Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference: Day 2

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Thanks for the nice feedback about my SSSR conference Day 1 blog post, it’s helped motivate this one. Here are summaries of what I attended on the second day (any errors/misunderstandings are my own).

In-person conferences are great for catching up with favourite Aussie professional movers and shakers like Mandy Nayton, Jennifer Buckingham and Pamela Snow.

Neural deficits in dyslexia

Dr Tracy Centanni of the university of Florida talked about two genes on Chromosome 6 – KIAA0319 and DCDC2 – which are widely studied in dyslexia. If you suppress KIAA039, the left temporal area of the brain starts working inconsistently, either too fast or too slow. About 50% of kids with dyslexia have low neural consistency. This makes it harder to link speech sounds to letters.

DCDC2 is linked with white matter integrity in the language network, and helps neurons go where they should. Suppression of this gene in rats really messed with the speed of their performance, so perhaps this gene is linked to Rapid Automatised Naming (RAN), vital for fluent reading.

The most common neural deficit in dyslexia is low activation in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left side of the brain. In non-literate people this area processes information about things like tools, faces and structures. Once learning to read begins, VWFA cells start to specialise in processing written words, linking the visual and language areas of the brain. Face processing gets partly shunted to the right side of the brain, but most people don’t notice they’ve lost half their face processing real estate. Even before dyslexic kids start school, their VWFAs respond less strongly to letters, but not nonsense objects.

Goals targeting writing skills in ASD kids’ IEPs

The Autism Spectrum is very diverse, and kids with ASD vary greatly in their literacy and broader educational needs. 70% of ASD students in the US have an Individualised Educational Program (IEP).

A/Prof Matt Zajic of Columbia University surveyed families of 954 ASD kids with an average age of 10, 80% of whom were male, and 60% of whom spent more than half their time in mainstream school. 80% had good cognitive skills, 89% had language disorder, 43% had ADHD. The survey asked whether the students had at least one IEP goal targeting handwriting, keyboarding, spelling, grammar, punctuation, or sentence/paragraph construction, but didn’t evaluate the quality, quantity or priority of these goals.

Data were analysed using Latent Class Analysis, a statistical method used to identify hidden subgroups. About 15% of kids, mostly younger ones, fell into a transcription subgroup (handwriting and spelling). 17% of kids, mostly older ones, fell into a text generation subgroup (sentence and/or paragraph construction).

About 24% had ‘most needs’, and 44% had ‘minimal needs’, which I think means 44% of kids were good at writing and 24% were seriously not, but that could be wrong, he was going very fast. Keyboarding goals were low across the board. Cognitive, language and/or attention diagnoses didn’t make much difference to the data, but grade, time spent in mainstream school and adaptive behaviour did make a difference. More research is needed on different profiles, relationship to reading goals and level of professional support.

TOPsy: the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis

There’s a clear link between prosody (speech intonation/stress patterns) and reading in research. While we know prosody is important for communication, it’s poorly understood. Dr Srishti Nayak of Vanderbilt University Medical Centre has been working on a test of adult prosody. It takes 10 minutes, and has 28 items. Test words are said by a female American English speaker, and test-takers identify word stress.

However, Dr Nayak pronounces many of the test words differently from the test, because she speaks Indian English, so she doesn’t do very well on her own test. The TOPsy is thus quite accent specific, and how it might work in other languages is not clear, since some languages have mobile lexical stress (e.g. English, as in ‘PHOto’ but ‘phoTOGrapher’), while in other languages (e.g. French) lexical stress is fixed, or operates in other ways.

The TOPsy built on an existing internet-based silent reading fluency test from Hong Kong called WordSword. This presents digital text without spaces between words. Test-takers have four minutes to mark word boundaries. The TOPsy also drew on a large genetic association study of word reading, to combine prosody scores with measures of genetic predisposition for reading. I didn’t really understand how, so write to Dr Nayak if you’re curious.

Anyway, the lower your prosody score on the TOPsy, the more likely you are to have dyslexia. There was also a genetic association between prosody and reading. People being studied provided genetic material by mailing back saliva kits during the pandemic. Researchers are creative!

Photo from conference venue window, rather distracting

Reading skills and the digital divide

47% of kids living in poverty in the US lack high-speed internet. Research in North Carolina compared broadband speed and state reading test scores, and found a small but significant increase in scores thanks to faster broadband.

Dr Callie Little of the Florida Center for Reading Research examined the impact of pre-pandemic (2015-2017) broadband access on early reading nationally. Data were from 650 children involved in the National Project on Achievement in Twins, aged 5 to 8 years, 89% of whom were white. Parents ranked internet speeds from 1-5, and average download speed in megabytes per second in each census tract was also collected. The Child Opportunity Index is also organised by census tract, and rates opportunity from 1-100 based on educational, health, environmental and socio-economic factors. DIBELS composite scores were used to measure reading. Number of devices in the home were not measured.

No significant association between internet access and early reading achievement was found in this study. Broadband speed information for 2020 is now available, so researchers will look at the impact of COVID-19 on reading achievement, including for older kids who had to do more homework online.

UFLI foundations: an affordable, evidence-based Tier 1 program

Dr Holly Lane talked about the University of Florida Literacy Intervention (UFLI) Foundations program, which was developed over two years in response to school requests to improve phonics outcomes. University staff had been giving schools program-agnostic professional learning advice, assuming this would lead to improved instruction, and thus to better student outcomes.

However, they discovered that professional learning improves teachers’ knowledge, but their practice doesn’t change. Teachers also need an educative curriculum. So the university staff asked, “What if we just develop the lesson plans for you?”. Schools said “yes, please!”.

UFLI scope and sequence and lesson plans were developed to be very explicit and systematic, with lesson routines, many opportunities to practice, interleaving, the development of automaticity, progress monitoring and differentiation. UFLI was piloted in one school with 16 teachers in the first year, then usability and feasibility revisions were made e.g. they discovered word chains need to be provided, as teachers are more likely to skip them than make up their own.

In the second year they did a district-wide pilot, with 1670 students in Years K-1, and measured progress with DIBELS (8th edition). The comparison groups were children at the same levels in the previous year. School autonomy presented a problem in implementation, as not every teacher implemented UFLI with fidelity, and this was related to outcomes. However, Effect Sizes for UFLI were still remarkable: 1.44 for Kindergarten and 2.04 for Year 1 (an Effect Size of 0.8 is considered high).

Dr Lane’s slide showing UFLI Foundations Effect Sizes of 1.44 and 2.04 included nice gifs of excited minions.

In the US summer of 2022, UFLI Foundations was released. Each lesson plan is two pages, and the only other things teachers need are letter sets, markers, whiteboards and free stuff from an online toolbox e.g. decodable text, a slide deck, web-based apps, and printables. They are still adding to these resources. UFLI is thus very cost-effective to implement, you just need the book.

UFLI has now gone viral, about 180,000 teachers around the world are using it, and Dr Lane has just toured Australia (darnit, I was busy with other things and missed her).

Teacher-led Tier 2 in Aotearoa/NZ’s Better Start Literacy approach

Associate Dean Brigid McNeill of Canterbury University talked about the Better Start Literacy Approach‘s Tier 2 (small group, helping beginners keep up) intervention. This needs to be:

  • Explicit and systematic across all Big Five domains of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
  • Complementary/supplementary to classroom instruction (Tier 1), but providing more intensity and exposure.
  • Implemented early, and then building towards evaluation.

The Better Start program is strengths-based, and includes online teacher professional learning completed whenever suits them, and resulting in a microcredential. Facilitators are paired with teachers, to provide coaching and mentoring. There is family engagement and culturally appropriate resources. Online monitoring assessments identify kids with difficulties, monitor learning, help with planning, and are adapted for children with complex needs.

Better Start is now in 833 schools across NZ, and 3650 teachers have been trained. Over 43,000 students have been involved, 23.4% Maori, 9.4 Pasifika, 12.4% Asian and 46.8% European. 14% of children involved have had tier 2 support.

The Ready To Read Phonic Plus series readers, which were co-constructed with teachers and informed by parent and child feedback, are used. There are some scripted lessons, and some that teachers develop.

Children have baseline assessment at school entry, then 10 weeks later any strugglers start Tier 2 intervention for 20 weeks, focusing on phonemic awareness, phonics and word decoding/encoding. The gap between the Tier 2 children and other children disappeared at 30 weeks on all measures except their scores on reading connected text, where controls reached a higher level, perhaps because they could process text faster.

Key aspects of this research were that it took a co-creation/partnership approach, had high stakeholder engagement, and quality professional learning and development delivered at scale, with in-context, ongoing support. Evaluation of impact was via teacher administered measures and integrated into the study design, and teachers could use their evaluations to drive teaching decisions.

Stay tuned for more on Better Start’s Tier 1, discussed on Day 3 of the conference. There’s also a Tier 3.

The slow development of fast word recognition

Most children get better at recognising both written and spoken words in their first few school years. To understand what we hear and read, we must identify words efficiently. Spoken words are presented temporally in fractions of a second, but when reading, we must rapidly tell the difference between words with shared letters, by building evidence for the correct word, and suppressing competitor words.

Professor Bob McMurray of the University of Iowa talked about research in which 280 children in Grades 1-3 saw briefly presented words and then had to click on matching pictures. Some of the competing pictures represented words with shared letters e.g. for the word ‘ship’, pictures were ‘shin’, ‘chip’, ‘shop’, ‘snip’ and ‘coin’. They also had to identify spoken words, but I didn’t write down how that was done, sorry. Write to him if you need to know.

There were concurrent relationships between spoken and written word identification, which suggest a common factor. More robust and efficient spoken word recognition leads more efficient written word recognition. Efficient spoken word recognition might reflect better phonological processing (discerning the structure of spoken words). To understand how children become efficient readers, we might need to better understand how they become efficient listeners.

The words children see and hear

Dr Luan Li of East China Normal University spoke about research into lexical variability (diversity in words used) in language seen and heard by school-aged children in China. Most research in this area has focussed on preschoolers, but in the early school years there is a vocabulary spurt, and it is a critical period for the development of abstract ideas.

Vocabulary diversity was studied in three sources of language input: child-directed speech (1.8 million words), animated cartoons/movies (1.8 million words), and picture books (1.5 million words). Picture books had the most diverse vocabulary, but cartoons/movies had greater contextual and semantic diversity, i.e. they used words in a wider variety of ways/to express more varied meanings. Child-directed speech had the least variability. The words kids see and hear affect language and reading development. If you can read Chinese, more information is here.

DIBELS 8th edition as a dyslexia screener

Most US states now require students to be screened for dyslexia, but there aren’t any screening tests specifically validated for this purpose (I hope EarlyBird will help fill this niche). Dr Patrick Kennedy from the University of Oregon spoke about outcomes of the first two of four years of research into the use of a general reading screening test – DIBELS 8 – as a dyslexia screener.

Preliminary results suggest that DIBELS can be used as a dyslexia screener, though it’s difficult to decide exactly where to put cutoff scores (e.g. 5th, 15th or 25th percentile).

Computer-adaptive reading screening

Dr Emily Farris from Middle Tennessee State University talked about research comparing three computer-based reading screening tests: Istation Indicators of Progress Early Reading, MAP-Reading and Star Reading. Third graders’ results on these screening tests were compared with the state achievement test, which 55% of children currently fail.

Sadly, none of the computer-based screeners were very sensitive or specific, they all identified far too many kids. These results suggest it’s probably not a good idea to rely on a single measure to identify children at risk. Screening in third grade is also too late, it needs to be done much earlier.

Compensating readers

Dr Kristina Breaux from educational publisher Pearson, developer of the widely-used fourth edition of the Weschler Individual Achievement Test, spoke about students who seem to read within normal limits, but still find reading difficult, and are reluctant to do it. These kids have above-average listening comprehension (standard scores of 105+), below-average phonological processing and pseudoword reading (standard scores of 85 or lower), but real word reading in the average range (standard scores of 85-90+ across four word reading subtests).

The WIAT-4 standardisation sample of 1800 school-aged students suggests that 1-3% of students might be considered compensating readers.

The text-complexity leap between third and fourth grade

In the US, nearly two-thirds of 4th and 8th grade kids are not reading at grade level, but ‘grade level text’ is poorly defined. Text complexity in grade level text increases substantially between third and fourth grade (from Lexile 420 to 740, a 76% jump).

Dr David Paige of Northern Illinois University discussed work developing systems which would allow more fine-grained tracking of progress, and earlier foundational work, so there is a smoother transition to reading at a fourth-grade level. This is needed if most fourth graders are to succeed on their state tests. The systems he was discussing are US ones, so I didn’t understand all of it, sorry. There is an article here.

Awards, including Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award

The awards ceremony was the last event on Friday, and I didn’t write down all the award and recipient names because I assumed they’d be on the SSSR website Awards page after the conference. They’re not there yet, and a new SSSR website is being developed, so perhaps the update is going straight onto the new site, which should be available soon.

Charles Hulme (whose name I have been pronouncing ‘Hulm’ in my head for decades, but it’s ‘Hume’, gah) won the Distinguished Scientific Contributions award and gave a talk titled: “What we talk about when we talk about reading“. I can’t do this talk justice here, but wrote down a few things:

  • Causes of problems like dyslexia and poor reading comprehension are theoretical statements, not real Things. They only exist in the context of a well-specified theory/model, developing out of correlations and operating forwards in time.
  • Hulme has been trying to specify cognitive processes in learning to read which can be tested statistically. Famous statistician George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful”. William of Ockham (he of Ockham’s Razor) said “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”. Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” We look for the simplest way to explain available data.
  • Path diagrams can be used to represent causal theories. Causes and consequences are linked with one-headed arrows. Understanding causes is essential for developing and evaluating interventions. Intervention studies allow us to test causal theories.
  • There are at least three causal influences of individual differences in children’s ability to learn to decode: letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness (PA), and rapid automatised naming (RAN). The first two are the basis of the alphabetic principle. RAN seems to tap a separable mechanism concerned with the efficiency of retrieving names from visual inputs. Phonemic skills and letter knowledge should fairly clearly predict early reading, and affect each other.
  • Hulme set out to prove that RAN wasn’t important, but the data did not agree. Alphanumeric RAN after three months of reading instruction predicted the later rate of growth in reading over two years (Lervag and Hulme 2009). RAN repurposes neural mechanisms meant for other tasks in left-hemisphere brain region networks. Changes in the volume of the arcuate fasciculus (a bundle of nerves connecting language and frontal areas of the brain) predicted reading. RAN taps the left-hemisphere naming system, so having effective connections between posterior and frontal areas seems essential for fluent reading.
  • The three components of the Triple Foundation Model (PA, phonics, RAN) all centre on aspects of phonology. RAN seems to tap some neurally constrained processes for retrieving the names of printed items. RAN seems to operate more strongly in later stages of development. We can’t train it, so can’t be sure it’s causal, but it probably is (he said, reluctantly).
  • The Simple View of Reading (SVoR) is a statistical model of the concurrent predictors of reading comprehension. There are four potential profiles: typical readers, hyperlexia, dyslexia and language disorder/poor comprehension. Word reading and language comprehension should both predict reading comprehension, and they do. They have double-headed arrows between them in path diagrams, indicating a reciprocal relationship.
Didn’t manage a selfie with Charles Hulme, but Tanya Serry and I got one with his work-and-life collaborator Maggie Snowling.
  • The Wellcome Language and Reading study was a seven year study. Hulme thought speech skills at age three-and-a-half would be critical for the development of reading ability. He was wrong. Language development strongly predicts RAN, phonics knowledge and phonological skills. Word-level literacy at five-and-a-half tells you a lot about reading comprehension at age eight. All this is in line with the SVoR. But language skills are critical for the development of phonological skills. Phonology grows out of much broader, language-based skills.
  • However, persistent speech difficulties are related to reading problems. One study of 569 kids starting school followed them for four years, and 7% had speech difficulties. These were a powerful predictor of later reading difficulty. The development of PA and Letter Sound Knowledge (LSK) are affected by persistent speech problems, a clear risk factor for later decoding problems. It’s easy to identify kids with speech problems.
  • The Wellcome study provided strong support for the SVoR, but makes it more complicated as language and phonology are highly correlated, not independent. But the simplicity of the SVoR makes it helpful.
  • Code-related skills drive decoding which influences comprehension. We also have a direct effect from language to reading comprehension. Early language skills provide the foundation for both decoding and comprehension.
  • The Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) improves narrative, vocabulary and listening skills. There have now been several randomised controlled trials of the effects of this intervention. Teaching assistants deliver this pullout program targeting the bottom 20-25% of kids. It produces reliable improvements in kids’ oral language skills. Children who got intervention strongly changed their language post-test scores compared with kids on the waiting list (the difference was 0.8 of a Standard Deviation, which is A Lot). In their second year of school, the intervention kids had improved language, and this completely accounted for improvements in reading comprehension.
  • A mobile app called Language Screen has been developed, which operates on an Apple or Android tablet or phone. It has four subtests and is an easy, automated way to assess kids’ language ability. Thanks to UK Education department funding the NELI program has now been provided to 100,000+ children and data on well over half a million kids is being assessed with Language Screen. They also have a preschool language enrichment program which runs for 20 weeks, which kids and teachers like, and which improves language skills by a quarter of a standard deviation at population level.
  • However, there are still lots of people selling snake oil interventions that don’t have good evidence.
  • The title of this talk was inspired by a rather pessimistic short story by Raymond Carver called “What we talk about when we talk about love”, which is a story about what love means. There’s much more reason for optimism in the field of reading difficulties!

Society for the Scientific Study of Reading conference: Day 1

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My head nearly exploded with new learning at the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading Conference in Port Douglas last week. I wasn’t tempted to wag any sessions by beach, pool, sunshine or opportunities to chat, and often wished I could clone myself and go to two or three concurrent sessions.

I’ll try to summarise the most interesting bits, without getting too TL,DR. Any mistakes/misunderstandings in what follows are my fault, let me know if you spot one. I’ll write about one day at a time, or my brain really will explode.

Learning to read syllables

Prof Carsten Elbro

Danish Professor Carsten Elbro (co-author of Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension) described research in which adults learnt novel symbols for three phonemes (/m/, /s/ and /ar/, the latter not occurring in Danish). Surprisingly, dyslexic adults couldn’t blend two of these sounds into syllables, though they could say the syllables. Blending is very hard for some people. Perhaps this relates to the way sounds change when they blur together in words (coarticulation).

In Italy, fairly straightforward sound-letter relationships and relatively few possible syllables allow kids to be taught sound-letter relationships, after which most can figure out blending on their own. However, languages like English and Danish have complex relationships between sounds and letters, and greater complexity and number of possible syllables. Prof Elbro studied 200 Danish and Italian children in Grades 1 and 2, and found that learning to read new syllables was something that had a protracted influence on decoding development, especially in Danish. This may present lasting obstacles for learners in blending and retaining (via orthographic mapping) the pronunciations and spellings of syllables, so they can be read instantly in words.

Prof Elbro’s research found that showing kids how to blend by moving letter cards together was a waste of time. The kids who didn’t have this ‘blending support’ did equally well.

Orthographic skeletons

Readers who hear short, novel words create ‘orthographic skeletons‘ for them by thinking about how they’re probably spelt. Esra Ataman of Macquarie University’s Masters thesis research taught 81 adults made-up, spoken (but not written) words with suffixes like ‘vished’, ‘visher’, ‘jafed’ and ‘jafer’. These “inventions of Professor Parsnip” were used in sentences e.g. a ‘visher’ is a toaster-like machine used for shuffling cards. The adults were then asked to read the made-up base words e.g. ‘vish’ (expected spelling) and ‘jayf’ (weird spelling, you’d expect ‘jafe’ or ‘jaif’) and their reaction times were recorded. Weird spellings were read more slowly, suggesting the adults had formed orthographic skeletons for the made-up base words, even though they’d never heard them without suffixes. Whether the trained words had inflectional or derivational suffixes didn’t seem to make much difference.

Morphology meta-analysis

Some of the ACAL staff at the conference (photo snaffled from Twitter, hope that was OK)

Dr Danielle Colenbrander from the recently-established Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy at ACU reported on a meta-analysis of research about teaching children how words are made up of meaningful word parts (morphology). Findings suggested morphology instruction helps kids with word-level reading and spelling, and transfers to the spelling of new words, but doesn’t affect comprehension. Only four of the 27 mostly US/UK studies included in this research studied beginning readers (K-2) so we don’t really know how early to start. Explicit teaching and longer-term intervention seemed to be better than implicit or short-term teaching, but there was great diversity and many gaps in the research, making it hard to know what kind of teaching is most effective, who benefits the most, or draw other conclusions.

Morphemes as islands of regularity

Dr Elisabetta Simone from Macquarie University compared how suffixes work in English and Italian. English has less complicated morphology than Italian, but much more complicated sound-spelling relationships. Her research added suffixes to real and nonsense words, and measured how quickly samples of 60 speakers of each language decided whether they were real words or not. The results suggested that English speakers relied more on morphological processing than the Italian speakers. Perhaps in the crazy chaos of the English writing system, standard spellings of morphemes provide helpful islands of regularity.

A hangover is not an overhang

Jasmine Spencer from Macquarie University spoke about the position of morphemes in written words. Free morphemes (words in their own right) can occupy different positions in longer words: ‘book’ is at the start of ‘bookshelf’ but the end of ‘textbook’. Even when compound words are scrambled e.g. ‘proofweather’ and ‘childrengrand’, they still look like real words. However, prefixes and suffixes are position-dependent. When they’re out of order – ‘ismtru’ or ‘ismsch’ – they look like gibberish. The 90 adults in her research took longer to reject scrambled compound words when their meanings were suggested by the component words (e.g. dreamday) than when they were not (e.g. linedead), and quicker to reject scrambled non-compounds (e.g. shadeday), so semantics plays a role in processing these written words. Subjects also rejected nonwords more slowly when they had real suffixes.

The Word and Affix Model

Dr Lisi Beyersmann from Macquarie University talked about a new model showing word parts being processed separately during reading. This is based on research showing typical readers read complex non-words containing real morphemes more easily than similar looking non-words. Research involving five adults with acquired dyslexia also showed they benefited from the presence of identifiable morphemes when reading nonwords. Even though prefixes come first in words, stems facilitated non-word reading more. This might be because stems tend to have clearer meanings, whereas affixes tend to be more abstract.

Tween/teen processing of morphemes

Leah Zimmermann from the University of Iowa spoke about research examining automatic processing of morphemes in 80 monolingual 12-14 year olds of varying reading ability. Students’ reading accuracy and automaticity (words presented for 90 milliseconds) were both tested on a set of 320 words. Half the words had only one morpheme, and half had two morphemes (stem and derivational suffix). Automaticity was important for fluency and comprehension, but the role of morphological processing was less clear. My notes say that the only variable to contribute unique variance to comprehension was the ability to read syllables, but I can’t find that in the abstract, so I hope it’s correct.

I managed to get a selfie with Saskia

Spelling irregular words

Most English word spellings follow sound (phonological) or word part (morphological) logic, but some don’t. There’s growing interest in how to teach these, for example using ‘spelling pronunciations’ or repeated practice. A/Prof Saskia Kohnen from Macquarie Uni talked about a study of 14 children aged 8-11 who were poor spellers (5th percentile on the Test of Written Spelling) but had other skills in the average range. They did pre-tests, then two and six weeks later wrote out 182 irregular words from the Oxford Word List, to gather two baselines. There wasn’t much natural spelling improvement in between. They then did four weeks of training (direct copying, delayed copying, spelling to dictation) at home on 32 of the words, then did a post-test.

All 14 kids made significant gains on trained words. Eight also significantly improved on untrained words. Words containing only minor errors were more likely to improve, along with words high in frequency and neighbourhood size (with similar sounds/spellings). Improved spelling of untrained words might mean kids were using a different strategy, or improving their ability to represent words in long-term memory.

Lexical richness: the vocabulary of books

The language of books is quite different from the language we use in everyday conversation. Books tend to use more sophisticated words, and unique word types. Reading aloud to children gives them early exposure to this language, or access to greater ‘lexical richness’. Nicola Dawson and colleagues from Oxford University read 180 children aged 4-7 three versions of specially-written stories. One version used a basic vocabulary item (e.g. ‘hungry’) several times, another used several synonyms (e.g. ‘hungry’, ‘starving’, ‘peckish’, ‘famished’), and a third version used the most sophisticated word (e.g. ‘famished’) repeatedly. Children were asked to retell the stories to see which words they used. Children who heard the sophisticated words repeatedly were more likely to use them. Diversity was less important. There was a clear benefit from re-reading the stories. They are still collecting data on retention/use of synonyms.

Executive Functions training

The term ‘EF soldiers’ might need to be changed if using these ideas in other cultures

Working memory, attention, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control – known collectively as Executive Functions – affect all learning. Shani Levy-Shimon from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University studied 72 Hebrew-speaking third grade poor readers, who worked in small groups of 3-4 students, for 35 minutes, three times a week for 16 weeks. 6 teachers each taught 2-3 groups, using either a multicomponent literacy intervention or business as usual. Some of the multicomponent intervention included Executive Functions training. The children receiving the Executive Functions training outperformed the other groups on all measures.

Psychosocial wellbeing

There were quite a few talks about the psychosocial impacts of literacy skill development/failure, but I’d decided to focus on word-level reading and spelling, so missed most of them. However, I did plan to attend a talk by NZ Prof John Everatt about research following two samples of struggling readers in Years 4-6. One group of 57 students received morphology intervention from Speech-Language Pathologists, while a second group of 30 received this intervention from their classroom teacher. Both groups improved not only their vocabulary, morphological awareness, word reading, spelling and reading comprehension, but also their academic self-concept and self-efficacy.

With five talks per session, and no time in between, I was often running between rooms like a madwoman, so must have missed the start of this one, when (I think) A/Prof Alison Arrow of Canterbury Uni, a co-author of the original abstract, explained John couldn’t come, and she’d talk about her PhD research instead. She had studied three groups of about 20 middle school students, who were given morphological intervention – 30 minutes 4 times per week for 10 weeks (40 sessions), or 20-30 minutes across 20 weeks (40 sessions). Their literacy skills improved, with some improvements on psychosocial measures as well.

She also said difficulties in psychosocial development due to literacy difficulties can emerge within the first six weeks of schooling, or even earlier, and can be pervasive and compound as students progress through school. Kids with learning difficulties often blame themselves for failure, but attribute success to external factors. There’s some evidence psychosocial development is very stable, so giving these kids reading success is perhaps the best way to meet their psychosocial needs.

Brain scans and diagnostic terms

Kelly Mahaffy from the University of Connecticut talked about brain scans comparing typical readers and poor decoders with ‘poor comprehenders’. She said the latter group make up about 10% of the population, and have reduced vocabulary, and difficulties with semantic and syntactic processing, inference and comprehension monitoring. In a large sample from the Child Mind Institute Healthy Brain Network Biobank, there were some frontal lobe grey matter differences, but no significant difference in white matter. This suggests executive functions are important in reading comprehension.

After the session I asked her why she didn’t use the internationally-agreed term Developmental Language Disorder instead ‘Poor Comprehenders’. She said there are people who are good at both decoding and language comprehension, but poor at reading comprehension. I raised an eyebrow and said I’d never met one, and she said she’d send me more information. I’ll let you know if it’s interesting.

Poster displays

After lunch each day there were lots of poster displays. I won’t try to summarise them, or the interesting discussions they provoked, but here’s what they looked like:

Help the government improve adult literacy!

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Screenshot from the Australian Reading Writing Hotline handbook for volunteer adult literacy tutors (emoji is added).

The elephant-in-the-room fact that millions of Australian adults have poor literacy skills is back in the news. Radio National’s AM program reports that the government is concerned millions of adults are missing out on jobs, or are ashamed to even apply for work, because they lack basic reading, writing and numeracy skills.

We’ve known about this problem since the 1996 ABS Adult Literacy Survey, but nobody in the adult literacy sector seemed to know what to do about it. Most of their teachers were sold the same Balanced Literacy story (balancing effective and ineffective) at university as other teachers, so that’s not too surprising.

If you cringed through SBS’s Lost For Words, or have browsed the Reading Writing Hotline website, you already know the adult literacy sector hasn’t really kept up with reading/spelling research. The RWH website’s “Literacy Face To Face” handbook for volunteer adult literacy tutors contains an explanation of how we read which goes beyond the three-cueing nonsense still being taken seriously in far too many schools, saying, “The efficient reader uses four sets of clues…” I kid you not. Section 1, page 4. Read it and weep. The screenshot above is from page 7. I really, truly am quite lost for words.

The Minister for Skills and Training, Brendan O’Connor, has commissioned a study to give the government a clearer picture of where adults lack basic skills. I think it also needs to get a clear picture of what scientific research has discovered about how we actually learn to read and spell, and how well this research is understood and translated into practice in the adult literacy sector. Or not.

If the study assesses adults’ reading and spelling, but not phonological processing skills, it will be about as informative as studying an iceberg by examining the part sticking out of the water, while ignoring the part under the water, holding it up (or not). If you’d like to tell the people designing the research this, or anything else, click here and do it before April 24th.

The Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox, says basic skill shortages are a national crisis for employers. In their 2021 survey of over 300 employers, 99% said that they’d been disadvantaged in some way because of basic skill shortages among current or prospective staff.

The Chief Executive of the National Apprentices Employment network says an apprenticeship is not a training program in literacy, numeracy or digital skills, and good candidates are missing out because they lack foundational skills.

There’s no shortage of heavyweights who know we have a serious adult literacy problem. I wish we could be confident there were plenty of people in the adult literacy sector offering serious, evidence-informed solutions. The solutions will probably have to come from outside the sector, from people like the readers of this blog. Please, go for it!

Play and language: the roots of literacy

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Dr Carol Westby was a preschool play and language guru back when I was an undergraduate, but I don’t work with preschoolers these days, so haven’t kept track of her recent work. However, lots of people ask me how to prepare preschoolers for literacy success at school.

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The Education Research Reading Room podcast

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I’ve just been listening to the latest episode of Ollie Lovell’s Education Research Reading Room (ERRR) podcast, the back catalogue of which is such a magnificent, free professional learning resource for teachers and others in education.

Ollie is a maths/science teacher and researcher here in Melbourne, but he’s brimming with curiosity and enthusiasm about education more generally, and always finds interesting people to interview, and asks them interesting questions.

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Context can reduce accurate word learning

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I’ve been reading an interesting 2017 dissertation by US researcher Reem Al Ghanem in preparation for this month’s DSF conference. It’s about how children learn to read and write polysyllabic words.

One section jumped out at me, because multi-cueing and the idea that phonics/word study should occur in context is still popular in many Australian schools:

“When poor readers rely on context to aid word recognition, they focus on selecting semantically appropriate words given the context clues rather than decoding the words through letter-sound conversion strategy.

When children utilize a compensatory strategy like contextual guessing rather than phonological decoding to aid their word recognition, their attention to word form is limited, resulting in poorer acquisition of word-specific representations, hence the negative context effects.

When poor readers are presented with words in isolation, they are forced to read them using phonological decoding. Although inefficient, their phonological decoding of the words increases their attention to the orthographic details of the words, resulting in acquiring higher quality representations for the words than when they are presented in
context.
” (p103)

Developing high-quality word representations is a challenging activity for struggling readers. Expecting them to only learn words in context is a bit like asking them to only learn to shoot netball or basketball goals during a real game, and discouraging goal-shooting and other skills practice.

As a weedy, unco, asthmatic kid keen to avoid on-court humiliation, I voluntarily did many hours of goal-shooting practice. Imagine if coaches discouraged such practice, and said sporting skills should only be learnt in the context of real games. We’d all stare at them. Then ignore them.

Al Ghanem’s dissertation goes on:

“While context clues can support comprehension, they are unreliable sources for orthographic learning. Teachers must select the instructional strategy that fits the goal of instruction, and presenting words in isolation appears to be the most beneficial when the goal of instruction is acquiring word-specific representations.” (p107)

Dyslexia is not a visual problem, or a gift

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Picture: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/search?q=zombie+costumes

Dyslexia means severe difficulty reading words, despite adequate intervention and effort. It can start in adulthood after a stroke or injury, but typically begins in childhood for no immediately obvious reason. A detailed definition can be found here.

Is dyslexia a visual problem?

Dyslexia is not a visual problem, it’s a language-based problem. Like many others, I’ve said this before (here, here, here, here, here, and here) but the zombie idea of ‘visual dyslexia’ still seems to be wasting children’s time, and parents’ and taxpayers’ money, so it bears repeating.

The American Academy of Paediatrics’ Opthamologists’ Joint Statement on Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia and Vision says:

“Vision problems can interfere with the process of learning; however, vision problems are not the cause of primary dyslexia or learning disabilities. Scientific evidence does not support the efficacy of eye exercises, behavioral vision therapy, or special tinted filters or lenses for improving the long-term educational performance in these complex pediatric neurocognitive conditions. Diagnostic and treatment approaches that lack scientific evidence of efficacy, including eye exercises, behavioral vision therapy, or special tinted filters or lenses, are not endorsed and should not be recommended”.

American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Ophthalmology Executive Committee, 2008-2009, reaffirmed 2014, https://www.aao.org/clinical-statement/joint-statement-learning-disabilities-dyslexia-vis

This statement has been endorsed by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Opthamologists. It has five pages of scientific references. Please share it with anyone who is considering vision-based dyslexia interventions like behavioural optometry, coloured overlays, Irlen lenses, the Lawson anti-suppression device, or special dyslexia fonts.

For more detail on controversial vision theories and therapies, visit the American Academy of Opthamology website, read this 2019 article in The Conversation, this 2018 article on the website Science Based Medicine and/or this article by Dr Kerry Hempenstall in the 2020 International Dyslexia Association journal. A 2019 systematic review re “Irlen Syndrome” (read it here), found lack of evidence that Irlen Syndrome exists, and lack of evidence that the treatments proposed for it work.

Children’s learning time is precious, and parents’ and taxpayers’ money needs to be spent wisely.

Do dyslexic people have special talents/gifts?

There are lots of smart, talented, capable people with dyslexia. Some have achieved great things in mathematics, science, art, architecture, entrepreneurship and other fields. They have shown that it’s possible to have dyslexia and still succeed in life.

It’s complete nonsense to flip this and suggest dyslexia gives you special talents and makes you more likely to succeed in life than average. The plural of anecdote is not data.

However, these claims persist, and interventions which lack scientific evidence are still being promoted and taken seriously. A Melbourne school this week helped market a Davis Dyslexia webinar, with an ad making extravagant claims about the special talents of people with dyslexia. Happily, readers of this blog alerted the school leadership to what turned out to be a mistake by the marketing team (thanks, Karen, Heidi and Nancy!), and the ad was removed, kudos to the school for acting so swiftly.

To establish a correlation between dyslexia and life achievement, scientific researchers would need to study a large, random sample of the population. They’d measure reading skills and levels of success/achievement (however that’s defined, I’m sure sociologists have ideas). They’d statistically analyse their data.

Three outcomes would be possible: 1) no correlation beyond what could be accounted for by random chance, 2) a correlation with above-average achievement, and 3) a correlation with below-average achievement. Even if a correlation were found between dyslexia and high achievement, correlation is not the same thing as causation. A third factor might be involved, or there might be multiple factors.

After this blog post was published, I heard from one of the co-authors of a 2021 systematic review of research into whether dyslexia conveys a creative benefit. Their results suggest that “individuals with dyslexia as a group are no more creative or show greater variability in creativity than peers without dyslexia”.

The whole ‘gift of dyslexia’ idea is also IMHO also rather cruel. It’s like telling a dyslexic child, ‘Not only are you expected to overcome your dyslexia, but I expect you to excel at something like art, architecture or entrepreneurship. No pressure.’

Children with word-level reading difficulties, whether they have dyslexia diagnoses or not, should have intensive, systematic, synthetic phonics teaching as part of a literacy curriculum based on scientific research (a useful, free evaluate-your-curriculum checklist is here). Like other children, they should be told they’re expected to play, have fun, rest and do their best at things that matter and things they love, however they decide to spend their one wild and precious life.