A decodable book is a book for a beginning or struggling reader which contains words she or he can sound out.
In practice this means it contains sound-letter relationships and word types its reader has been taught. It doesn’t include patterns not yet taught.
Decodability thus describes how well a book/text matches its reader’s decoding skills. It gives us a proper, objective way of identifying a just-right book, by ensuring lesson-to-text match. Continue reading
Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham has announced that once they’ve been at school for 18 months, he’d like all children to do a short, class-teacher-administered phonics test.
Loud protests, of course. Not another mandatory test, etc. But I agree with his advisors that this short, simple test will be a good thing. I’m optimistic that once it draws teachers’ attention to not-currently-obvious gaps in their students’ reading knowledge, they’ll move to fill them.
This test is largely the result of lobbying by parents, concerned teachers and others because of the gap between research and practice in early literacy teaching, and the unnecessary failure and suffering that results.
This is a big problem for teachers as well as children. Teachers lose a lot of sleep over children in their classes who just keep falling further and further behind in reading, and who they’re not adequately trained or equipped to help.
The new phonics test, based on one currently used in the UK, would be designed to help teachers quickly and easily identify children who aren’t sounding out (decoding) words well. This is the first step towards helping them. Continue reading
I’m mentioned in The Age newspaper today because as usual I’ve been talking to anyone who will listen about the need for more and better phonemic awareness and phonics teaching for beginning and struggling readers and spellers.
I was a bit sad that the article started off saying that “the ‘reading wars’ have been reignited”, as I’m not interested in war with anyone. I just want teachers to be given the skills and resources they need to teach all but a tiny minority of children to read and spell, confidently and well, on their first attempt. But I guess in the media it has to bleed to lead.
It was lovely that the article discussed the successful use of an explicit, synthetic phonics program with the Preps at Westgarth P.S., one of my local schools. Nothing is so powerful as a good example.
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.
I put some pseudoword spelling tests up on my website ages ago, hoping they would help people work out which of my workbooks and other materials might best meet their needs.
A pseudoword is a potential word in a given language, as it has allowable sound and spelling combinations, for example, "flernish" is an English pseudoword, but "wstoepfteg" is not. It doesn't sound or look remotely English.
Pseudowords are great for testing encoding skills/spelling, because they eliminate the possibility that the test words have been memorised as wholes, and require learners to sound out (i.e. use their phonemic awareness and knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences) to spell all the words.
For young children and older ones who haven't been able to build their vocabularies through reading, most of the words in English are pseudowords. In fact, none of us know every word in the language – think of how many words are allowed in Scrabble that you've never heard of. So learners are not phased by being asked to write pseudowords. From their perspective, they have to do it all the time. When you google pseudowords, you find that most of them really do mean something to someone, somewhere. "Google", "blog" and the ubiquitous "selfie" were all pseudowords not long ago.
I haven't had much feedback about the spelling tests currently on my website, so I don't think they are being used much. Perhaps this is because they are far too long (I don't even use them in full these days) and in video form, requiring internet access. It's not easy to print them off and only use parts of them, or control the rate of presentation of words.
Below is an abbreviated, 100 word spelling test (or the printable version can be downloaded here) – on which I'd love your feedback.
There are no norms for this test, it's just intended as a tool to explore what a learner does and doesn't know about spelling. I usually try a two or three words from each section and then if it's clearly too easy, skip up to the next section, till I find a group of words that contain spellings which are clearly too difficult.
Before we do this test, I usually tell kids that I'm going to ask them to write some alien names and words from an alien language written in English. Sometimes I draw a few aliens – four eyes, six tentacles, some slime etc, and since my drawing skills are atrocious, kids laugh, which helps make the task seem less formal and stressful. Then off we go. No need for special equipment or expensive test forms, just pencils and paper, plus a way to block the view of other people's work for anyone inclined to copy.
I start with just one letter = one sound in three-sound words (CVCs or Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words):
If these are a problem, try Workbook 3. But if they can spell CCVCs, try some "long" vowel spellings in both open and closed syllables.
The possible correct answers multiply here because each sound has several spellings:
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.
Learning Difficulties Australia has just marked its 50th anniversary with a national speaking tour by US literacy expert Dr Louisa Moats.
Dr Moats is the author of many influential papers and articles about literacy, and has been a key advocate for better language education for teachers in the US.
I've written a couple of previous blog posts about some of her work, here and here, but you can just google her name to find out lots more.
I spent all of Saturday and this morning in workshops by Dr Moats, so my head is kind of exploding with good information and ideas, in particular about how to align literacy-teaching with the scientific evidence about what works best.
I tend to get very focussed on sounds and spellings because they're the area of greatest need for most strugglers, and because of the lack of accurate information and systematic teaching about them. Teachers and the curriculum are focussed on letters, but letters are not the basic units for decoding, sounds (phonemes) and their spellings (graphemes) are.
However, Dr Moats' workshops reminded me about the broader context of what constitutes a good literacy program. It's good to get a bit of an "eyes up" now and then.
Dr Moats was very frank: Reading is one of the most studied aspects of human psychology, so we know a great deal about how novices learn, how proficient readers read, what' s going on in the brain when we read and what causes reading difficulty.
So, she says, "At a certain point (or a certain age) you begin to wonder: if we know so much about reading, how come there are so many poor readers?"
Her answer is that the science of reading is not well-reflected in classroom practices.
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