Spelfabet

“Fully decodable” just means “buy our books”

Educational publishers now know there’s strong demand for decodable books, and are marketing many as ‘fully decodable’. But fully decodable to whom?

A book is only ‘fully decodable’ if its intended reader has been taught the sound-spelling relationships and high-frequency words it contains. Books that are fully decodable to Year 2 students aren’t fully decodable to Year 1 students, let alone students in their first year of school. It depends on what’s been taught, and each phonics teaching sequence is different.

So, buyers: beware. Avoid books marketed as ‘fully decodable’ that don’t clarify for whom – according to which teaching sequence, and at which point. Otherwise, it’s a meaningless term.

I also wish book covers didn’t list graphemes without example words clarifying the phonemes they represent. What exactly is the point of a cover that says ‘ea’, ‘oo’ or ‘ear’? Does the book practise ea/sea, ea/head, ea/break, or all three? oo/moon or oo/good, or both? ear/hear, ear/learn and/or ear/bear? You often have to look inside the book to find out, which is hard if you’re ordering online.

Another common problem is that many ‘fully decodable’ book covers list target graphemes THAT ARE NOT EVEN IN THEM, or appear only in one or two words. The Mog And Gom Library looks like a real bargain, but Book 41 targeting ‘ur’ has only the word ‘turns’ in it, and Book 63 targeting ‘ph’ has the word ‘elephant’ six times and no other words containing ‘ph’. If your lesson was about ‘ur’ or ‘ph’, these books don’t offer much lesson-to-text match. When a book cover lists multiple target graphemes that don’t/can’t all represent the same phoneme, maybe it’s really a mainstream book with a retrofitted decodable cover? Again, where’s the lesson-to-text match?

The rest of this post aims to help teachers in my home state of Victoria, Australia, choose decodable books to match our local Phonics Plus sequence. Apologies to interstate and international readers, please listen to/sing your favourite song and have some chocolate instead of reading on.

Phonics Plus aligned decodable text in Year 1 and 2

The Victorian Education Department has been rolling out materials for its F-2 phonics and morphology teaching sequence, Phonics Plus, for over a year. No published decodable books neatly match this teaching sequence (though they do provide other decodable text, and some are probably in the pipeline), but this helpful document was made available to help schools choose and sequence decodables for children in their first year of school (which I’m learning to call Foundation, not Prep).

There’s no similar document for Year 1 or 2 of Phonics Plus, which I’ve been worrying about because our school year finishes in less than two weeks, then it’s the silly season, then summer holidays, and then the kids who just did Phonics Plus in Foundation will start Year 1. I don’t want anyone to rush into buying poor-quality books, or for teachers all over the state to have to spend hours researching better options and matching their lessons to these texts.

I’ve therefore drafted a Phonics Plus decodable book alignment for Year 1 (click here to download it), and started work on Year 2. These are suggestions only, and not comprehensive. We don’t sell decodables except the affordable, download-and-print Phonics With Feeling books, from which the author/illustrator receives 50% of income (not the usual 5-15%, which is still not much given the work she put into them, and their high repetition of targets, so her books appear first on my lists). Nobody paid or lobbied to have their books listed, and I’d love you to put any feedback or suggestions you have in the comments.

Books from Australia and the UK

The Year 1 list has Australian books first, as they’re most relevant to our accent, spelling, vocabulary and culture. Books from the UK are listed next, as their accent is quite similar to ours (non-rhotic, i.e. they don’t say word-final /r/), and most people here (except the Labor Party) follow their spelling system. Our vocabularies are also fairly similar, though they differentiate ‘chips’ and ‘crisps’, and think cars have trunks, and thongs are underwear.

I haven’t found time to include books from America or elsewhere, but the American English accent, spelling system, vocabulary and culture are all fairly different from ours (I still can’t believe the US has school active shooter drills instead of sensible gun laws). I suggest investigating American decodables if suitable books from Australia and the UK, and maybe Aotearoa/NZ, can’t be found. At some stage I might find time to add some US books to lists.

List colour-coding

A book can include some or all of the targeted spellings in a given Phonics Plus Set, and many contain extra spellings not in this teaching sequence. I’ve therefore colour-coded book titles as follows: green = contains one/some of the Phonics Plus targets; black = contains all the targets; red = contains extra targets for that phoneme. I hope this colour-coding helps teachers find easier and harder books for kids who need differentiation, as well as books that cover all target spellings.

To be certain you’re spending your school decodable books budget wisely, read all books yourself before bulk ordering. You can read the ones on our display in North Fitzroy, if we have the books of interest to you. Our waiting room has comfy couches, and some days we even have an empty room you could use. On my list, the colour of book series’ names indicate which ones we have on display (black = whole sets, purple = partial sets, pink = none yet, so information is based on catalogues or online sources).

Supplier links

My list also includes links to suppliers/publishers – just click on the series name the first time it appears. Most nonprofit AUSPELD members supply decodables – see the SPELD VIC, SPELD NSW, SA SPELD and DSF bookshops – and their bookshops help fund other services they offer to people with learning difficulties and their families/teams. If you can get your books from them, please do.

Alison Clarke

Fact and opinion in educational news

If you’re a reader of Education HQ and expect it to clearly differentiate between fact and opinion, you might have been surprised by its 14 July 2025 article “‘It changed my life’: all students should be screened for Irlen Syndrome, teacher says’“.

The article says Irlen Syndrome is “a disorder that manifests as a cluster of symptoms that occur when the brain has trouble processing light and visual stimuli efficiently”. Sounds like a fact, right? Something Education HQ’s fact-checkers would have thoroughly checked out.

Opthalmologists are vision experts. Their Australian and NZ professional association, RANZCO, says that ‘There is no scientific evidence that Irlen Syndrome exists’. Read all about it here.

The RANZCO position is summarised in 122 words halfway through the 1165 word Education HQ article, but seems to be playing the role of the sceptical* curmudgeon in an epic story about a young person who struggled and overcame significant difficulties after a life-changing discovery, and now wants to help others do the same. Yay, I love those kind of stories! No need to interview any RANZCO curmudgeons, or let scientific evidence (or lack thereof) get in the way.

Other statements in the article which should have set off fact-checking alarms:

• “To receive Irlen Syndrome diagnosis and treatment, you must visit a licensed Irlen diagnostician.” (Yes, and to see the Great Pumpkin rise through the air, you must visit the pumpkin patch at Hallowe’en).

• “One Year 12 student studying physics with Kneeshaw recently found out he too had Irlen Syndrome.” (Hmm, did he also visit the pumpkin patch?).

• “Kneeshaw now knows the genetic origin of her diagnosis.” (Yes, dyslexia runs in families, but Irlen Syndrome doesn’t, because it’s not a Thing. The Placebo Effect, however, is a Thing, but sugar pills don’t cost $700).

I asked ChatGPT to summarise the Education HQ article in 100 words, and got this:

Dr Samantha Kneeshaw, head of science at Ulladulla** High School, advocates universal screening for Irlen Syndrome, a visual processing disorder affecting reading due to light sensitivity. Undiagnosed as a student, she faced humiliation and learning struggles until tinted lenses transformed her reading. The Irlen Method, costing around $700, is disputed by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, which questions its existence and warns against delaying proven interventions. Kneeshaw, however, has seen dramatic improvements in students and colleagues after diagnosis. She believes early detection could prevent academic underachievement, behavioural issues, and wasted potential, urging schools to implement nationwide screening.

If my googlesleuthing is correct (wow, she survived a bushfire by scuba diving in a swimming pool, as well as getting the last laugh over that mean teacher! She is seriously cool, I’d much rather hang out with her than those RANZCO curmudgeons), Dr Kneeshaw’s expertise is in marine science, not learning difficulties or opthamology. She believes Irlen Syndrome exists, that she has it, and that coloured lenses changed her life. This is an opinion, or what witty Radio National science journalists like to call an “N1 study”. It’s an anecdote. Her reports of other people experiencing the same thing are also anecdotes. Every scientist and journalist should know that the plural of anecdote is not data.

If you were a parent desperate to help your child overcome learning difficulties, would you believe the warnings of the faceless data-waving opthamologists at RANZCO, or Dr Kneeshaw’s wonderful success story? Most people love, believe and want to read great stories. Facts, not so much. But many great stories simply don’t align with scientific evidence, and in the age of Fake News, it’s more important than ever that journalists clearly delineate between fact and opinion. In my opinion (and yes, it is just an opinion) this Education HQ article reads more like an Irlen advertorial than education news.

If you’re in/near Ulladulla, or anywhere in NSW, and worrying about someone’s reading or spelling skills, the excellent folk at SPELD NSW know all about evidence-based assessment and intervention for learning difficulties, and should be able to help.

^{* Yes, we do spell it as “sceptic” in Australian and UK English, because this word came into English via French sceptique from Latin scepticus, though they got it from Greek skeptikos. For once, I think Noah Webster was right and we should go with the US spelling “skeptic”.}

^{** If you’re not an Aussie and wonder how to pronounce “Ulladulla”, I recommend listening to Gleny Rae Virus’s hilarious parody of the it’s-beaut-to-shoot-roos-in-a-ute genre of Australian country music, “Redneck Lovesong”.}

Free phonics intervention PD & holiday plans

A free Sounds-Write Symposium on phonics interventions will be happening from June 24th to 27th. I’ll be one of the presenters, talking about using manipulatives to build words from bases, prefixes and suffixes, sometimes adjusting junctures in the process (doubling final consonants, dropping final e, changing y to i, assimilating prefixes).

Wordy rules with lots of ‘if-then’ and ‘all except’ type language tend to be poorly understood by young children, and children with language difficulties, so showing them how to build words can be far more effective. Also, kids enjoy flipping tiles over and crashing them into each other as they build words.

The symposium has heaps of interesting sessions from a range of international speakers. I’m especially looking forward to Prof Julian Elliott’s possibly-provocative keynote: “Rethinking Dyslexia: From Diagnostic Labels to Evidence-Based Reading Support”, and I always learn something from speakers like Marnie Ginsberg, Norah Chahbazi, Tricia Millar and Mandy Nayton. You can check out the program and book your ticket here.

School holiday literacy intensives

At Spelfabet in North Fitzroy we are once again offering literacy intensives in the upcoming school holidays (7th to 18th July 2025) for children struggling to keep up with reading/writing at school. These provide a burst of personalised, intensive intervention (3-5 sessions), plenty of home practice activities, and a report with recommendations. Click here for more details.

Assessments

Many of our regular clients are away or take a therapy break during school holidays, so we have more time to offer speech, language and literacy assessments. Standardised tests are expensive, so not every Speech Pathologist can afford every test they’d like to use. Waiting lists for speech and/or language assessments are often frustratingly long. Please let us know if you’d like us to do an assessment for you, or someone you know, during the school holidays. More details are here.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Decodables: you can’t judge a book by its cover

Many mainstream educational publishers have recently started marketing decodable books, to meet fast-growing demand for phonics practice texts. Having bought and examined hundreds of these books, I’m excited by how many good options are now available. Here are photos of books we have at the Spelfabet office:

In general, publishers who produced decodables before there was a lucrative market for them tend to offer better phonics practice/lesson-to-text matching than less experienced publishers. However, all major publishers now seem to recognise that kids need to be taught to decode words, not guess and memorise them.

One problem with the term ‘decodable’ is that a book containing lots of sentences like “A dog is in the mud” and “Tim did not sit the dog in the tub” can be decoded by many young learners, but may not offer much practice of the book’s stated phonics targets. Just as an example, the new Flying Start to Literacy Decodables Unit 3 states its phonics targets as ‘b’, ‘j’, ‘q’, ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘x’ and ‘y’. The letter ‘j’ appears in three of the ten books (in a total of four words, as ‘job’ appears twice), ‘v’ appears in only two words (‘van’ once and ‘vet’ eight times), and ‘q’ doesn’t appear in any words at all.

It’s hard to write high-quality decodable text including low-frequency targets – there simply aren’t a lot of CVC words containing ‘j’ and ‘v’. I’d still argue that more words like ‘jam’, ‘jab’, ‘jog’, ‘jet’, ‘jig’, ‘jot’, ‘jut’, ‘Jed’, ‘Jan’, and/or ‘vat’ and perhaps some clipped words like ‘vac’, ‘Ev’, ‘Viv’, ‘Bev’ or ‘Kev’ would have improved a book targeting ‘j’ and ‘v’. I don’t know why ‘q’ is listed as a target.

Busy teachers should be able to judge a book by its cover, and not have to check whether the targets listed on books’ covers are in multiple words in the books.

I also wondered about similarities between some of the new Flying Start decodables and existing books from the same publisher. Here’s a photo of six of the covers of Unit 6 Flying Start to Literacy decodables:

Here are covers of other texts from the same publisher. The pictures on them appear in the above decodables.

It’s hard to write high-quality decodables, let alone write them to match illustrations from an existing book. ‘Dad’ in the new decodable ‘At Our Farm’ looks quite old to have such a young son (yes, I know Charlie Chaplin’s youngest child was born when he was 73). Being an Australian dairy farmer’s daughter, I wondered about the dairy, calf shed and hay shed all being called ‘barns’, not a term I’ve known Aussie farmers to use. Real farmers’ kids will also scratch their heads at a photo of the ‘farmer’s son’ offering grain to a calf that looks far too young to consume anything but milk.

Please check out decodables before you spend a lot of money on them. Read a few from each level, and consider how well they match your phonics teaching sequence. Think about whether they make sense, and offer value for money. A single book can cost anywhere between $2.70 (yay the Pocket Rockets by Berys from Moonee Ponds!) and about $13. If getting printables, don’t forget to include printing and collating materials and time in your cost calculations. Consider whether relevant training and other matching teaching resources are available, their cost and quality.

The last of the 2024 Spelfabet decodable book workshops aren’t going ahead due to caseload pressures and low enrolments, but if you want a tailored session to help you choose books for a specific person or purpose, please contact admin@spelfabet.com.au.

Australian school handwriting

While the importance of handwriting is well-known, Australia’s Curriculum 9.0 is hilariously vague about it. After a year at school, children are expected to: “… correctly form known upper- and lower-case letters.” Which letters are expected to be known is unknown. Eight Handwriting and Keyboarding sub-elements are listed here. The first one says:

• produces simple handwriting movements (writing, or drawing?)
• experiments with pencils, writing implements or devices (up noses? down socks?)
• writes letters which resemble standard letter formations (how closely? what standard?)

Leaving handwriting style decisions up to the states has worked out about as well as letting states decide railway gauges. Australia now has five approved handwriting styles for beginners, most with manuscript, pre-cursive and cursive versions. This must be confusing for the thousands of young kids who move interstate each year. It must drive early learning publishers insane.

Since foxes are helping send our native wildlife towards extinction, I’ve devised my own every-letter sentence to demonstrate our five beginners’ handwriting styles, while promoting adorable marsupials.

The first style comes from my state. I’m not a fan. Beginners’ versions of Victorian Modern Cursive often make the letter ‘n’ look like ‘m’, ‘r’ look like ‘v’, ‘k’ look like ‘R’, and put a vertical line on top of letter ‘o’. Children don’t see writing like this in books, or much beyond school. I wonder if it’s based on the same teach-novices-to-imitate-experts logic as Whole Language. Does research show that learning to write cursive ‘p’ and ‘b’ helps you read non-cursive p/q and b/d in books? I’d prefer kids start with simpler letters, and get plenty of instruction about how to form and place them as they say and spell words, so that visual information, motor plans and articulation fuse nicely in their brains. Joiny bits can come later.

Educational Psychologist Murray Evely (a nice fellow, we once both worked at Footscray School Support Centre) led the development of Victorian Modern Cursive in 1985. NSW’s Foundation Style was devised two years later. Queensland’s 1984 handwriting handbook, with the above glorious cover photo, can still be downloaded here. South Australian Modern Cursive was devised in 1983 and updated in 2006. Tasmania’s 1985 style has been updated a few times, most recently last year, when Tasmanian Handwriting Guidelines were developed with the help of academic and consultant Dr Noella Mackenzie. I wonder why different conclusions about shape, size, spacing, slant and joins were drawn from (presumably) the same mid-1980s research?

Every state teaches cursive eventually, mainly because it’s considered more efficient. However, US handwriting expert Steve Graham et al’s 1998 research found that mixed handwriting was faster than both cursive and manuscript, and that a mixed style containing mostly cursive letters was also the most legible. Canadian research in 2013 by Bara and Morin also found that “cursive handwriting was the slower style, whereas mixed handwriting seemed to be more efficient”.

Steve Graham recommends teaching beginners traditional manuscript letters for four reasons (see p21-22 of this article):

1. Most children start school already knowing how to write some manuscript letters.
2. There is some (rather dated) evidence that manuscript is easier to learn (Researchers! This topic!).
3. Once mastered, manuscript can be written as fast as cursive, and possibly more legibly.
4. Manuscript may facilitate reading development, as kids’ reading material is manuscript, not cursive.

UK handwriting expert Dr Rosemary Sassoon (who Wikipedia says is 93 and now lives in Busselton, WA) researched handwriting styles children find easy to read in 1993, and based her fonts on this research. I wonder if any of the Australian font designers also had the novel idea of asking children which fonts they preferred. Sassoon wrote a book about teaching handwriting, which is now freely available online.

The Victorian Phonics Lesson Plans team is preparing early years systematic, synthetic phonics resources for our local schools. Great! And (April 2025 update) they won’t be in Victorian Modern Cursive. Yippee and well done to those responsible! A free version of this font is downloadable here, but it’s pretty clunky. There’s also a free Queensland handwriting font here, but otherwise Australia’s official school fonts aren’t freely available.

I rang Kevin Brown at Australian School Fonts and wasted about an hour of his time asking about handwriting styles, fonts and related topics (It’s OK, I then bought his fonts). He said since we’ve had a National Curriculum, (first drafted in 2010) schools can use whatever handwriting style they like. Judging from the orders he receives, many schools are using a different state’s style. He also said it’s not possible to copyright a handwriting style, only font installation files, which are difficult to write and need updates as software changes. Australian handwriting fonts are also available from the Schoolfonts website, and probably elsewhere – if you know of quality, affordable suppliers, please make a comment below.

Sticking to a specific beginners’ handwriting style promotes consistent teaching about letter formation, sizing and placement, and I doubt teachers ask kids who move interstate to unlearn their original handwriting style. Over time we all develop our own style. Explicit instruction and lots of practice seem to be the main things that lead to efficient, legible handwriting, whatever the starting style.

For times when kids say keyboards make handwriting obsolete, I like Bec from Talkin’ Chalk‘s recommended reply: “When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, there’ll be no tech. You’ll need handwriting.” And for an extra start-of-the-week laugh, here’s an AI generated version of my favourite handwriting cartoon: the Doctor’s Strike (OK, the eyes and fingers are weird, and the bot doesn’t understand “scribble on placards”, but the cartoons are all copyright and you get the idea).

Free & cheap word-building games

It’s the silly season, time to play more games. Excellent Spelfabet Speech Pathologists Georgina Ryan and Elle Holloway have devised and tested a set of download-and-print word-building card games which are now available in the Spelfabet shop. Each game can be printed on 3 sheets of A4 cardboard and handed to a group of kids to cut up and play, or you can laminate them first, if you want them to last.

The simplest game is free, and requires learners to add productive suffixes -ed and -ing, and Olden Days suffix -le (not used to produce new words any more, but still in heaps of words), to base words with ‘short’ vowels, adjacent consonants and the consonant spellings ss, sh, ck, ng, and tch. Here’s a video of how to play it:

Here’s a video of the other Initial Code game in the set, in which players add the suffixes -ed, -ing, -er, -y and -s/es to base words, doubling final consonants if required. If they have both -y and -er suffixes, they can stack these to create words like ‘bumpier’ and ‘jumpier’, changing -y into i before adding the -er.

Here are videos of two other games in the set, we hope this gives you the idea of how they work, and that they will work well with your learners. The whole set is available here. Happy silly season from all of us at Spelfabet!

Therapists’ duty of care means we must recommend evidence-based teaching

A local school leader recently contacted me ask that my colleagues and I delete one of the recommendations we often put in assessment reports, because it is prompting parents to question the school’s teaching approach.

The recommendation reads:

(Child name) should not be taught using a ‘whole language’ or ‘balanced literacy’ approach (Reading Recovery, Leveled Literacy Intervention, Guided Reading, PM Readers, Running Records, etc.) as this approach does not control adequately for word structure and phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and encourages the strategies of weak readers, such as guessing and rote-memorising words. This approach is not explicit or systematic enough in its teaching of sound-spelling relationships or word structure.

The school leader explained that her school system requires staff to use approaches we recommend against, so our reports were putting their Reading Recovery teachers and other staff in a difficult position.

We have no desire to put anyone in a difficult position, but our duty of care is to our clients. We must make recommendations which are in their best interests, based on the best available scientific evidence.

It’s completely unfair to a child to have one set of adults teaching them to sound words out, and another set of adults teaching them to memorise and guess words. Memorising and guessing words are the habits of weak readers, but are encouraged when high-frequency word lists are used as spelling lists, and children are given predictable/repetitive texts containing spelling patterns they’ve never been taught.

Undoing bad habits and building strong foundational skills is hard work, especially when we only see clients for 40 minutes once a week or fortnight. They’re at school five days per week. It would be professionally irresponsible not to tackle this issue in our reports.

I agreed to send the school leader evidence supporting our recommendation, but this is the second request of this type, so it probably won’t be the last. Answering the question in this blog post, and linking to it in our reports, should help parents argue kindly and clearly for science, and help school leaders learn about reading research, and discard programs and practices that don’t help children thrive.

Reading Recovery

• May et al (2023) Long-Term Impacts of Reading Recovery through 3rd and 4th Grade: A Regression Discontinuity Study found that Reading Recovery had a long-term a negative impact on children. There is also a plain-English article explaining this research here.
• The Centre for Educational Statistics and Evaluation’s (2015) Reading Recovery: A Sector-Wide Analysis showed children in Reading Recovery made modest, short-term improvements which weren’t maintained over time.
• The Pedagogy Non Grata website’s analysis of Reading Recovery is here.
• Five From Five (2019) Reading Recovery: A failed investment explains that Reading Recovery is a weak intervention because it fails to sufficiently target phonemic awareness and phonics.

Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI)

• Research its authors call the independent, gold standard evidence for LLI received funding from the program’s publisher, and was published on a university website, not in a peer-reviewed journal. The valid, reliable, objective measure of progress used in this research – DIBELS – showed that LLI was not effective. Children only improved on the subjective, LLI-devised measure. Here’s a video explanation.
• Pedagogy Non Grata’s Effect-Size-based meta-analysis of LLI research is here, which concludes, “The program is not research based”. The author discusses this analysis in this video.

Fountas and Pinnell Classroom

• The Pedagogy Non Grata website’s analysis of F&P Classroom research is here, which concludes, “The mean effect size found was negligible”.
• Ed Reports’ 2020 evaluation of Fountas and Pinnell Classroom is here.

Other balanced literacy strategies/resources

• The Pedagogy Non Grata website’s analysis of Lucy Caulkins’ Units of Study is here.
• Pedagogy Non Grata found no peer reviewed research on balanced literacy.
• Prof Pamela Snow’s 2017 blog Balanced Literacy: An instructional bricolage that is neither fish nor fowl, says balanced literacy is poorly defined, and in practice means eclectic teaching.
• US Reading Panel expert Timothy Shanahan rejects Instructional Level Theory here. Edublogger Karen Vaites expands on this and provides research links here.
• The Five from Five website explains that levelled reading schemes’ books for beginners encourage word memorisation and guessing, the habits of poor readers, as they contain many words beginners can’t yet decode, e.g. this example from the PM Readers.
• The US Reading League has a Three Cueing Systems and Related Myths video lecture online.
• Articles by Dr Kerry Hempenstall about three-cueing/multicueing are here and here.
• A/Prof Dennis S Davis et al’s 2020 ITE-insider perspective on cueing systems called Is It Time for a Hard Conversation about Cueing Systems and Word Reading in Teacher Education? argues it’s time for educators to stop using cueing. Yes, please.

Science of Reading

• American Public Media journalist Emily Hanford’s* six years of reporting on this issue, including her podcast Sold a Story, can be found here. Recently interviewed in New Zealand, home of Reading Recovery (now rapidly being replaced by Better Start and other programs), Hanford said this:

• The Australian Education Resource Organisation website has an Introduction to the Science of Reading.
• Pedagogy Non Grata has done a meta-analysis of research on the science of reading and writing instruction, and has an easy-to-understand beginner’s guide to reading research.
• Prof Pamela Snow’s SOLAR: Science of Language and Reading article summarises the process of learning language and reading, and has a very useful reference list.
• US Edweek’s How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says video is a plain-English summary.
• Profs Castles, Rastle and Nation et al’s (2018) article Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert is another useful overview.
• Prof Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain is a classic text, and his key ideas relevant to effective instruction from a 2023 talk are summarised here.

Switching to evidence-based teaching

• Prof Pam Snow wrote Leaving the Balanced Literacy habit behind: A theory of change in 2020.
• Pedagogy Non Grata has an article about the impact of the many US state laws targeting literacy here, and the author is interviewed about it here. Research shows 97.5% of children can be taught to read at grade level with the right core instruction, and intensity and type of intervention.
• US Teacher Crystal Lenhart wrote a great letter explaining to parents why her school made the switch away from Fountas and Pinnell reading levels, leveled readers, Guided Reading and three-cueing, towards science-based literacy teaching, which many other schools have used as a template. You can hear her discussing her school’s experience and her letter in episode 161 of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast, or watch it on YouTube.
• There’s now a massive teacher-led movement for evidence-based teaching in Australia – see Reading Science In Schools, Think Forward Educators and Sharing Best Practice. There is lots of useful information on the Literacy Hub, Five From Five, ULD for Parents and AUSPELD websites.

I hope leaders of Australian schools still using balanced literacy (an ill-defined mishmash of things that work, and things that don’t, some of which can be harmful) find the knowledge, resources and inspiration to switch to science based teaching of reading and spelling in 2024.

^{* No, Emily Hanford and Pedagogy Non Grata’s Nathaniel Hansford (who writes/speaks as Nate Joseph) are not related.}