Spelfabet

Christmas writing

Little kids (and quite a few bigger ones) are often keen at this time of year to write Christmas lists, letters to Santa, cards or do other seasonally-adjusted writing.

They are often less enthusiastic about continuing to do structured spelling work.

It’s the silly season, so fair enough. It’s great to find a writing task they’re still keen to do, in between all their parties, concerts and swimming.

I often give up on the structured spelling work at this point of the year and just go with the silly season writing, aiming to give kids enough guidance for them to sound out all the words they want to write, while making sure I prevent spelling mistakes.

The first encounter with a written word matters, and spelling it correctly maximises your chances of getting it right again next time.

There’s no need to give up on sounding out words for this activity, and revert to visual copying or reciting letter names.

Instead, you can give kids the spellings they need for any words they can’t spell independently, and ask them to build these words before writing them. (more…)

Seven things to consider before you buy into phonics programs

I’ve just written a comment in response to today’s article in The Conversation called “Seven things to consider before you buy into phonics programs” by Senior Lecturer in Language, Literacy and TESL at the University of Canberra, Misty Adoniou.

Her Seven Things are, in distilled form:

• That “English is not a phonetic language”, so spending money and time teaching phonics is of questionable value,
• That sounds are free and people who sell phonics teaching materials are con artists,
• That older students only have comprehension problems, not decoding problems,
• That politicians are not educators or educational researchers, and have no business pushing educational reform,
• That many phonics programs are rubbish,
• That many activities that people call “phonics” are rubbish,
• That everyone learns literacy differently, and phonics programs are only relevant to learners with “particular learning needs”.

I only agree with points 5 and 6 (one of the reasons I set up this blog was to help people avoid the rubbish) so I wrote a fairly long comment in reply. (more…)

Helping teenagers with literacy

The other day our state Education Minister announced $72.3 million extra dollars will be spent over four years helping struggling secondary students, specifically kids who haven’t met Year 5 NAPLAN benchmarks.

Woo hoo to that, I say. But if it’s spent on doing the same sorts of things that didn’t work in primary school, it will be a waste.

Secondary school students with poor decoding skills and very little ability to spell generally need a good initial blast of synthetic phonics to build their awareness of sounds in words and knowledge of spelling patterns, followed up by work on vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. I’ve been doing this type of work for 14 years, in conjunction with the world’s most fabulous integration teacher and aides. We’re yet to find someone we can’t teach to read, including students with intellectual disability, language disorder and English as a second or third language.

Here’s roughly what I’d do and buy if I were a decision-maker in a secondary school with a number of students who have encoding/decoding difficulties.

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Reorganising high-frequency word lists

Literacy beginners and strugglers are often given high-frequency words to rote memorise, drawing them from the Oxford, Magic, Dolch, Fry or some other high-frequency word list.

These lists treat written words as things to be visually memorised, rather than sounded out.

They work from most to least common words without regard to spelling complexity or word structure, and include a mixture of simple, more complex and unusual spellings.

Teaching high-frequency words in order of frequency reinforces the impression children get from reading repetitive texts that English spelling is a dog’s breakfast, by obscuring rather than illuminating the spelling patterns.

Visually memorising regularly-spelt words is also highly inefficient, and can give children with weak awareness of sounds in words the idea that written words are lumpy wholes without reusable component parts.

I agree that frequency matters, but it’s not more important than complexity.

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Spelling list signal to noise ratios

I’m tearing my hair out again about the spelling lists some of my students are being asked to learn for spelling tests.

They’re all noise and no signal.

A spelling list should help students learn something about spelling. They should demonstrate a clear pattern students can apply to their reading and writing.

Because teachers are not usually taught much about spelling, the main message their spelling lists often send to students is that spelling is very difficult.

I wish teachers designing spelling lists would identify a single, clear spelling signal for each list, and then choose words which focus their students’ attention on this signal, and minimise background noise.

Example spelling lists

For young children, such a list might go like this: quads, squad, swamp, swan, swap, swat, wand, want, was, wasp, wash, watch.

This list makes the spelling point that after the sound “w”, the sound “o” (as in “got”) is spelt with a letter A.

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Phonics and Early Reading Assessment

2021 update: this assessment seems to be no longer available.

The Phonics and Early Reading Assessment (PERA) is a new reading test from the UK for children in their first three years of schooling.

Molly de Lemos from Learning Difficulties Australia sent me a review copy and asked me to write about it, as some LDA consultants have been asking for more information on it (thanks, Molly!)

At first pass, it looks like a quick, affordable, objective assessment for specialists working with struggling young beginners, as well as early years classroom teachers who think of literacy as a skill to be actively and systematically taught, not a developmental mystery to be observed unfolding.

I managed to get a friend’s six-year-old, a confident reader, to stop talking about Lego long enough to do the PERA (thanks, G and L), and have also tried it with little boy who has had to work hard to get off the literacy starting blocks (thanks to him and his mum too). And I read the not-at-all-daunting 60-page manual. Here’s what I found out.

Five assessments in one

The PERA is actually five assessments in one:

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Cheap decodable books – Pocket Rockets

Most of the books my local schools give beginners to read are of the repetitive, look-at-the-picture-and-guess variety. They contain a large, random selection of sound-letter correspondences, and often long words and hard spellings.

There’s no way beginners can sound many or even most of these words out, and schools typically have few or no decodable books, which strip back this complexity and provide children with focussed opportunities to practice the sounds and spellings they’ve been taught. Crazy, eh? But there it is.

Class teachers often don’t get to choose the books available, and don’t have a budget to buy decodable books. They must either use the too-hard books or (if they are determined to teach in accordance with the best scientific evidence) get free or cheap decodable books that reflect their teaching sequence. Free ones are great but involve downloading, printing and binding them oneself, which is time-consuming, and it’s hard to get a professional-looking result.

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