Spelfabet

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

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

Holiday groups, new games, 30% off sale

A quick blog post about three things: therapy groups for Melbourne F-2 children in January 2025, 15 more Flex-It card games to teach Set for Variability/pronunciation correction in polysyllable words, and a bumper end of year Spelfabet online shop sale (use the code “Happy Holidays!” at the checkout for 30% off).

January therapy groups

We still have a few places in our 20-24th January therapy groups for young struggling readers/spellers (2024 Foundation to Year 2 children). If you know a young child in Melbourne whose school report says they’re not keeping up with peers on literacy, and who might like to join an intensive group, please let them know. More details are here.

We now have a bunch of kids who have been coming back most holidays, as young children are often too tired to do therapy outside school hours during term. Groups can be more fun than individual sessions, and allow children to make friends with peers who are also finding reading/spelling a bit tricky.

More Flex-It card games

A second tranche of 15 Flex-It card download-and-print games are now in the website shop, you can find them here. These games give children controlled practice trying a different target sound for a target spelling (Set for Variability/pronunciation correction), if their first attempt at sounding out a word isn’t successful, e.g. if they rhyme ‘very’ with ‘furry’ instead of ‘berry’.

Each printable game costs an Aussie dollar (or 70c for the rest of 2024) plus GST. Each prints in colour on three sheets of A4 cardboard. Print and laminate what you need, cut them up (or helpful older kids might like to flex their scissor skills) and you’re ready to play. The original 15 Flex-It games have also been improved slightly, so if you already have the first set, log back into the shop to download the new files (go to My Account, reset your password if it’s forgotten).

30% off everything in the Spelfabet shop

To congratulate everyone for getting through the year, we’re having a bumper 30% off everything sale in the Spelfabet online shop until the end of 2024.

Choose the things you want from the shop – embedded picture mnemonics, decodable books, games, quizzes, workbooks, whatever – then type “Happy Holidays!” into the coupon box at the checkout for the discount. If you dislike laminating and cutting up, we probably can’t post the printed Short Vowels game in the video below to you before Christmas, but postage on a class set costs the same as a single game, and would arrive anywhere in Australia before the 2025 school year (sorry we don’t mail them overseas).

May your festive season be full of rest, fun and love, from everyone at Spelfabet.

Literacy boosts language

Washington DC’s amazing Planet Word Museum has a great YouTube channel which includes a lecture called Eyes on Reading: Dr. Stanislas Dehaene with Emily Hanford about how learning to read changes the brain. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the many kids I’ve known with whose language test scores vastly improved after they learnt to read and write, so I sat up and paid close attention when Dr. Dehaene said (starting at 16.15 on the video clock):

“…because you’ve learned to read, you are processing spoken language better. You are hearing the phonemes better and you are able to do phonological awareness tasks, you’re able to move phonemes around in your mind, you’re able to play with phonemes, and we found that there is almost a doubling of the brain activity for spoken language as a function of how good a reader you are, as a function of reading score. So that’s a huge transformation. We don’t fully know at the cellular level what it means, but there is a huge enhancement of responses in this area. We also found that the connection between these systems, if we look just at the anatomy of the connections of the brain with diffusion imaging, was reinforced “.

Matthew Effects and Spiral Causality

We’ve known since Keith Stanovich’s classic 1986 Matthew Effects article that reading boosts both language and cognitive skills. He explains this here:

Conversely, failing to learn to read has a negative impact on language and cognitive skills, and other negative knock-on effects, as Stanovich wrote:

“Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performance on many academic tasks. In short, as reading develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behavior. Or, to put it more simply – and more sadly – in the words of a tearful nine-year-old, already falling frustratingly behind his peers in reading progress, “Reading affects everything you do.” (p390)

In 2011, Dutch researchers Suzanne Mol and Adriana Bus published To Read or Not To Read: A Meta-Analysis of Print Exposure from Infancy to Early Adulthood, in which they found:

“Print exposure explains 12% of the variance in preschoolers’ and kindergartners’ oral language skills,13% in primary school, 19% in middle school, 30% in high school, and 34% at undergraduate and graduate level…Although these outcomes do not permit conclusions about causality, the pattern of findings as well as a qualitative review of longitudinal studies suggests that spiral causality is plausible.”

Being literate helps us remember spoken words

In 2022 I was surprised by radio reports of a new, nationalist Italian Prime Minister with an Irish-sounding name: Georgia Maloney. OK, Italy and Ireland are both in the EU, but, mi scusi? Google to the rescue. Giorgia Meloni. Facepalm. I’d applied the wrong orthographic skeletons – ideas we form about a word’s spelling from its pronunciation. They’re what we correct/clarify when we hear an unfamiliar name, ask ‘how do you spell that?’, then don’t write it down. We’re just trying to mentally store a high-quality lexical representation (sounds, word structure, meaning and spelling).

Generating orthographic skeletons is linked to better word recall (see last year’s delightfully-titled article Déjà-lu: When Orthographic Representations are Generated in the Absence of Orthography), just as oral vocabulary knowledge boosts retention of written words (see other non-paywalled articles about this here, here, here and here). Words are learnt more easily, even by dyslexic children, when presented in both spoken and printed form. Spellings help us symbolise and store sounds/word parts in memory. Other research on this Orthographic Facilitation process can be found here, here and here.

We all know strong oral language is the foundation of strong literacy skills, but language and literacy intertwine across the lifespan in a reciprocal way, so that becoming literate boosts oral language skills, especially vocabulary. US education, cognitive science and fairness blogger Natalie Wexler’s recent post “Want children to be good speakers? Teach them to write” argues that writing instruction also improves comprehension and the ability to use formal spoken language. All of us at Spelfabet are about to do SRSD training, as research suggests their approach to writing also has positive spinoffs for other aspects of communication and wellbeing.

New NDIS guidelines

Australia’s new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) guidelines say supports related to school education are not funded by the NDIS. Having been in local government, I find cost-shifting maddening, so I agree that every cent of NDIS funding should be spent helping people with disabilities to become more independent, find work, study and have greater choice and control over their lives.

Ideally, schools should be able to teach all children with disabilities who can understand and use language to read and write. As well as this being great for the kids, it would save the NDIS a lot of money helping participants overcome consequences of poor literacy, like not being able to read signage, food labels, recipes, shopping lists, timetables, text messages etc., let alone study or find work.

Some children with disabilities have major difficulties with phonological processing, memory, speech, language, attention, perspective-taking, restricted interests, sensory overload, motor planning and/or anxiety, which interfere with learning to read and write. Even if they have high-quality classroom teaching and small group intervention in their first three years of schooling, they still fall behind their peers. Their disabilities require specialised, individualised intervention not always available in schools to learn to read and write, and thus improve their language and life prospects generally. The longer this intervention is postponed, the more difficult and expensive it becomes.

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.

Dyslexia facts, myths and strategies

I’ve just listened to a great Ontario IDA Reading Road Trip podcast, in which the IDA’s Kate Winn interviews Dr Jack Fletcher about dyslexia facts, myths and strategies. Click here to listen to the whole thing yourself, and/or read the transcript, which includes references. For the time-poor and my own learning, here’s what I thought were key takeaways.

Defining and diagnosing dyslexia

Dyslexia is a word-level reading and spelling problem which results from a combination of biological and environmental factors. It’s a persistent inability to respond to the kind of explicit, intensive, instruction that works for most people.

Instructional response is the most important criterion for diagnosing anyone with a Specific Learning Disorder, especially dyslexia. Diagnosis should be based on multiple criteria, including progress monitoring measures from intervention, and norm-referenced achievement testing. Specialist dyslexia assessment tools aren’t helpful or necessary. Cognitive tests are only useful in identifying kids who are at risk in the first two years of schooling. After grade two, assessment should be focussed on academic measures of reading, spelling, and writing.

It’s not valid to diagnose dyslexia based on a discrepancy between cognitive skills and academic performance. Kids with reading problems with high and low IQs have the same difficulties with phonological awareness, rapid naming and so on. IQ tests have racial and social bias, so there are social justice issues associated with their use. A Pattern of Strengths And Weaknesses model is also a discrepancy model, is typically inaccurate and grossly under-identifies kids with learning disabilities. We also need to be aware of English Language Learners when identifying at-risk kids, so they’re not misidentified.

Related/co-occurring difficulties

Other kinds of learning disorders and difficulties often co-occur with dyslexia, such as problems with writing or mathematics. Kids with dyslexia often also have difficulties with attention and/or language needing separate intervention. Stimulant medication can help a child pay attention but it won’t teach them how to read. Learning to read words doesn’t guarantee you’ll know what they mean.

About 25% of kids with dyslexia have clinical levels of anxiety. Anxiety predicts a poorer response to intervention, so one US expert, Sharon Vaughn, has introduced five minutes of mindfulness meditation at the start of intervention sessions, to reduce anxiety.

Psychiatrist Shepherd Kellam studied an approach which prevented behaviour problems, but found this didn’t help kids improve their reading. So he introduced a reading intervention, and found that when they became better readers, the girls were less depressed and the boys were less disruptive. He also found that kids all knew who was struggling with reading, and that this was a source of anxiety.

Can dyslexia be prevented?

Many severe reading problems can be prevented if kids get the right kind of explicit instruction and reading experience in their first three years of schooling. About 40% of kids find it hard to learn to read well without really explicit and fairly intense instruction and early reading experience. This makes them aware of the sounds in spoken words and helps them grasp the idea that these sounds are what letters represent (the alphabetic principle) and develops their brains as mediators of reading. Early access to print gives the brain the kind of visual experience it needs to become an automatic reader.

If kids don’t learn to read in the first three years of schooling, it’s very hard for them fully develop their neural system and get the reading experience and vocabulary they need to become skilled, automatic readers. They can be taught to decode, but end up with persistent reading problems. Intervention in first and second grade is twice as effective as intervention after the third grade. It’s hard to differentiate reading problems due to biology and those which are due to environment. Brain scans of third grade poor readers who were not taught well and third grade poor readers at biological risk of dyslexia look the same.

Poor instruction is unfortunately still quite common, though teachers are not to blame, they always have good intentions. They just may not have the training and the knowledge that they need to be effective instructors for kids who are at risk. Improving and maintaining high-quality instruction, including classroom management, needs to be an ongoing priority.

What kind of intervention?

Explicit, systematic instruction in the general early years classroom works for everyone, but works twice as well for the at-risk kids (see this research by Barbara Foorman et al). There should be systematic, explicit phonics: teaching the relationship between what words sound like and what they look like. There should also be cumulative practice of skills to automaticity, and work on comprehension. Reading and writing strengths and weaknesses should be monitored, and intervention adjusted accordingly.

If you are including all these elements and collecting data towards your benchmark, and making good progress, then you should just continue until students achieve the benchmark.

Research by the late Carol Connor suggests decoding/word level intervention is about four times more effective in a small group (3 or 4 children per teacher) than a large group, as long as the groups are well matched and managed. This makes sense, as in phonics lessons, teachers have to listen closely to each child, and notice and correct their errors. There’s no evidence that individual phonics instruction is better than this kind of well-matched small group work (click here for information about upcoming Spelfabet holiday groups). The best indicator of which kids should be grouped together is their reading fluency.

Meaning-based instruction, on the other hand, can be done equally well in small or large groups. For English Language Learners, quality of instruction seems to make more difference than language of instruction.

Myths about dyslexia

Dyslexia is not a gift. The myth that people with dyslexia have special talents might result from individual differences and the natural orientation of development towards strengths.

People with dyslexia don’t see letters backwards. As we learn to read, we see mirror images of words in both sides of the brain, which gradually lateralises to the left side of the brain. This happens more slowly in people with dyslexia.

Other myths include: that coloured lenses or overlays help with reading; that dyslexia is a reading comprehension problem; that it’s rare; that people grow out of it; that Brain Training programs not involving reading instruction work; and that improving home literacy will overcome dyslexia. See the blue box on the right of Fletcher and Vaughn’s interesting article titled “Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems for the full list of 18 myths Dr Fletcher refers to in the podcast.

Thanks a quintillion to Kate Winn and Ontario IDA for this interesting podcast series, I’ll be going through the back catalogue in coming weeks, and just noticed a new 4 March 2024 episode pop up, with Australia’s own Dr Jennifer Buckingham. One for tomorrow’s morning dog walk, methinks.

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.