if it delivers success

The Australian Education Union dislikes our state’s new requirement to teach explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics in the early years, saying teachers already do phonics, must not be told how to do their jobs, weren’t properly consulted, and won’t cooperate. However, many teachers, including AEU members, are pleased by this new requirement. They see it as a vital social justice measure and a way to cut teacher workloads, and are disappointed by the AEU’s response.

I’m not sure why being told to do something you already do is a problem. Everyone is told how to do their jobs, including self-employed folk like me. I’m working on my Speech Pathology Australia Certification, and must comply with Fair Work, NDIS, Medicare, ATO and many other requirements.

The reading/learning science movement has been growing like topsy for years, so I’d be surprised if Education Ministers and the AEU haven’t had plenty of discussions about how to best teach literacy. Having been a union rep myself, I’d be amazed if AEU members went to the barricades to defend teaching approaches which lack strong evidence, or the resulting high differentiation workloads.

Teacher autonomy (not evidence-based practice) gets top priority in the recently-updated AEU Pedagogy Policy. Perhaps whoever invited Barbara Arrowsmith-Young to speak at the AEU office in 2017 led the policy review process. Has teacher autonomy been working well for this state’s struggling readers, and their teachers, who have a right to do high-quality work, and to see their students succeed?

New VAGO report

A new state Auditor-General (VAGO) report says our Education Department isn’t getting good value for the $1.2 billion dollars being spent over five years on its Tutor Learning Initiative. There’s substantial evidence (e.g. here and here) that high-quality, intensive small group intervention can help struggling readers catch up. Across the state in 2023, tutored kids’ test scores increased more than the median increase for all kids (great!), but less than matched kids who weren’t tutored (oh dear).

I’m sure many skilled, experienced tutors who understand reading/learning research provided high-quality intervention in many schools, and their students made a lot of progress. But what were tutors doing elsewhere? Balanced literacy (a balance of things that work and things that don’t)? Other ineffective programs/approaches? VAGO says tutoring was generally timely, but there were problems with targeting intervention, and making it appropriate to school context and student need. Workforce problems mainly affected secondary and F-12 schools.

VAGO concludes that many schools’ tutoring was not effective, and recommends a statewide, staged roll-out of effective programs. Data the Education Department already collects should be used to drive improvement. Absolutely.

What does good intervention look like?

Most kids who struggle to read and write have difficulty at the word level. Kids’ word-level reading and spelling improves when they do a LOT of well-targeted and sequenced reading and writing practice. If watching a Tutor Learning Initiative literacy session, I’d mainly want to see kids with eyes on text (in books, games, whatever) as they read aloud, or pencils in hand, writing, then reading back what they’ve written. I’d want to see tutors providing well-organised and sequenced, fast-paced work with immediate feedback and encouragement. They’d be helping kids get their reps up, and slam-dunk words into long-term memory for instant retrieval and thus fluency.

Take a look at the 90 second video about the Tutor Learning Initiative here: www.vic.gov.au/tutor-learning-initiative. I see children walking, sitting, talking, smiling … but can you see any children reading or writing? What does this mean? I’m not sure, but I’d promote this initiative with a very different video.

System support for the best teaching and learning

The AEU’s submission to our recent state government inquiry into education says on p2:

“Geoffrey Robertson KC correctly argues that “a real revolution in education will only come when a government ensures that its state schools set the standard of excellence. Then and only then will we have equity.” The idea of equality draws on notions that all people in our society are of equal value. This democratic principle is crucial to underpinning the provision of public schooling. Only through proper and fair funding of our schools and a system focused on supporting school staff to provide the best teaching and learning programs that then (sic) we can achieve equity.”

Typo/grammar aside, I couldn’t agree more. It’s time to close the school funding gap. I hope the Federal Next Steps report ensures that future Initial Teacher Education graduates know how to teach reading and spelling fast and well. I hope ongoing Tutor Learning Initiative improvements, and implementation of the VAGO report’s recommendations, help stacks of struggling kids catch up with their peers in 2025. And I hope AEU members can persuade their leaders that early, explicit, systematic phonics is (to paraphrase Snow and Juel) helpful to all children and their teachers, harmful to none, and crucial for some, and that autonomy to wander in the literacy pedagogy wilderness is highly overrated.

25 minutes a day in F-2 so everyone can read!

Melbourne newspaper The Age is holding its Schools Summit, you can find their blog about this here.

The big announcement from this summit is that explicit teaching of systematic, synthetic phonics in the first three years of school will be required of all Victorian schools from 2025. Here’s a screenshot from the Premier’s media release entitled “Making best practice common practice in the Education State”:

An article The way children are taught to read in Victoria is about to change provides more detail, but it’s pay-walled if you’re not an Age subscriber. If you are, please make time to leave a comment. Here’s mine:

Kudos to Education Minister Ben Carroll for learning about reading research, and acting on it. Everyone in education and beyond will benefit when all children are taught to read and write in the most effective, efficient way, especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

A win for kids and teachers

This announcement must be implemented in a pro-teacher way, recognising the yawning gap in language knowledge in most teacher preparation degrees, and the vast amount of work so many teachers have done in their own time to upskill themselves and others, and get us to this point (yes, Sharing Best Practice, Reading Science In Schools, TFE, SPELDs, LDA, SOTLA, Berys Dixon and Maureen Pollard, I’m looking at you).

This decision should give early years teachers faster success teaching all children to read and write, especially those who struggle. It should reduce later years teachers’ differentiation workloads. Fewer parents will have to spend money on intervention outside school. Fewer kids whose parents can’t afford intervention will miss out on quality teaching about our complex writing system. More success for all means better behaviour and less class disruption. This announcement should help block the school-to-prison pipeline.

I’ve been doing little happy dances about the announcement all morning, but this is only the beginning. The hard work of implementation starts now.

Helping schools choose quality phonics practice texts

Practice makes permanent, so schools need to choose high-quality, good-value phonics practice texts, and make them available to all F-2 children. Our North Fitzroy office is about the only place in Victoria where a wide range of decodable books suitable for F-2 are on display. Next term, I’ll be running small (up to 12 people) three-hour workshops about them on Wednesdays and Thursdays after school, and fortnightly on Saturdays.

There are also a couple of 22nd June workshops for people needing urgent help getting value for EOFY unspent cash, and some workshops for interventionists, librarians, adult educators and parents. I hope this is a useful way to support implementation of this important announcement, and ensure children are given quality phonics practice texts, and Victorians’ money is spent wisely. All the dates and times are on the workshops page, where tickets will be available soon.

Let’s set kids up for success

Finally, I’ve been thinking about the article “The way we teach most children to read sets them up to fail” Prof Pamela Snow and I co-wrote in the Conversation in 2015. Let’s hope everyone in the education system can now work together to ensure all children are taught to read in a way that sets them up for success.

Alison Clarke

Ten cheers for our new Children’s Laureate!

I was so excited to be invited to the launch of Sally Rippin’s two year program as Australian Children’s Laureate on Tuesday, though surprised to spot a former colleague in the crowd who was once staunchly anti-phonics and pro Reading Recovery/Fountas and Pinnell.

Then I realised: Sally is the Perzackly Perfect Person to cheer people off the sinking Balanced Literacy ship (especially since the Grattan Institute’s Reading Guarantee report), and onto ship Structured Literacy, so all kids can hurry up and start enjoying wonderful stories.

Sally isn’t just an author of great kids’ books, she’s the mum of a neurodivergent kid who struggled to read and spell, and a staunch advocate of making sure all kids are taught to crack our spelling code, instead of being encouraged to memorise and guess words. Her book for adults about this, Wild Things: how we learn to read, and what can happen if we don’t, should be in every school and local library. Here she is at the launch with queen of our activist dyslexia mums, Dyslexia Victoria Support founder Heidi Gregory.

Sally’s term as Children’s Laureate is the perfect time for a strong push to dump dross like predictable/repetitive texts and rote-memorisation of high frequency word lists, and promote things like decodable texts and systematic, explicit phonics teaching in Years F-2. It’s also the perfect time to improve early identification and intervention for neurodivergent kids in schools, and knock down barriers to reading for all kids.

The Grattan Institute report (there’s a podcast about it here, and a 20-minute YouTube summary here) says kids with poor literacy currently in school could cost taxpayers $40 billion over their lifetimes, not to mention the personal cost to those kids. I cannot think of a better use of my taxes than ensuring all schools use literacy-teaching methods that are based on the best available evidence, and that struggling and neurodiverse kids whose parents can’t afford high-quality private intervention don’t miss out on it.

At the launch I also got a copy of Come Over To My House, a picture book co-authored by Eliza Hull, full of stories about making the world more accessible for everyone. It’s perfect for our waiting room. I also got some School Of Monsters compilations for our lending library, signed by Sally and illustrator Chris Kennett (who also drew little bats on them). Chris taught everyone at the launch how to draw a monster, which was rather hilarious.

Sally will be travelling all over Australia in the next two years, so make sure you find out when she is coming to a town or city near you (the ACLF newsletter and social media information is here), and spread the word. It’s a story well worth telling.

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.

The Australian Curriculum Version 9.0

Prompted by an interesting Radio National interview with ACARA CEO David de Carvalho, I’ve been trying to get my head around early literacy in version 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum. It’s a definite improvement on previous versions, so WELL DONE to all those who argued for evidence-based practice, sorry I was too busy swimming through COVID-related mud to help.

My main interest is in the English strand for Foundation to Year 2, the vital learning-to-spell-and-decode years. Have predictable texts, multicueing and rote-memorisation of high-frequency wordlists finally been dumped? How specific is it about which phonemic awareness, phonics and morphology knowledge/skills to teach in the first three years? What does it say about spelling?