Some days I think of a really good title for a blog post, but it's just stupidly long, and if I used it, the post would sink like  a stone in search engines and nobody would read it.

Today is one of those days, and the title I have sensibly not used is:

Why on earth would you teach children 100 first words, when you could teach them 100 first spellings, which would give them the power to read and spell thousands of words?

Children starting school are often taught to read and write "100 first words" – words that come up frequently in books and/or the English language more generally.

There are various 100 first words lists, but just for example, 20 words that seem to make it onto all of them include:

To make these 20 words, you need the following spellings:

Vowels: a, e, i, o, or, ou.

Consonants: b, d, f, h, n, s, t, th, ve, w, y.

17 spellings.

Why would you teach concepts that are bulky and redundant, when you could teach compact, reusable concepts? We wouldn't do it in maths, or science, so why do we do it in literacy?

Working through the above 20-word list, writing out the spellings required, you only get as far as "that" and you realise you don't need any extra spellings.

You can just recycle the "th" you met in "the", the "a" you met in "and" and the "t" you met in "to".

It happens again on "not". No extra spelling required. You can just use the "n" from "in", the "o" from "of" and the "t from "to", "that" and "it".

It happens again with "on" and "he" and "at".

If you learn the spellings of the words "do" and "to", you don't need an extra vowel letter to make "of", "not" and "on".

You just need to know that this spelling has more than one sound, depending what sort of word it's in.

There's "o" as in "not" (with a consonant after it), "o" as in "to", and as you meet more words you'll discover that there's also "o" as in "go", and "o" as in "won".

These words can be learnt in groups so that their patterns are clear and understood, and nobody trips over the variations.

Is this too hard for little children? I don't think so, and the idea that they have to swallow hundreds of words holus bolus, not learn to digest them properly, is not supported by the literacy research. In fact, quite the reverse. Digesting words is go, and clear instruction in how to do it properly is absoutely essential for the weakest readers.

So if your child is being sent home with lists of words to swallow whole, please show them how to digest them properly, and how to use their components in many, many, many other words.

Don't risk your child getting the idea (in the absence of more accurate information) that written English has a separate symbol for each word, but not even supposedly "logographic" languages like Chinese really have this, or nobody would be able to learn them. Our writing system is based on representations of the sounds we say, and it's complicated but eminently learnable.

If you need a cheap ($10), useful , assemble-yourself tool to help you with this, try my movable alphabet, which contains 100 spellings used in one-syllable words. Get a roll of magnetic tape from the stationer, and hey presto, fridge magnets. Each piece includes little example words, to help you explain authoritatively to your child how many main sounds each spelling represents, and what they are. Click here to see a video demonstration.

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I recently stumbled upon a website that claimed that 80% of people who can't read have a problem the website's authors call "optilexia", or sight-reading, characterised by:

• Lots of guessing, particularly of short words,
• Being able to read a word on one page, but not the next,
• Transposing one word for another word with the same first letter,
• Very poor spelling,
• Poor comprehension,
• Very weak word attack skills for new words.

If you google "optilexia", you'll find 6440 entries, and I guess this post makes that 6441. However, I think the term "optilexia" is very much surplus to requirements.

We already have a medical-sounding word for this common cluster of difficulties: "dyslexia", and even that term is problematic.

Are we even sure dyslexia (let alone optilexia) is a real thing?

The definition of dyslexia has always been pretty murky – basically it is a failure to learn to read despite adequate vision, hearing and intelligence, and having been taught in the same way as everyone else (more on this in a minute).

You can't take a blood test or have a CAT scan to check whether you have dyslexia, it is diagnosed from your behaviour and by eliminating other possible causes.

This is a very common way to get a medical diagnosis – for example, Autism Spectrum Disorders and most mental illnesses are diagnosed from behaviour.

The ground rules most commonly used in Australia for this sort of diagnosis are set down in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, currently in its fourth edition. DSM-IV includes dyslexia as a diagnosis, and so does the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Diseases.

However, DSM-V comes out in May this year, and although we won't know precisely what's in it till then, it seems likely that dyslexia won't appear as a distinct disorder.

The people who write the DSM don't just get together one weekend and scribble it on the back of an envelope – there is a long and complicated process involving examination of years of scientific research, a huge number of experts, public consultation etc.

So it's not really kosher for self-designated experts on the internet to make up new, medical-sounding disorders like "optilexia".

Sight reading (the key behaviour exhibited by "optilexics") is taught in schools

Let's label the source of the problem, not its victim

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I've found a nice 13 minute video on the internet from the UK Reading Reform Foundation Conference 2011, in which experienced teacher Elizabeth Nonweiler answers the following questions:

• Do we need a range of strategies for teaching reading or does one size fit all?
• Can phonics be fun?
• What about reading for meaning?
• What about a rich literacy curriculum?
• Is there a danger that phonics will put children off reading?

Worth a look, IMHO. Here it is.

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I've been pushing for an early years Synthetic Phonics program at one of the schools I work in, but sadly I'm just a far-too-busy part-time contractor and outsider, who doesn't get to go to the meetings where such things are decided, so I haven't succeeded.

Oh well, I guess it means they'll always generate plenty of work for a Speech Pathologist with literacy expertise (she said, through gritted teeth).

The literacy program they've chosen to use is called Words Their Way, which in the early years essentially puts a layer of initial and analytic phonics over what remains at its core a Whole Language program.

People I know and respect say it is better than the standard "give them a bath in written language and they will magically catch on" Whole Language fare, but its conceptual framework still sees literacy as natural and developmental and a bit mysterious, to be "facilitated" as it "emerges", not an artificial skill to be pulled apart and actively and systematically taught.

"Emergent Spellers"

Words Their Way calls anyone aged one to seven who is writing random marks on paper, drawing pictures, doing "mock linear or letter like writing" or writing random letters and numbers an "Emergent Speller".

Actually, I call someone aged one who is making any sort of recognisable marks on paper a baby genius. Most one-year-olds are more likely to suck the pencil or throw it at you.

On the other hand, anyone in our education system who can only write random letters at age seven is well behind, and probably well aware of this, and highly distressed about it.

Words Their Way assessments for "Emergent Spellers"

Words Their Way's assessments for "Emergent Spellers" first examine their ability to identify rhyme and alliteration, and circle pictures that begin with given letters. This is all good, we know that little kids who start school with awareness of initial sounds, rhyme and letters are ahead of the game on literacy.

The assessment also requires children to spell little words like mat, nap, kid, log, jet and gum. Of course, an "Emergent Speller" who is writing random letters will not be able to do this, and is by definition not an "Emergent Speller" at all (more on this later).

A "Concept of word" assessment teaches children to memorise the rhyme Humpty Dumpty (which most children from mainstream backgrounds will already know, bad luck if your family is from South Sudan and you haven't heard it before) and then checks, one by one, whether they can "read" it themselves, by pointing to each word as they say it. The teacher is expected to score this pointing on a scale from 0-6 where 0 is going backwards and forwards and all over the shop, 3 is "points to words for each rhythmic beat or syllable, getting off track" and 6 is accurate pointing. I'm not going to try to unpack the construct validity of this assessment, except to say that it makes my "what's the point?" meter go off like a rocket.

The assessment goes on to ask individual children to read particular words from Humpty Dumpty, firstly in the verse itself (this is called Word Recognition in Context) and then on a list – on, Humpty, put, horses, sat, men, king's, wall, had, fall – which is called Word Recognition in Isolation.

Most of this just makes me want to cry – it simply makes no sense from a linguistics point of view, it's basically assessing initial letter-sound skills (which have already been assessed) and visual memorisation of words as wholes (which if used exclusively as a strategy soon leads to literacy failure). I despair at the idea of a whole lot of lovely teachers and kids I know spending hours on such tasks, instead of things that do make linguistic sense.

Words Their Way program for "Emergent Spellers"

The teacher of Emergent Spellers is advised to "talk with and read to students and share the sounds and meaning of language", "build vocabulary with concept sorts", "develop phonological awareness with picture sorts, songs and games" and "enhance alphabet knowledge with games, matching activities, and sorts".

In practice this means a lot of memorising whole words, reciting rhymes and jingles while pointing to the text, initial phonics of the "a is for aardvark, b is for badger" variety, vocabulary and concept picture sorting, discussion of vocabulary, dictation (without prior explicit teaching of the relevant spellings), finding named letters in text and shared reading.

There is some rhyme sorting, as well as some rhyming games like bingo and concentration, which at least acknowledge that there are letters in words beyond the first one. But these still don't break words right down into phonemes and graphemes and really teach children how to put them together and pull them apart.

Right from the beginning, tiny children are presented with written multisyllable words like "triangle", "animal" and "vegetables".

Words Their Way stories

The first story in the Emergent Spellers book contains not just simple, one-letter-equals-one-sound spellings, but also the "ee" in "peel", the "a" in "banana" (sounds like "ar" in Australian English), the "y" in "my", the "u" in "put", the "th" in "the" and the "ow" in "bowl". That's just in the first verse.

In the next two verses we also meet the "a" (which sounds like "o") and the "sh" in "wash", the "pp" and "le" in "apple", the "a" (which sounds like "i") and the "ge" in "orange".

The next story is about circles, and contains the word "circles" five times, but the lesson plan seems to contain no explanation for children about why the letter "c" sounds like a "s" the first time it appears in this word, and a "k" the second time.

This story and the next one contain more digraphs and spelling overlaps – the "a…e" in "make", the unstressed "er" in "paper" (introduced before the stressed "er" in "her" and "term", so children will think the sound for this spelling is "u"), the "ir" in "bird", the "ey" in "monkeys", the "a" in "water" (sounds like "or"), the "wh" in "everywhere" and also add trigraphs – the word "air", the "oar" in "board" and the "ere" in "everywhere".

In story number four we meet a highly irregular spelling – the "oe" in shoe (like canoe, Donohoe and if you know of any other words like this, please tell me and I will add them to my spelling list). The regularly-spelt "oe" word "toe" is also in this story, but there seems to be no point in the lesson at which the teacher tells children that we ordinarily say "oe" as per the word "toe" (see this list), not as per the word "shoe".

Being an American program, there are rhymes in Words Their Way that don't work in an Australian accent like "I Can't Said The Ant" (I can't said the aunt?), and I think I had better stop there, you get the idea.

"Developmental stages" of spelling

Saying there are developmental stages in spelling is a bit like saying there are developmental stages in learning to cook, fix a car or program a computer.

None of these things are in the slightest bit natural or developmental. If you put a child alone on a desert island with paper, pens and pencils, a fully equipped kitchen, a car and a motor mechanic's shop, and the most whizz-bang computers available, you could come back and assess them as often as you liked, but they probably wouldn't write a story, a word or a line of code, scramble an egg or fix the simplest breakdown.

If you hung around with them on the desert island for a few years, writing and reading, cooking, fixing and programming, and they watched you, most of them would learn at least the basics, but some would not. If you want someone to be a good cook, motor mechanic or computer programmer, you start them off doing simple things and then gradually and systematically teach them harder and harder stuff, till they are as proficient as you (or if you fix cars and program computers as well as I do, you get someone else to teach them).

Our usual system for teaching beginning spelling, however, seems to be a weird combination of let-them-hang-around-and-watch, and actively setting about a quarter to a fifth of children up to fail, by requiring them to do linguistically and conceptually hard things well before they've mastered much easier ones.

Instead of talking about "developmental stages" of spelling, spelling programs for beginners should actively teach the simple and common spellings in all word positions first (like the spellings in the words mat, tip and rug), then the more complex ones (like "wh" and "er" and "a…e"), working from short to long words, along the way pointing out any tricky spellings from which they should not try to generalise patterns, like the "oe" in "shoe", the "ai" in "said" and spelling nightmare words like "choir" and "sure".

What's wrong with teaching correct spelling straight up?

As mentioned above, a Words Their Way "Emergent Speller" who can spell little words like mat, nap, kid, log, jet and gum is not in fact an Emergent Speller at all, so I went looking through Words My Way for their stage.

The second stage is called "Letter Name – Alphabetic Speller". These children, aged 4-9 (!), are writing "mine" as M, MN or MIN, "drive" as JN, JV, JFR or DRIV and "send" as S, SD, SAD and SED. Heaven help the nine-year-olds, I say. If you haven't cracked the spelling code by age 9, all the research on long-term outcomes suggest that you are in serious, serious trouble. Unless someone comes along with a seriously effective intervention, you probably won't learn to read and spell very well, ever.

For a program to suggest that it's OK for nine-year-olds to be writing "mine" as "M" is, I think, frankly scandalous.

The third stage, children aged 6-12 (the pedagogical and accountability implications of these blurry age groupings will have to be the subject of another rant, another day), is called "Within Word Pattern Spellers" and here children write "seat" as SETE or SEET, "nail" as "NALE" and "rope" as ROAP. So they are getting the idea but are still not expected to spell correctly.

I can't tell you what stage a child aged 5-12 who can spell mat, nap, kid, log, jet, gum, mine, seat and nail is in. Words Their Way seems to have an underlying assumption that all children will make constant mistakes in spelling, and adults' job is to assess and record and accept these, while trying in a gentle, oblique way to facilitate their development away from them.

The problem is that if you practice a spelling mistake often enough, it becomes a habit, and hard to undo.

A first-and-fast, explicit phonics teaching methodology is the way to avoid encouraging children to practice spelling mistakes, but getting schools to recognise this and start using it is a lot harder than I expected.

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I've been working with a little girl in her second year of school who is taking a long time to understand sounds and letters, so I've scheduled some extra one-to-one time with her each week.

Last year, she had pretty much nailed the "short" vowels ("a" as in "hat", "e" as in "red", "i" as in "sit", "o" as in "not" and "u" as in "fun") in little, three-sound words. However, her responses were very slow, so I was hoping to get her faster and more automatic this term, before working on longer words and extra spellings next term.

Suddenly yesterday, whenever I asked her to write a word containing the "short" vowel sound "u", she wrote "a". I asked for "sun" and she wrote "san", I asked for "duck" and she wrote "dack", I asked for "nut" and she wrote "nat". Argh. What happened?

The Golden Words

She has a really lovely teacher, who is also very concerned about her slow progress, and who mentioned in passing in the hallway that she'd sent home the "Golden Words" for the family to work on.

The "Golden Words" are the first 12 "sight" words in a high-frequency-words-based literacy scheme called the Magic 100 Words, which is popular in my local schools, and seems to be recommended to undergraduate teachers as their first literacy priority. The words are "a", "and", "be", "I", "in", "is", "it", "of", "that", "the", "to" and "was".

So that's what happened. The child has been practicing reading the word "a" as "uh", and now she sees the letter "a" in a word and says "uh" too. "Uh" as in "drat".

I'm sure once I have a chance to discuss this with the teacher and send home some different things to practice, this student will be back on track. However, it would be great if teachers graduated with something less confusing as their early literacy starting point. Think about what sounds the letter "a" represents just in the 12 "Golden Words" above. There are three different sounds – "uh" as in the word "a" (I wish people would say "ay" – click here for an earlier blog post about this), "a" as in "that" and "o" as in "was". Totally, totally confusing for beginners.

The 100 Most Annoying Words

The mother of another young client told me the other day that they have started calling the 100 most frequent words "The 100 Most Annoying Words". I think this is brilliant and will be calling all high-frequency word list this from now on.

I count a total of 74 different letter-sound correspondences in the Magic 100 Most Annoying Words:

The list includes some words with doozy irregular spellings, and sometimes these are the only example of that spelling e.g. the "ai" in "said" is on the list, but not the "ai" in "rain" and "hail".

However, most of the words are regularly-spelt, once you understand how major spellings work in different slots in a syllable. So there's no need to memorise these words holus-bolus. Children just need to be taught each pattern in an efficient, systematic way, ensuring it is generalisable to thousands of other words. When they meet an irregular in a book, e.g. the "oul" in "could", you can just say, "That word has a funny spelling for the sound 'oo'". The two other sounds in this word are spelt utterly regularly, so children who can decode 95% of the surrounding words aren't generally tripped up by this.

I'd love to throw all the different versions of 100 Most Annoying Words lists out, or at least relegate them to somewhere in the curriculum well beyond the time when children are taught how to work with the basic code of our language (click here if you want to download a free picture book to help your beginner grasp this). Such lists give too many small children the completely wrong idea about how our spelling system works.

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A few people have asked me what I think of Fountas and Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention, as this program seems to now be widely used in my local schools.

I haven't used it myself, but had a brief browse through some of its readers for absolute beginners the other day, and here's what I found:

Reading by memorising and picture-guessing

Book 1 from Level A of Leveled Literacy Intervention is called "Waking up".

This blog post originally included photos of some of the pages in this book, but the publisher wrote to me on 2 April 2015 asking me to take both text and pictures down for copyright reasons. Without them, it will be a little harder to make sense of this blog post, but I will paraphrase the text and you can imagine the pictures:

The (male hen) wakes up. (Rooster noise)

The phoneme-grapheme correspondences (PGCs) on this page are as follows:

• One-letter-equals-one-sound: e, r, s, t, w, k, u, p, c, o, a, d.
• Two letters equal one sound: th, oo, er, a…e, ck, le.

So just on page 1 of book 1, level A, there are 18 phoneme-grapheme correspondences! Far, far too many for beginners and strugglers.

Not only are there too many PGCs, but there is some serious spelling complexity in this book:

• the letter "t" is a stand-alone spelling in "rooster" and part of the digraph "th" in "the",
• the letter "a" as part of the "long" vowel spelling "a…e" in "wakes", but represents a different sound in "a-doodle",
• The letter "e" is typically (unfortunately for children) pronounced "uh" in the word "the", and it's also part of the "er" spelling in "rooster", the "a…e" spelling in "wakes" and the "le" spelling in "doodle",
• the letter "o" is used as a one-letter spelling in "cock" but also part of a digraph in "rooster" and "doodle-doo".

The next page goes like this:

The (female cattle) wakes up. (Cow noise).

The third page goes:

The (swine) wakes up. (pig noise).

By now we are up to 24 PGCs:

• One-letter-equals-one-sound: e, r, s, t, w, k, u, p, c, o, a, d, m, i, g, n.
• Two letters equal one sound: th, oo, er, a…e, ck, le, ow, oi.

Beginners can only realistically "read" this book by memorising the format, and substituting words to match the pictures. There is far too much spelling complexity for them to be expected to sound words out.

The next pages contain pictures of a horse, a turkey, a sheep, a duck and a chick. No prizes for guessing the text, you can probably "read" the rest of this book even if you've never seen it.

There are a total of 42 phoneme-grapheme correspondences in this book. Why that doesn't make teachers deem it quite unsuitable for beginners is beyond me.

Many of these PGCs are extremely complex/difficult, such as the four-letter spelling "eigh" in "neigh", different pronunciations of "a" in "waking" and "quack", and unusual spellings like the "aa" in "baa". There are also consonant blends and two-syllable words.

OK, maybe the first book is a bad example. Let's have a look at the next few books.

Title: Frog food. Repetitive text: I like bugs on pancakes. I like bugs on popcorn… soup…bread…pizza…salad…cake…I like bugs.

This book adds 11 PGCs not seen in the previous book, bringing us up to 53 PGCs just in the first two books in the series.

Title: The new puppy. Repetitive text: I got a little dish…blanket…collar….bed…toy…brush…bone…puppy.

Another 8 PGCs, so we're now up to 61.

Title: Friends. Repetitive text: Orson is a big dog. Taco is a little dog. Orson has a big collar. Taco has a little collar….bone…ball…bark…bowl…bed…friend.

An additional 5 PGCs, so the absolute beginner has now been exposed to 66 in total. If they haven't learnt a single one of them properly, nobody should be surprised.

Title: Sam and Papa. Repetitive text: I like to read books with my Papa…eat lunch…play ball…draw pictures…go shopping…watch TV…make cookies…I love my Papa! And my Papa loves me!

This book adds a further 13 PGCs, giving a tally of 79 PGCs just in the first five books in the Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Literacy Intervention box.

Sigh. At that point I gave up, and figured I had better things to do with my time than look at books that I would never in a million years use or recommend. They don't even attempt an interesting narrative, the pictures are nice but the repetitive text is boring.

Giving these books to beginners and strugglers might be a way of teaching reading-like behaviour, but is not teaching actual reading.

Discussion among professionals

I'm a member of the US-based listserve Spell-Talk, where I learn a lot of interesting things about spelling and literacy generally, from all kinds of experts including people with relevant PhDs, professorships and decades of experience.

A few months ago there was some discussion on this listserve of Fountas and Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention, and here's my summary of what was said, which probably doesn't qualify as much more than professional gossip, but is still interesting, and permitted in the blogosphere:

Leveled Literacy Intervention is based on the same 1970s theory of reading as Reading Recovery. There are now many more effective programs that are consistent with current models of reading. The logic/science behind LLI's reading levels is not obvious.

Claims that Leveled Literacy Intervention is effective are based on research done by its publisher, but the data are not particularly impressive or robust. Everything teachers do has an effect. What's interesting from a research point of view is how large the effect of an intervention is. Improvements attributed to Leveled Literacy Intervention identified in Running Records (subjective and open to bias) were not identified by more objective assessment.

Leveled Literacy Intervention sessions include some work on decoding and encoding words, perhaps 5-10 minutes per half-hour session, which makes teachers who are unused to phonics think it includes a lot of phonics. This may be because they've never seen or used a really excellent synthetic phonics program.

Phonics skills learnt in word study activities in Leveled Literacy Intervention are not then practiced/reinforced in reading activities. Instead, when reading, children are given books containing few/none of the patterns that have just been learnt, and encouraged to use multiple cues and guessing, as per traditional Whole Language practice.

US Psychologist Dr Steve Dykstra summarised this approach thus: "It's like teaching children a little bit about a healthy diet, then serving twinkies and french fries for lunch.  It is true you taught them something about a healthy diet. It is true."

After teachers use Leveled Literacy Intervention for a while, they start to independently query why the skills taught in the phonics part of the program seem to exist in isolation from the rest of the program, and aren't reinforced in the reading part of the program.

Better books for beginners

The first book of the Little Learners Love Literacy series (also available as apps) contains only six PGCs: s, a, m, p, i, t, with no digraphs, no spelling overlaps and no words longer than three sounds. This is quite hard enough for absolute beginners.

If you don't believe me, learn this code:

Now scroll the above decoder off the screen and read the text from the first Little Learners book written in this code:

Easy, huh? Want to add another dozen PGCs, including two, three or four-letter spellings and spellings that are used for more than one sound, into the mix? I thought not.

The first Sounds~Write books contain five PGCs: a, i, m, s, t. The first Flyleaf book  contains six PGCs: I, a, m, s, y, e. The first Beginning Reading Instruction reader (on the iPad called "Reading for all learners") has five: I, s, ee, a, m. The first Dandelion Launchers book (also available as iBooks) has five: s, a, t, i, m.

These are my idea of suitable books for four and five-year-olds having their first go at reading a book for themselves. Their schemes gradually and systematically introduce more PGCs until children have enough word attack to start to be able to successfully decode other books and printed information, and build solid mental images of printed words.

As well as reading such little books, very young children should work at tracing and copying letters and words, filling gaps in words, and reading, building and writing little, two and three-sound words in a variety of activities, then gradually making the words longer and the spellings more complex. Reading and spelling should be taught as the reverse of each other.

While children are learning to encode and decode in this way, and until they can read quality children's literature themselves, adults should read it to them.

There's no need to give beginners books that are far too hard for them, and which encourage them to think that reading is accomplished by memorising and guessing.

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Today’s Australian edition of The Conversation contained an article that really made me see red, called “Ditch the home readers – real books are better for your child”. Its advice from a literacy academic frankly contradicts the scientific research on how best to teach literacy.

The author’s argument is that readers with simplified spellings are boring, and children should be free to choose and independently tackle whatever books interest them.

He says (and I can’t believe I am not making this up), “Don’t worry about the book being too hard – you can use a strategy to help your child access the text when reading together at home, or you can read it to them.”

Well, I agree wholeheartedly with the second suggestion. Of course adults should read all kinds of interesting books to beginning readers, to show them what a powerful, wonderful thing reading is, and to develop their oral language skills and knowledge about the world.

However, the idea that children should be encouraged to themselves tackle books that are too hard for them is simply outrageous. Would we encourage children to ride bikes that are too big for them? To cook a three-course meal before they can make toast? To play a symphony before they can play a simple tune? I know lots of children who were set up to fail at reading like this, and if it carries on, it makes them think they are stupid, give up and eventually hate school.

The suggested “strategy” contains a link to a YouTube video about “Echo Reading”, where an adult reads a book to a child (good), and then the child is required to parrot what they say (why?).

A child with good oral language skills can parrot what an adult says without even looking at the print from which they are reading. How this can be interpreted as the child reading is really quite beyond me. How this does anything other than make the book slower and more boring, ditto.

What this article promotes is the Whole Language approach to literacy-teaching (nowadays sprinkled with incidental, initial phonics and rebadged “Balanced Literacy”), a methodology for which John Hattie’s meta-research calculated an effect size of 0.06, i.e. it is not very effective. Credible methodologies have effect sizes of 0.4 or more. The effect size Hattie calculated for phonics instruction is 0.54 (see the book “Visible Learning for Teachers“, p266-268).

I got so riled by this article that I posted a comment on it, and then realised that probably hardly anyone reads the comments (I hardly ever read them myself). So here’s mine, I hope it helps encourage others to get involved in conversations like this, because we really can debunk this stuff, and we really must, for the sake of both children and their teachers.

Working as a Speech Pathologist with school-aged children I see firsthand the carnage created when teachers and parents follow this sort of advice.

This author conflates books-to-read-to-your-child, which should be chosen on the basis of interest, and books-for-your-child-to-read, which can and should be carefully selected on the basis of the complexity of their text, because we have a very complicated and opaque spelling system in English, and it is too hard for little children to learn all at once.

The long words and tricky spellings need to be taken out at first, so they can learn the basic spellings to a point at which they are fast and automatic, and then gradually the other dozens of spellings can be learnt, like those used for the “ay” sound in “same” (a…e), “sail” (ai), “say” (ay), “eight” (eigh), “they” (ey) and eventually also rare spellings like the “ei” in “vein”, the “ea” in “great”, the “aigh” in “straight” and the French “e…e” in “fete” and “suede”.

Children also need to learn that lots of our spellings are used for several sounds e.g. The “ea” in “sea”, “dead” and “great”, and also “Sean” and “Seamus” if children with these names are in the class.

To learn a large complex set of information, organise it! But teachers are simply not being equipped at university to do this, which is not fair to them. Along the way teachers should also be equipped to explain where words come from, to help students understand why we have so many spellings e.g. The word “suede” is from the French word for Sweden, from where suede was imported to France.

Reading scientists have established beyond a shadow of a doubt* that teaching beginners in this fine-grained, incremental way very quickly is the best and fastest way to teach children to read well, and spell well too, so they can get on and read, and enjoy reading, whatever they like. Yet education academics continue to promote “just dump children in any old book, don’t worry if it’s too hard, and let them work out the patterns for themselves” teaching methods.

I see the consequences of this approach in my clinic and at school every day, and I implore parents of beginners and strugglers to ignore this bad advice, and seek out books with simple spellings and little words that their children can actually decode, rather than always having to look at the pictures and guess.

And I implore teachers to go back to the faculties of Education where they trained, and ask the academics there why they were not equipped to teach the sounds-and-spellings of our language in a logical, systematic way (many primary teachers have never even been taught that there are 44 sounds in our language, not just 26) and what is happening to ensure that future teachers are given the knowledge and skills to be able to get almost all children reading in the first year of school.

There should be at most 3-5% of children struggling, not our current 20% or more. Saying this might help put people like me out of business, but frankly I don’t care. These are little children, and we must do better.

* The research to which I refer is largely summarised in three recent national inquiries into literacy education:

The 2005 Australian National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy recommended that, “teachers provide systematic, direct and explicit phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skills required for foundational reading proficiency.”

The UK’s 2006 Independent Review into the Teaching of Early Literacy (the Rose Review) resulted in synthetic phonics being mandated as the early literacy teaching methodology in state supported schools in the UK, because, “Synthetic Phonics offers the vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers”.

Also in 2006, the US National Reading Panel report stated that, “Systematic phonics instruction produces significant benefits for students in kindergarten through 6th grade and for children having difficulty learning to read”.

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I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry recently upon discovering a video from the University of Canberra called “Echo Reading”.

OK, I thought, Whole Language/Balanced Literacy has finally jumped the shark.

In this video, an adult reads a book that is too hard for a student aloud, pausing after each sentence for the student to repeat the sentence:

If you are the sort of person inclined to notice things such as emperors not having any clothes, you will have noticed that all the student has to be able to do to succeed at “Echo Reading” is be able to repeat spoken sentences. They don’t even have to look at the text.

In Speech Pathology and linguistics circles, we call this skill “verbal imitation”. Not “reading”.

I found another Echo Reading video on the internet in which an instructor actively discourages a child’s attempts at independent decoding, and encourages the child to listen and copy what she says, in the name of fluency:

In neither video was there any tracking of text with a finger, or apparent expectation or requirement for the student to decode, although in the second video, the child clearly could decode pretty well, and kept trying to do so.

In another Echo Reading demonstration the teacher does point to the words and encourages the child to do so on his turn. So at least she knew the child was looking at the words, though it’s not clear from the video whether he could decode them himself, or was just copying her spoken words and her pointing.

Another video shows a teacher reading a repetitive “Big book” to a class, and then she gets them to “Echo Read” it. Again, she points to the words, but as the print is small, the group is large and young, and many of the words are quite hard (“butterfly”, “giraffe”, “elephant”, “orange”), so most children are probably just verbally imitating, not reading.

In another video called Choral and Echo Reading, the emphasis seems to be encouraging a child to decode with or after an adult, using books that seem to be around or a little above the child’s decoding level.

So this is better than the previous videos, but instead of helping the child sound out words, and pointing out useful patterns like the “ay” in “strays”, the teacher just says whole words for her. Yet this child clearly knows a bit about sounding out, and might have been helped to blend “s+t+r+ay+s”, she might even know the “ay” pattern since she did seem to decode the word “stays” (but perhaps she just remembered when the teacher said it).

I also found a video in which Echo Reading was used to teach a child who could already decode the text to read with more expression:

I don’t have any problem with Echo Reading used like this, as a strategy for improving phrasing and reading expression in children who can already decode. Indeed a brief Google Scholar search suggests that this might have been the original point of Echo Reading, if only I were an academic, I’d be able to easily access the articles, and tell you more (late edit: see Mary Gladstone’s comment below for details of the origins of Echo Reading. Thanks, Mary!)

A teaching strategy is only as good as the theory or rationale behind it. I was teaching a six-year-old stutterer to speak smoothly and slowly yesterday, so I got out a book containing short words, simple spellings and an interesting story, and read it sentence by sentence to him, and got him to copy the way I was talking. I guess some people watching would have called that Echo Reading. I wouldn’t, the purpose of the activity was smooth speech.

Any use of Echo Reading as a substitute for decoding, a means of discouraging decoding or a means of encouraging children to memorise whole written words rather than decode them, is really very worrying. Children need to learn to decode to become successful readers.

I also don’t see how Echo Reading “is a great strategy to take the stress and anxiety out of reading together”, as suggested in the first video.

The struggling readers I know aren’t interested in engaging in reading-like-behaviour, they’re interested in actually learning to read. They will probably be stressed and anxious until they can do it, and fair enough. The best way to reduce their stress and anxiety is to get their reading foundations in i.e. teach them to decode. Once they can decode a bit, they’re the ones nagging you for time to do more practice.

Instead of “Echo Reading”, students with poor decoding skills should be doing two separate reading activities:

1. Reading books containing the sounds and spellings they have been taught. As additional sounds and spellings are mastered, books which include them can be tackled. A list of books with simplified spellings intended for this purpose, and suitable for a range of ages, is here.

2. Listening to adults read interesting books that are too hard for them to read independently, for comprehension, vocabulary and enjoyment. There’s no need to say every line twice. That would just be annoying and mess up the story.

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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.

For example, the "three-cueing system" remains widely used in Australian early literacy teaching, as well as the US.

Young children are encouraged to use three different sets of cues when attempting to read an unfamiliar word (this table is from learningaboutourworld.weebly.com):

The three-cueing system has absolutely no scientific basis.

Its treatment of the graphophonic part of reading as primarily a visual activity is frankly absurd, given the weight of research evidence over decades showing decoding words is primarily a linguistic activity.

Dr Moats explained that science has shown that four major brain systems are involved in reading:

• A context processor which deals with background information and sentence context,
• A meaning processor which deals with vocabulary and meaningful word parts (morphemes),
• A phonological processor which deals with speech sounds, and
• An orthographic processor which deals with letters and spelling patterns.

The phonological and orthographic processors, involved in word recognition, are only linked to the context processor via the meaning processor. So word recognition is not driven by context.

Context is useful once a word is decoded, if there is more than one possible meaning, for example the word "record" can be a verb (as in "I will record this") or noun (as in "she made a record"), and we can work out which is intended from the sentence. But context is not how we get words off the page.

On Saturday, Dr Moats accepted Learning Difficulties Australia's Eminent Researcher award, and I filmed part of her acceptance speech, in which she discusses the remarkable persistence of bad ideas in literacy education.

She says we need to be outraged, put our feet down, and run a coordinated campaign for literacy-teaching that is grounded in the scientific evidence. I couldn't agree more.

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Two years ago I wrote a blog post about Reading Recovery, after two children in their fourth year of schooling were referred to me with the reading and spelling skills of the average six-year-old.

Both had done Reading Recovery, but it obviously hadn't worked.

When I read about what Reading Recovery entails, it was obvious why not.

Only five minutes of each half-hour daily Reading Recovery session involves work on sounds (phonemes) and spellings (graphemes), the areas in which these students (and most young strugglers) needed most help, just to be able to get words off and onto the page.

The rest of the session involves activities that are unlikely to be of much benefit to such learners. Some of the strategies encouraged, like guessing from pictures, context or first letters, are counter-productive.

I kept thinking about these students this week while listening to US literacy expert Louisa Moats talking about the need to improve literacy instruction in schools, and make sure children like these don't fall through the cracks.

Dr Moats expressed her concerns about the ongoing use of Reading Recovery at a meeting I attended at the Department of Education yesterday. I recorded these and had embedded the video in this blog post, but a colleague  then told me that Dr Moats spoke to her about concerns about being understood correctly in the media and not quoted out of context, so I have taken the video down. Sorry if it's what you were looking for in this blog post.

Dr Moats referred to research in New Zealand which is summarised readably in an article called Reading Recovery and the Failure of the New Zealand National Literacy Strategy in the November 2013 Learning Difficulties Australia Bulletin, click here for a copy.

Even further summarising, New Zealand, the home of Reading Recovery, has far too many learners significantly under-achieving on literacy, just like Australia. In the PIRLS study, New Zealand and Australia scored the lowest on reading in the English-speaking world, click here for more details. Of course those most likely to fall behind are from less wealthy backgrounds and Indigenous and Islander communities.

Reading Recovery is an important part of the New Zealand Literacy Strategy, and has been in use with struggling readers in New Zealand for nearly three decades. Its stated aim is to prevent literacy difficulties at an early stage, but there are no data to show that this aim has ever been achieved. The gap between good and poor readers has not narrowed in the decades since Reading Recovery was introduced.

Reading Recovery claims an 80% success rate, but long-term data show that gains are not sustained over time and students tend to remain significantly behind their peers.

Children who don't make progress in Reading Recovery are "discontinued" and some children are considered "too low" for the program and not included in the first place. With such children off its books, Reading Recovery can claim higher success rates.

If Speech Pathologists showed up at schools saying, "Just send me the children with mild and moderate difficulties, the severe ones are too low", we'd be shown the door, pronto, and rightly so. We can and do tailor our intervention to children's needs. But as a fixed program, it seems that children are required to fit Reading Recovery, not the other way around.

Children doing Reading Recovery in the New Zealand research averaged about 40-50 hours of one-to-one intervention. So it's incredibly expensive. Small groups would be a lot more cost-effective, and possibly equally effective for many children. In Response to Intervention terms, in schools with literacy programs still based on the (long-discredited, but it seems you can't kill it with an axe) multiple-cues theory of reading, Reading Recovery is a Tier 3 intervention, but without any Tier 1 or Tier 2.

This is a wait-to-fail and allow-to-fail system.

As the New Zealand researchers and Louisa Moats say, it's long past time to replace Reading Recovery with programs that have been shown to be more effective, and train teachers to deliver them.

You can find a lot more information about Reading Recovery in this 2011 edition of Perspectives on Language and Literacy, a publication of the International Dyslexia Association, as well as the paper entitled "Whole Language Hi Jinks: how to tell when scientifically-based reading instruction isn't" by Louisa Moats (see especially pages 22-23).

Whatever happened to those two kids?

In my blog post two years ago I said that I'd let you know how my two students went. They were then reading like six-year-olds at the ages of eight and nine.

Both undertook a program of systematic, explicit phonics instruction, as well as further assessment which showed quite different cognitive profiles. They read a range of decodable texts, carefully graded to match the sound and spelling patterns we'd taught them. They did a lot of writing and word-building work, sometimes disguised as games, and some work on vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. They worked through all the major spelling patterns in one-syllable words, and moved on to longer words.

Both students can now read, thanks mostly to the hard work of their parents and school support staff who did most of the day-to-day slog with them, since my sessions were limited to once or occasionally twice a week, often in a group. Oh, to have the luxury of 40-50 hours of one-to-one time with such students!

Neither has caught up completely with their peers, but according to teachers one of them is now only about a year behind. Being one year behind is still not a lot of fun, especially when you've busted a gut to get there, while a lot of your friends have been in cruise mode all along.

The other student has more cognitive difficulties so progress has been slower, and probably over time there will always be a fairly significant gap between this student and peers across the curriculum.

Both students participate in class, hand in work, and read books. You wouldn't spot them as strugglers in the classroom unless you were quite a skilled observer. Their spelling continues to leave quite a bit to be desired, but they can get their ideas down on paper.

Had they had the type of intervention they needed in their first or second year of schooling instead of their fourth, they would almost certainly be doing better than they are. One of them might not have fallen behind in the first place. But when they needed systematic, explicit, synthetic phonics most, they were instead given Reading Recovery.

A School Improvement Brilliant Example

That was all a bit depressing, so I thought I'd end on a cheerier note. One of the striking examples Louisa Moats gave of how schools can turn their literacy results around in a short period of time was from a school called Hartsfield Elementary School in the US.

Here's the slide she presented, showing that in 1995 they had 31.8% of children falling below the 25th percentile on literacy at the end of first grade.

The following year they reduced the strugglers to 20.4% by introducing a research-based, comprehensive literacy program for all students.

The year after that they introduced screening at the beginning of first grade, with extra intervention for the lowest 30-40% of students. This left them with only 10.9% of children struggling.

In the following two years they fine-tuned their core program and specialist intervention, so that in 1998 only 6.7% of children were below the 25th percentile, and in 1999 that figure was only 3.7%.

If American schools can do this sort of thing, I'm sure Australian schools can do it too. I just want them to hurry up!

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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. Then I realised that lots of people will read the article but not the comments, and that the editor might not approve my comment (though it is tremendously polite and restrained) so given TC has a Creative Commons licence I’ve decided to post my comment here too, hoping to get more people to read it. Here it is:

“A phonetic language” is a language with phonemes (speech sounds), of which English has about 44, depending how thinly you slice them. I think you mean that English lacks a transparent orthography, but that does not mean it lacks strong and consistent relationships between sounds and letters.

Four main principles need to be understood to teach English orthography well: 1. Spoken words are made of sounds, 2. Letters and letter combinations are how we represent these sounds in print (about 200 main spellings), 3. Most sounds are written a few different ways e.g. ou in out, ow in cow, ough in drought, 4. Some sounds share spellings e.g. ow in cow, ow in low.

Once you get your head around this system, almost all words in English are decodable, though their phoneme-grapheme correspondences are more complex than languages with shallow orthographies like Italian and Finnish (I use “shallow” in the linguistics sense, not the pejorative sense).

If English wasn’t phonetic we wouldn’t be able to read new brand or business names in the shops, or other words we’ve never seen before. You wouldn’t be able to read aloud these pseudowords I just made up – flaunk and pustinaceous – which adhere to the phonotactics and orthotactics of English, unlike xcmetrvyz, which doesn’t and so couldn’t be an English word.

If teachers want to make up their own phonics materials, and have the knowledge, time and desire to do so, good for them. But if they don’t have the knowledge (let alone the time or inclination) it’s usually because it hasn’t been taught properly or at all by Education faculties. I hope this problem is overcome soon because I am tired of explaining explicit, systematic synthetic phonics to teachers and having them say “why wasn’t I taught about this at Uni?”

I know many older students with poor decoding skills, so beg to differ with the statement, “Children who are failing in literacy in upper primary and high school are not failing because they don’t know their sounds. They are failing because they can’t comprehend.” Many students have only ever been taught the most basic spelling code, and not all the vowel sounds (we have five vowel letters but 20 vowel sounds), less common spellings of consonant sounds, or how to segment words into syllables and manage the unstressed vowel. Many students simply can’t work these things out for themselves, so they can only read simplified text.

Some of these struggling students also have listening comprehension difficulties, and some of them do not. I’m yet to find one who cannot learn, given good explicit, systematic synthetic phonics instruction. If Education faculties taught that reading = decoding X listening comprehension (the Simple View of Reading), and how to assess decoding and comprehension separately in order to pinpoint a student’s problem(s), then teachers would be able to assist students with difficulties more effectively.

A good synthetic phonics program doesn’t just teach the alphabet and a few digraphs, it works on word and syllable structure, covers spellings of 1-4 letters, shared spellings and multisyllable words, and less-common spellings like the Greek PH in graph, CH in chemist, Y in gym and perhaps even the X in xylem.

Educational reforms should be based on the best-quality evidence available. According to John Hattie phonics instruction’s effect size is 0.6 but Whole Language’s effect size is only 0.06, see http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement. This research pertains to mainstream students, not just the few students who are very hard to teach to read and spell.

Many phonics programs are written by people with no linguistics training and are full of mistakes, and lots of activities sold as “phonics” are indeed a waste of time. If teachers were taught English phonology, orthography and morphology, they would be able to easily tell the difference, and not add to the problem.

Finally, it is simply not true that everyone’s brain learns literacy differently. Cognitive neuroscientists have established this quite conclusively. A good starting point to learn more is this short, free video of a talk by the author of the book “Reading in the Brain”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=25GI3-kiLdo.

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The excellent Lorraine Hammond, President of Learning Difficulties Australia, was on Radio National’s Life Matters program this morning, with the unenviable task of explaining how children learn to read in ten minutes.

You can listen to what she said here.

The program was a follow-up to last week’s much longer discussion about the research showing that the widely-used literacy intervention Reading Recovery is not effective.

Many people contacted the show afterwards to defend teaching literacy using a bit of everything – a bit of rote-memorising “sight words”, a few alphabet lessons, a bit of guessing etc. This is what currently happens in most schools.

Lorraine pointed out that this still leaves us with many children who can’t sound out words, and thus struggle in school and fall further and further behind. One upper primary school child she met had had 10,000 hours of instruction, and was still looking at the first letter and guessing words. Unbelievable.

This child should have been taught in the way Lorraine (very briefly) described in the program, learning a small handful of sound-letter correspondences in the first week (maybe A, I, M, S, T, so that it’s possible to immediately write a few little words like “am”, “it”, “at” “Sam”, “mat” and “Tim”, and read books like “Tim, Tam and Sam” from Sounds~Write). Then adding a sound-letter correspondence a day till they’ve covered the main patterns of the whole spelling code. Books children are given to read should contain the spellings they’ve been taught, not spellings they have not yet been taught. This approach is called Synthetic Phonics, and is based on an understanding that reading is not a natural thing for humans to do, and is difficult for many.

The “a bit of everything” approach (widely known as “Balanced Literacy” but I call it “A Dog’s Breakfast”) and Reading Recovery are based on the underlying belief that learning to read is natural, and children will pick it up via exposure to print and a bit of lip service to phonics (A is for aeroplane etc).

Reading scientists tell us this is wrong, that when we learn to read we hijack parts of the brain evolution intended for other things, and that learning to read will always be very hard for a substantial number of children.

Yes, cobbling together a program from a bit of this and a bit of that will allow MOST children to succeed. We don’t need MOST children to succeed, we need ALL children to succeed. In our society, not learning to read is horrible on so many levels. Horrible for the kids, horrible for the teachers, horrible for the parents, horrible for society. Learning has to be not negotiable.

To get ALL children learning to read, we need a Response To Intervention approach:

1. Provide gold standard, explicit, systematic teaching in how the sounds in our speech are represented by letters on the page to all children from Day 1 of school. Show me one five-year-old who you think doesn’t deserve the best teaching. We can’t know which children walking in the door on their first day of school are going to struggle with literacy, though early screening can give us a pretty good idea, but we know it will be about one in every five children if we use a Dog’s Breakfast approach, and many fewer with the gold standard.
2. As soon as any child seems to be struggling, provide more intensive teaching in a small group, with lots of extra practice and feedback. Do it well before the end of the first year of schooling, preferably starting in the second term. Catch them as soon as they look like falling behind, and pull them up.
3. Intensive, one-to-one, personalised instruction for the perhaps 3-5% of children who still have difficulties despite gold standard classroom teaching and small group intervention. These are the kids with underlying neurological/language difficulties – problems discriminating sounds, with auditory memory, with naming skills and perhaps other things – who are likely to end up with a diagnosis of Specific Learning Disability or dyslexia. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be helped to achieve to their potential, like everyone else, through a combination of good intervention and then compensation for any remaining problems.

I was a little bit astonished to hear Ellen Fanning from Radio National suggest that “some kids don’t need the gold standard”, which to me means the same thing as “some kids can have second-rate teaching”.

Imagine if anyone said “some kids can have second-rate health care”. Everyone would be appalled. Learning to read and spell is so important that a second-rate approach based on a false idea (reading as natural) is really not acceptable. We must insist on the gold standard for all kids.

Gold standard literacy-teaching doesn’t have to cost a bomb, and will save us a lot in the long run, in both money and human misery. We already have the teachers, we already have the schools. We need clearer, higher expectations based on better evidence and modelling, better teacher training about how our speech sounds are represented by letters/spellings, and better books and other resources for beginners and strugglers in our schools and libraries.

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The books young children are typically given at school are called “Levelled Books”, which are used in class for “guided reading” or “shared reading”, where a teacher and a group of children read a book together, and discuss it. They’re also used as home readers.

Teachers typically encourage children to use a range of different strategies while reading these books, including guessing words from picture cues, first letters and context (e.g. “what word would make sense there?”), plus sounding words out, though often only as a last resort (perhaps thanks to the lasting influence of Dame Marie Clay, author of Reading Recovery and the Observation Survey still widely used in schools).

The PM readers are one set of levelled books you can find in schools all over Australia. How these books “have been meticulously levelled to ensure there is a gentle learning gradient” doesn’t seem to be spelt out on the PM website. There is some evidence questioning the levelling systems used in such books. The PM website says these books:

• Introduce high-frequency words gradually,
• Have a close text-illustration match “to help children to interpret the story and derive meaning from the text” (i.e. it’s easy to look at the picture and guess the words),
• Have child-centred fiction with a classic story structure – introduction, problem, tension, resolution,
• Have child-centred high-interest non-fiction that’s clear, logical and superbly illustrated.

I’m happy about the last two points, good on them.

I’m very unhappy about the fact that these readers introduce sound-letter correspondences and syllable types in what can only described as a random fashion. They simply do not have a sound-letter link teaching sequence.

As I’ve said in previous blog posts (here, here and here), I also have a real problem with teaching children to memorise rather than decode high-frequency words, and introducing high-frequency words in order of frequency. The word “birthday” might appear more frequently in children’s books and free writing than the word “man” (numbers 80 and 157 on the Oxford Wordlist, respectively) but “man” is an easy word to decode and spell, so there’s no need to memorise it, and “birthday” has two syllables and three digraphs, so should be introduced later.

I’m also very unhappy about children being encouraged to “read” repetitive books by guessing from pictures rather than sounding out the words. This is what levelled books mostly seem to be set up to encourage. In fact, for little kids, there is no other way to read them, because they contain too many long words and hard spellings.

Many young children thus manage to mask their serious problems with sounding out words for a very long time by being good at guessing from first letters and pictures.

If you have an iPad, you can now download some free PM Readers from the apps store, and check them out as examples of typical levelled books for yourself. The first one in the Starters series goes like this: Big things. A truck is big. A bulldozer is big, then it repeats the “A…is big” sentence frame for other vehicles: train, fire engine, bus, crane, ship and plane. The pictures are very nice, much better than the ones in this blog post – I didn’t want to use theirs for copyright reasons.

There are one, two and three-syllable words in this book for absolute beginners. Let’s count how many different phoneme-grapheme correspondences there are if you’re a speaker of standard Australian English:

1. b as in “big”, “bulldozer”, and “bus”.
2. i as in “is”, “big”, “things”, and “ship”.
3. g as in “big”.
4. th as in “things”.
5. ng as in “things”.
6. s as in “things” and “is” (sounds like “z”).
7. a as in “a”.
8. t as in “truck” and “train”.
9. r as in “truck”, “train” and “crane”.
10. u as in “truck” and “bus”.
11. ck as in “truck”.
12. u as in “bulldozer”.
13. ll as in “bulldozer”.
14. d as in “bulldozer”.
15. o as in “bulldozer”.
16. z as in “bulldozer”.
17. er as in “bulldozer”.
18. ai as in “train”.
19. n as in “train”, “engine”, “crane” and “plane”.
20. f as in “fire”.
21. i…e as in “fire”.
22. r as in “fire” (in Australian English this is the unstressed vowel, pronounced “uh”).
23. e as in “engine”.
24. g as in “engine” (pronounced “j”).
25. i…e as in “engine” (again the unstressed vowel, pronounced “uh”).
26. s as in “bus”.
27. c as in “crane”.
28. a…e as in “crane”.
29. sh as in “ship”.
30. p as in “ship” and “plane”.
31. l as in “plane”.

That’s 31 different sound-letter correspondences including several digraphs, one syllable words with five different syllable types (V, VC, CVC, CVCC, CCVC), two-syllable and three-syllable words, some incorporating the unstressed vowel. Most patterns appear only once or twice, so there’s not much chance to learn any of them.

On the iPad there are a lot of bells and whistles like voice output that make this more like a game or toy than a book. As a paper book, this sort of thing is really not suitable for beginning readers. I’d only ever use it as a picture book for a vehicle-obsessed younger child who is not yet starting to learn about sounds and letters.

Such books are based on the jump-the-shark Whole Language idea that reading and writing are natural and should be “caught not taught”. We now know that many kids won’t learn very well without explicit, structured teaching about how sounds in our speech are represented by letters on the page. This requires a proper teaching sequence for sounds and letters, and decodable books which contain the sound-letter links which have been taught, rather than levelled books of the type now widely used.

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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 PS. Nothing is so powerful as a good example.

My quote in the article doesn’t entirely make sense, sorry, everyone (cognitive memory and horsepower?), but oh well, that’ll teach me to better prepare quotes for journalists. I was trying to make the point that absolute beginners and strugglers have to use almost all their cognitive horsepower just to get words off the page.

Teachers encouraging “multi-cueing” (a term used widely in my local schools, also called “the three-cueing system”, or “searchlights” in the UK), often distract children from the vital early task of building their decoding skills, and encourage the habits of weak readers, not strong readers.

Strong readers and spellers internalise and automatise the links between words’ sounds and their spellings, and eventually can convert speech to print and print to speech at lightning speed without conscious effort. It’s only weak readers who have to guess from pictures, context, syntax or anything else. Context, syntax etc. come into play after a word is identified, in comprehending the text.

Whose three-cueing system?

Dr Marilyn Jager Adams is an internationally-regarded expert on literacy-learning, and author of the landmark book “Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print”. 

In the 1990s when she was a visiting scholar at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, she realised that “the three-cueing system” had become a Thing in education.

She tried to work out whose Thing it was.

Like other reading researchers, Adams knew that poorly developed word recognition skills are the most pervasive and debilitating source of reading difficulty, and that the skilful reader’s deep and ready knowledge of words’ spellings and spelling-to-speech correspondences is what enables swift, efficient word recognition.

She wrote: “During that fraction of a second while the eyes are paused on any given word in a text, its spelling is registered with complete, letter wise precision even as it is instantly and automatically mapped to the speech patterns it represents”.

The process is so over-learned that it happens subconsciously. Skilful readers can no more look at a word and not read it than fly to the moon.

In 1998 she wrote (I encourage you to read the whole article here): “Over the last few years, I have spent much time in schools around the country, working with teachers and administrators. My challenge has been to tell them about these lessons from research and their implications with respect to instruction. At some point during such sessions, I am almost inevitably asked how what I have said relates to the three-cueing system.

“The first time I was hit with this question, I naively asked what, specifically, my audience meant by “the three-cueing system”. Whose three-cueing system? Although nobody could provide me with a reference, someone in my audience graciously drew a schematic of the three-cueing system for me”.

I don’t have a copy of that diagram, but I imagine it looked something like this, as this is the sort of multi-cueing venn diagram I’ve seen kicking around schools for two decades.

Adams immediately assumed that the diagram referred to the elements that must be present for the meaning of a text to be understood. This made perfect sense and was based on extensive research from the 1970s, some of it her own.

As she spoke about this, she realised from her audience’s faces that what she was saying differed from what they were expecting in a fundamental way.

She started searching the academic literature for the source of the three-cueing system, but came up empty-handed. She asked colleagues around the world, but none of them knew. She gathered up workshop handouts, framework documents and advertisements referring to the three-cueing system, and searched them fruitlessly for references.

A number of people commented that the diagram was a lot like one which will be familiar to anyone who has studied linguistics or Speech Pathology:

The graphic was similar, but the topic was not. Adams kept searching, by now convinced that the three-cueing system was not part of the mainstream academic repertoire.

Eventually she was told that the term “cueing systems” referred to the strategies that readers can use when reading unfamiliar words, how these are integrated, how well they self-correct and what the text means to them. She found a largely-ignored 1976 article and two influential books from 1988 and 1994 by Regie Routman containing versions of the diagram. But no actual research.

Routman wrote that effective readers, “use all three cueing systems interdependently. Ineffective readers tend to rely too heavily upon graphophonic cues” and “that children learn phonics best after they can already read. I am convinced that the reason our good readers are good at phonics is that in their being able to read they can intuitively make sense of phonics”.

Well, it’s very nice to have convictions, but teaching needs to be based on evidence.

Routman and others argued that sounds and spellings are subordinate to meaning and structure in reading, and should be de-emphasised in teaching. They recommended that children should only sound out words as a last resort. Routman created practical tools for teachers to help them encourage reliance on other cues and actively discourage sounding out. Whatever their source, and whoever promoted them, these ideas were widely taken up in education.

Eventually a group of 40 linguists and psycholinguists discovered that the phonics-last philosophy had made it all the way into the Massachusetts Reading Curriculum Framework, and wrote a letter of protest to the Minister for Education, prompting policy change.

Lightbulb moment: the diagram refers to word identification

Marilyn Jager Adams maintained a generous view of the three-cueing Thing for a long time, still believing that it referred to how we understand text. After a number of baffling exchanges with editors, it dawned on her that the diagram was in fact being used as a model of the process of word identification.

She writes: “I finally understood why my audience looked so puzzled on that first run-in with the three-cueing system. They had been operating on the belief that the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic cues were straightforward and familiar to children, and, because of this, were wholly available for use in finessing the graphophonemic system, which was complicated and unfamiliar. It had never occurred to them that there was much to teach or learn about the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic cues involved in skillful reading”.

Adams suggests that the three-cueing system probably proliferated via inservices, workshops and conferences in education, in isolation from relevant university courses and researchers. She writes that the belief system the three-cueing diagram has come to represent has wreaked “disaster on students and hardship on teachers” and bred significant distrust and ill-will. Ugh.

How to replace this belief system with understandings based on solid research evidence, and thus prevent the abovementioned disaster and hardship, is the eleventy-billion-dollar question.

I guess we just have to:

1. keep discussing good evidence and promoting methodologies based on it, and thus helping close the gap between research and practice in literacy education,
2. keep asking for the evidence behind multi-cueing, in all its guises. When none can be produced (and if Marilyn Jager Adams couldn’t find it, I’d suggest nobody can) ask respectfully that its use be discontinued in favour of models and methods based on good evidence.

Teachers wanting an update on the best and latest research on how the reading brain works, how children learn to read, what can go wrong in this process, and what going digital might mean for the future of literacy should come to one of the upcoming seminars with Prof Maryanne Wolf in Brisbane (2nd September 2016), Sydney (7 Sept) or Melbourne (9 Sept).

I am busy organising a super-duper trade display of lesser-known good teaching resources for the Melbourne session, including Prof Wolf’s own program RAVE-O, which participants can browse and find out more about during the session breaks. Hope to see you there.

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I have a quick workshop activity which gives adults a small taste of what it’s like for children beginning to learn to use a new alphabet.

I’ve decided to make it available to my gentle blog-readers to try out with colleagues, at workshops etc., to help make the point that learning new, abstract symbols is very difficult.

You can download the worksheets for this activity here. The pictures are free-to-use ones from the internet, thanks so much to the generous photographers.

The activity takes about five minutes. There are four tasks:

Task 1

Filling gaps in sentences by listening to them being read aloud and copying the relevant high-frequency words. Five-year-olds are often asked to memorise the 12 “golden” words used (a, an, be, I, in, is, it, of, that, the, to, was) as one of their first literacy tasks when starting school. Typically adults find they can do this task quickly and without having to think very hard.

Task 2

Completing 10 words by listening to each word, identifying the first sound and writing the missing first letter from a choice of three letters – “d”, “p” or “t”. This very simple phonics task is also quick and absolutely easy for adults.

Task 3

The same as Task 1, but in Wingdings. Suddenly what was a simple task becomes close to impossible for adults. The unfamiliar symbols just make the page look like gobbledygook, and they find it very hard to work out which word is which.

I hope this experience drives home the message that working with whole words is very hard if you aren’t familiar with at least the basic code used to write them.

Task 4

The same as Task 2, but in Wingdings. Adults can usually do this task fairly easily, though they have to put a little conscious thought into which letter represents which sound, and how to form it – it’s not fast and automatic like when using familiar symbols, and if the pictures were removed they would still struggle to read the words.

Activities like this teach useful information about sounds and their spellings, which after additional practice can then be applied to other words. The task does not assume prior knowledge beyond an awareness that words are made of sounds and letters are how we write them, and the ability to segment initial sounds.

I’ve made a Youtube video of my fourth-year Speech Pathology students, Nicky and Jess (thanks, Nicky and Jess!) doing this activity, so you can see it being done before trying it yourself. Here it is:

I hope this activity helps to encourage teachers and others working with literacy beginners and strugglers to postpone work on high-frequency words until children have learnt the basics of how to sound out simple words.

As Professor Anne Castles has pointed out in her recent Read Oxford blog post, sight word teaching should only be “targeted at children who can recognise letters and who have some grasp of the alphabetic principle. Teaching sight words to children who have not reached this stage – by encouraging them to identify words by their overall shape or by salient visual features – does not transfer to long-term benefits”.

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The ACARA media release on the latest NAPLAN data says, “compared with 2016, there is no improvement in average results across the country that is significant”.

Sigh. So many teachers working so hard to improve results, and still 10% of Australian kids are not meeting basic minimum standards. Add to that the many strugglers who didn’t even sit the NAPLAN tests. Sigh.

Teacher-blogger Greg Ashman writes, “The blame for this situation lies squarely with a widespread adherence to bad ideas“. Whole Language – the idea that literacy is “caught not taught” – was a massively bad idea, inculcated into almost our entire teaching workforce at university, but now thoroughly discredited.

What-works-in-education expert John Hattie even puts Whole Language on his pedagogical “disasters” list, see slide 11 here, whereas Phonics Instruction is on slide 21’s “winners” list.

However, the Whole Language pig still has not been put out to pasture where it belongs. Our literacy education brains trust simply applied a bit of phonics lipstick, changed its name to Balanced Literacy, and carried on much as before.

To finally put the Whole Language pig out to pasture, here are five things that need to happen:

1. Replace repetitive/predictable texts with decodable texts

The book-levelling system used widely in schools is still a Whole Language-based one. Its books for absolute beginners are repetitive/predictable texts, full of spelling patterns and word types that children are yet to be taught. Let me write an example book for you now, let’s call it “On The Farm”.

• p1. I can see the cows.
• p2. I can see the sheep.
• p3. I can see the chickens.
• p4. I can see the ducks.
• p.5 I can see the turkeys.
• p6. I can see the dog.
• p7. I can see the cat.
• p8. I can see the farm animals!

I detest such books, my fingers always itch to grab and bin them, especially levels 1-5. Not only are they unspeakably dull, but true beginners can only “read” them by guessing from the pictures. This gives children a false idea of how reading works, and encourages the habits of weak readers, not the habits of strong readers.

The nasty little book I just made up contains the following digraphs: ee, th, ow, ch, ur, ey, ar. What is a child still learning to recognise individual letters supposed to make of them?

Repetitive/predictable books belong in the recycling. They are harmful to many children.

Schools should replace repetitive/predictable books with decodable books, which start off with just a small number of sound-letter relationships and very short words, and then incorporate new sound-spelling patterns and word structures as these are taught.

I take my hat off to schools which have already replaced repetitive/predictable texts with decodables. Throwing out books is hard, and school budgets are always tight, but this a vital step that will prevent a lot of reading failure.

2. Directly teach both early and advanced phonemic awareness

Ideally, children should arrive at school with phonological awareness (awareness that words have structure, as well as meaning), and thus be able to clap or tap syllables, detect and generate rhyme, and identify the first sound in a word (e.g. Mum starts with /m/). The ones who can’t do these things are likely to need extra help learning literacy, and careful monitoring.

Once at school, children need to learn basic phonemic awareness, or awareness of the individual sounds (phonemes) in words, because phonemes are the things represented by letters and letter patterns in our spelling system. Children who can’t pull words apart into their component sounds (segment) will not be able to spell well. Children who can’t combine sounds into words (blend) will not be able to read well.

These skills need to be established in the first year of schooling. A number of useful strategies for teaching them well to young children feature in the new, free, online Sounds~Write Udemy course. It’s meant for parents, but there’s a lot in it that will be useful to early years teachers, therapists and other interested professionals too.

Decodable books can be used in blending instruction, along with other reading and word-building activities containing the sound-spelling relationships and word types that have been learnt. Working on spelling the same kinds of words targets segmenting skills, and my Workbook 1 and 2 samplers are free downloadable activities targeting segmenting too.

After children can blend and segment spoken words well, including words with consonant combinations, like ‘camp’ and ‘bench’ and ‘stop’ and ‘bring’, they need to develop advanced phonemic awareness. This is crucial to reading fluency, as it allows children to rapidly build the pool of words they can instantly, effortlessly recognise (via a process called orthographic mapping, which you can read all about in this excellent book by David A. Kilpatrick).

Advanced phonemic awareness involves being able to manipulate sounds in words, for example taking the “l” sound out of the spoken word “helm”, the “s” sound out of “boast”, replacing the sound “s” in “west” with “n”, or doing Spoonerisms (Harry Potter – Parry Hotter etc). It’s a necessary skill in reading word attack when dealing with spellings which represent more than one sound e.g. when the word “dream” changes to “dreamt” we take out the /ee/ as in “sea” and replace it with an /e/ as in “head”.

Most kids develop advanced phonemic awareness as part of the process of learning to decode and encode words, but some children focus too much on letters and not enough on sounds, and benefit from active teaching in this area.

I like to teach advanced phonemic awareness by building and changing words with my moveable alphabet, working from spoken words to spellings (e.g. “make stick, now change it to slick, now change it to slim, now change it to swim” etc) because I worry about missing opportunities to link sounds to spellings. However, the irregularities of written English mean that once you get past “short” vowels you have to plan carefully, as (for instance) when you replace the “s” sound in “wrist” with “p”, you get “ripped”, and the letters no longer work.

There are stacks of one-minute phonemic awareness activities in “Equipped for Reading Success”, also by David A. Kilpatrick, but be aware that he has an American accent, so he can take the “s” out of “fast” and get “fat”, which doesn’t work in Australian or UK English. If you’re as old as me you might also like to drag out your old Rosner program, still available here.

3. Use a synthetic phonics teaching sequence

Teachers often can’t answer questions like “when does your school teach the spelling ‘igh’ as in ‘night'”, as this decision is left up to individual teachers, or year level groups of teachers.

This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, because it means that there is no simple way of knowing what has already been taught to each group of children and what hasn’t, or ensuring that all the main patterns are taught systematically. If a child can’t spell words with ‘igh’ as in night, is that just because they haven’t been taught yet? Or have they done it every year for three years, and still can’t remember it?

Each primary school needs a synthetic phonics teaching sequence, which should be the same one used in its decodable books. Examples are:

• the Little Learners Love Literacy sequence
• the Letters and Sounds/Get Reading Right/Pocket Rockets sequence
• the Jolly Phonics/SA SPELD books sequence
• the Sounds~Write/Phonic Books sequence
• the Phonics International sequence:

These ensure that all major spelling patterns are explicitly and systematically taught and reviewed in the first three years of schooling, both in reading and spelling tasks, and that spelling activities teach a pattern at a time to mastery, and don’t overload children with too many patterns at once.

Beyond this, it would be helpful if all schools had a clear sequence for teaching harder spelling stuff like lower-frequency consonant spellings, homophones, and word parts like prefixes, suffixes and Latin and Greek word roots/stems. These are the focus of my workbooks 6-9, free samplers of which include their contents pages, which might be useful in devising your own teaching sequence for these skills, if you don’t have one, and can’t buy/find one that suits you.

4. Scrap rote-learning of high-frequency word lists

Lots of the words on high-frequency word lists can be easily decoded once basic spelling patterns are learnt. Why on earth is any child being asked to visually memorise words like “it” and “in”, as per the “Golden Words”?

Most decodable books address the issue of high-frequency, irregularly-spelt words by including a few important words like “to” and “the” and “was” early in the sequence even though they include sound-spelling relationships not yet taught. The Little Learners books call these words “heart words”, Get Reading Right calls them “camera words”. Whatever you call them, high-frequency words with funny spellings are addressed in synthetic phonics teaching approaches. There is no need to memorise high-frequency word lists by rote.

Encouraging children to rote-memorise high-frequency word lists can lead to considerable confusion about sound-letter relationships. Teachers tell children in alphabet lessons that the letter S sounds like “s”, but in the Golden Words, the only sound represented by the letter S is “z” (in the words “is” and “was”) and there are no words in the Golden Words where the letter S is pronounced “s”. The only sound represented in the Golden Words by the letter F is “v” (in the word “of”). And so on.

5. Use current, evidence-based models of reading

Marie Clay, who said words should only be sounded out as a last resort*, is a guru to many literacy leaders in schools. However, her model of reading was a Whole Language one, and simply wrong. We do not decode words from context.

This means it’s time to take the multi-cueing/three-cueing model of reading off school pinboards and out of overheads and handouts, and put it in the recycling too. And most importantly, stop assessing and teaching according to this model.

Recycle your Running Records. They’re slow, subjective, and classifying and counting miscues is just a waste of precious time. The bizarre Whole Language idea that it’s better to misread “horse” as “pony” than “house” doesn’t even pass the pub test, much less stack up with the current reading science. There are fast, objective, free tests that do available here.

Current, evidence-based models show that word reading draws on knowledge of sounds (phonology), letters/spelling patterns (orthography) and vocabulary (semantics), and that the context processor is not part of the word reading “triangle” system. The following diagram is from p140 of the 2017 book “Language at the Speed of Sight: How we read, why so many can’t and what can be done about it” by Prof Mark Seidenberg:

Good readers read words accurately whether they are in proper sentences, gibberish sentences, or standing alone. Poor readers can’t, which is why they end up guessing and making lots of mistakes.

Reading for meaning of course involves more than just reading words, and scientific evidence on reading comprehension has consistently supported the Simple View of Reading:

Reading Comprehension = Decoding X Listening Comprehension.

If you want a recent scientific paper with references on the validity of this model, click here.

Reading comprehension combines one’s decoding skills and one’s listening comprehension. Learners who have weak decoding, and/or weak listening comprehension, will have weak reading comprehension. To work out what to do about that, it’s necessary to assess which part of the equation is weak:

• Is it just decoding? (dyslexia-type difficulties)
• Is it just listening comprehension? (hyperlexia, typically seen in kids on the Autism Spectrum, or kids with poor listening skills who’ve been taught to decode well)
• Is it both? (language delay or disorder).

Once the source(s) of the problem is/are identified, it’s possible to work out how to address it/them, through listening/language therapy and/or intensive systematic phonics.

I hope everyone worried about the latest NAPLAN results will ask people involved in early years education whether their schools use decodable books, teach both basic and advanced phonemic awareness, follow a synthetic phonics teaching sequence, skip rote-memorisation of high-frequency word lists, and are using models of literacy which stack up with the reading science. And if not, how and when this is going to change.

* Regarding the process of word identification, Marie Clay wrote: “[Beginning readers] need to use their knowledge of how the world works; the possible meanings of the text; the sentence structure; the importance of order of ideas, or words, or letters; the size of words or letters; special features of sound, shape, and layout; and special knowledge from past literary experiences before they resort to left to right sounding out of chunks or letter clusters, or in the last resort, single letters. Clay, M.M. (1998). An observation of early literacy achievement. Auckland, NZ: Heinemann. Quoted in Seidenberg, M: “Language at the Speed of Sight, 2017.

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La Trobe University and the Victorian Department of Education have this year collaborated to run workshops across Victoria about learning difficulties including dyslexia. The workshops have been available to teachers and other Department of Education staff.

The information from these workshops is now being made available free online via YouTube as webinars. Wow. Amazingly generous of both the University and the Department, since most professional development of this type and quality is paywalled. So thanks to all involved.

The webinars are presented by Dr Tanya Serry from La Trobe University, and the workshops on which they are based were developed with Professor Pamela Snow, Ms Emina McLean and Assistant Professor Jane McCormack also from La Trobe, and Dr Lorraine Hammond from Edith Cowan University in WA.

The webinars are the perfect length for after-school PD, at about 40-45 minutes each, here they all are. The last one won’t be available till October.  If using them, please express your appreciation to the people behind these webinars for so generously sharing their expertise publicly. Amazing and brilliant.

Webinar 1: Delving into Systematic Synthetic Phonics

Webinar 2 – Analysing Spelling Errors

Webinar 3 – Decodable, Authentic and Predictable Texts

Webinar 4 – Transitioning from Oral Language to Becoming Literate

The last webinar, Delving into Explicit Instruction, will be available after 8th October:

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On telly’s Today show last week, celebrated children’s fiction author Mem Fox talked about the importance of reading to children, something with which absolutely everyone agrees.

Mem Fox’s missionary parents took her to Southern Rhodesia as an infant. They were, she explains, “very keen on Australian books being read to us, and our reading Australian books”. TV hadn’t been invented, so she developed a love of reading. She thanks three years at drama school in London for her understanding of language and thus ability to write books. I suspect this training may also have contributed to her storytime drama skills.

All good. Then, about three minutes into the interview, I thought I heard Ms Fox say that young children are increasingly unable to communicate effectively using spoken language.

I did a double-take. I’m a paediatric speech pathologist. You’d think I’d know about this, if it were true. I don’t recall any mention of a general decline in young children’s ability to communicate at this year’s Speech Pathology Australia conference, or in any of the journals I’ve read lately.

I rewound the video, and Ms Fox’s exact words were:

“You know if children don’t have language, if they can’t talk by the time they get to school, and I know that will sound extraordinary, people will say ‘what, they can’t talk when they get to school?!’, if children can’t talk by the age of four, or can’t make themselves clearly understood by the age of four, and that is, increasingly, you know, happening, they can’t learn to read. If you can’t, you know if you don’t have language, obviously you can’t learn to read language. So reading aloud is very, very important for education.”

If anyone reading this knows of robust, scientific research showing a general decline in preschoolers’ oral language skills, I’d be very interested to hear of it. Until then, we can only assume that this is not actually factual.

Read three books a day to children to eliminate illiteracy?!

At 7.24 on the video clock, the interviewer says, “So, you believe that if every parent, or carer of course, read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to children in their care, we could eliminate illiteracy within one generation”.

Ms Fox replies, “I do believe that”, apparently blissfully unaware of how insulting this is to teachers. By this logic, their literacy-teaching work is irrelevant, because literacy is caught not taught. The many parents who faithfully read aloud to their children every day from infancy, but whose children did not learn to read at the expected time, might also find this insulting.

The science about this is entirely settled: Ms Fox is simply wrong. US public radio journalist Emily Hanford has recently produced some brilliant work explaining why, and what needs to be done about it. Please share her work with every teacher you know, it’s also relevant to Australia:

• Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read? (article and 52 minute audio documentary)
• What to do if your child’s school isn’t teaching reading right (article)
• Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way? (New York Times article)
• Why learning to read is still so hard (48 minute podcast)

“The Literacy Wars”, whatever they are

In her Today Show interview, Mem Fox goes on discuss what she calls “the Literacy Wars”. She says, “Some people want to teach reading in this way, which I find incredibly boring and putting off. Some people want to teach reading in this way, which can sometimes be too fuzzy and too warm, and you know, without, you know, strict enough teaching. There is a middle way. Nothing that we talk about after kids start school can be agreed upon, you know, people fight like mad about how to teach reading.”

Ms Fox doesn’t come out and say it’s phonics that she finds incredibly boring, but her meaning is unmistakable to anyone familiar with what the rest of the world calls “the Reading Wars”, and she explicitly bags out systematic, explicit phonics (and elevates the Cmabrigde Reading Hoax to the status of fact, see PS below for why it’s not) here, here and in her book Reading Magic.

Ms Fox says nobody disagrees about the importance of reading to kids, which is true. She fails to say that reading researchers actually can and do agree that the early teaching approach she calls boring – systematic, explicit phonics – produces the most skilled readers. Unfortunately, most universities still fail to teach teachers about this approach.

Six rhymes by age four = top reader by age eight?!

At 9:58 on the video clock, discussing (or, dare I say, marketing) her latest rhyming works of fiction, Ms Fox says, “the reason why rhymes are important is that if children know six nursery rhymes by the time they’re four, by heart, they’re usually in the top reading group by the time they’re eight. Because that’s how important learning to rhyme and predict is to learning to read. And people think ‘oh, it’s just nursery rhymes, who cares?’, but actually, you really do.”

Again, I scratched my head. I’ve read a lot of books and journal articles about how children learn to read, but have not previously been aware of a 6-rhymes-by-4, top-reader-by-8 statistic. Google Scholar isn’t shedding any light on it for me, either.

Yes, rhyming is part of phonological awareness, or awareness that words have structure as well as meaning. Good phonological awareness is important in learning to read, but once you start school it’s awareness of individual sounds in words – phonemic awareness – that matters most. Again, if anyone knows of research supporting Ms Fox’s six-nursery-rhymes statistic, I’m all ears, but until then I’ll just assume it’s made-up.

Not everyone lives in Ms Fox’s world

Not everyone lives in a nice middle-class world where every parent knows English nursery rhymes, can read and has access to lots of books. I worked for years with kids from public housing, mainly indigenous, refugee and migrant kids. Many parents have signed my permission forms with a cross, and I’m aware of Australia’s adult literacy statistics. So I know that many parents can’t actually read to their kids, because they can’t read. Ms Fox seems not to know this.

Ms Fox’s idea of a terrific “top reading group” necessarily implies a miserable “bottom reading group”, yet she doesn’t acknowledge that many, many kids from all walks of life simply cannot crack our spelling code without lots of explicit and direct phonics teaching, including access to carefully-sequenced decodable books (recently derided by education academics in The Conversation, but their arguments were quickly torn apart by Pam Snow and Greg Ashman).

In a fair system which respected children and teachers, this kind of teaching would start on the first day of school, because it is (in the words of researchers Catherine Snow and Connie Juell) “helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some”. In the hands of skilled teachers, it’s also not remotely boring.

I love Mem Fox’s children’s fiction like everyone else. Some of her facts, not so much.

P.S. In case anyone out there still thinks the Cambridge Reading Hoax is true, here’s internationally acclaimed reading researcher Professor Mark Seidenberg’s explanation of why everything it says is false, from his excellent book Language at the Speed of Sight:

PS2 Thanks to Laura McCormack and little Augie for being home watching the Today show when Mem Fox came on, and bringing this to my attention.

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I’ve been doing lots of assessment of my clients’ skills in the following areas lately:

• Receptive and/or expressive language
• Articulation
• Phonological awareness
• Phonological/auditory memory
• Rapid Automatised Naming
• Word and pseudoword reading accuracy and efficiency
• Spelling.

These allow me to identify problems in their reading and spelling systems, and work out how significant/severe these problems are, and what to do about them.

I use the robust, evidence-based Simple View of Reading (SVR) to guide my decision-making. A new, plain-English explanation of the SVR by retired US teacher Stephen Parker can be found on Pamela Snow’s blog.

Wherever possible, I use valid, reliable, standardised tests for assessment. However, I once administered a Running Record to a child with selective mutism, because she would talk to me, but not other adults at school (we were working on it). Her class teacher thus asked me to administer the assessment required by the school, which (sad face) used a multi-cueing model of reading and a text level gradient approach to reading assessment.

Running Records, like most widely-used book-levelling systems (LLI, PM, Reading Recovery, etc), focus on language meaning much more than language structure (speech sounds, their spellings and meaningful word parts), though language structure is the main basis of our writing system.

Running Records should be relegated

Running Records are based on the now-discredited multicueing/three cueing model of reading. They’re highly subjective, and take far too long to find out not much. I don’t know why any school is still using them in 2019, let alone why they’re still on my state’s Education Department’s website.

The Running Record I administered years ago didn’t tell me much about the child’s reading skills that I didn’t already know because I knew about her listening, speech, phonemic awareness and word-level reading. I could have almost completed the assessment form without listening to her read, except some of its questions came from Planet Multicueing, and made no sense to me. I did what I could, gave it back to the nice teacher, and heard no more.

The three cueing system and the four humours

Asking a speech pathologist or teacher who understands the current reading science to administer a Running Record is a bit like asking a modern doctor to assess the Four Humours.

The Four Humours were the four bodily fluids of ancient and mediaeval medicine – black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood – thought to influence temperament and health. They were thought to require balancing in amount and strength for good health, and surpluses or imbalances in the four humours were thought to affect not only health but also personality.

A modern doctor asked to assess the Four Humours would simply say, “that’s not how the body works, so I can’t do that”. They’d insist on using a scientifically-based model of health, and prefer objective assessment tools developed in accordance with this model: stethoscope, thermometer, blood tests and so on, not rely on their own observations, let alone prescribe the leeches, infusions and vomiting which made sense to doctors using Four Humours thinking.

Everyone now knows that the Four Humours aren’t how the human body works, but many of today’s teachers still don’t know that children do not learn to read words by using meaning, structure and visual cues. The three cueing system/multicueing model of word-level reading is still the basis of Running Records, and these are still widely used in schools.

You can watch someone administering an assessment along Running Record lines here:

First the child is told to read the book silently, and reminded to look carefully at the pictures, as “making connections between the text and illustrations is an important reading strategy”. The video does not say that children should be encouraged to sound out words they don’t instantly recognise, and discouraged from guessing words from pictures. Once words are identified accurately, pictures can be used to support story comprehension and enjoyment (the oral language part of reading), but should not be used as word identification crutches.

Next, the child is asked to summarise the story, and then read it aloud. The teacher ticks each word the child gets right on the scoresheet, telling the child any words he doesn’t know, and writing down the child’s errors. The teacher then asks the child some comprehension questions, some of which require inference and the application of general knowledge. Amusingly, the child in this video got the first, literal, supposedly-easiest question wrong, and the rest right.

The teacher then goes back through the form and codes and counts the child’s errors and self-corrections, and “in terms of whether they used meaning, whether they used structure or whether the child used the visual information system”.

Since reading scientists have shown that context and syntax play almost no part in accurate word identification, and the multi-cueing model on which this coding system is based has been debunked, this is a waste of precious teacher time.

Stanislas Dehaene (who will be a keynote speaker at the Language, Literacy and Learning Conference in Perth in April) gives a nice video explanation of how the brain actually learns to read here, and David Kilpatrick unpacks the psychological and educational research on this here.

The Running Record form then has a section for recording “Reading Behaviours Observed” which starts with a check box for “Concepts about Print established”. Concepts about Print means things like holding the book up the right way, turning the pages in the right direction and looking at the book not licking it. I’ve never met a school-aged child without a severe intellectual disability who doesn’t do these things correctly, so perhaps this is one of those educational hooray-everyone-gets-a-tick-for-something things.

There’s a check box for “recognised high-frequency words in the text”, although the form doesn’t seem to identify which words are the high-frequency ones, clarify how many of them the child must recognise before the box is ticked, or explain whether to count high-frequency words that are sounded out (i.e. identified) rather than being instantly recognised. On Planet Multicueing, they don’t know about orthographic mapping.

There is a check box for “Applied knowledge of letter-sound relationships to accurately decode some words”, but it’s unclear whether this box should be ticked for words the child reads correctly without having to sound them out, or just some (two? five? ten?) words for which the child can be heard saying individual sounds and then blending them (correctly?) into a word.

Further check boxes allow the assessor to subjectively evaluate “Strategies” such as “attending to meaning” and “searching for print details” as well as “fluency”, though as David Kilpatrick explains at 1:07:45 on the clock in the video here, “the lion’s share of your fluency is determined by your sight vocabulary”, and fluency is not really its own separate Thing (Dr Kilpatrick will be speaking at LDA seminars in Australia this coming August, details will be here soon).

What Running Records do not tell us

Running Records do not attempt to assess children’s phonological awareness. Poor phonological awareness is the most common underlying cause of reading problems, so this is quite an oversight. The version in the video above doesn’t even mention phonemes, it just refers to “visual” errors. There also seems to be nowhere on a Running Record for children’s articulation errors, though these are often a sign of phonological processing weakness.

A Running Record is not designed to tell us which phoneme-grapheme correspondences a child knows, although I can tell you from watching the child in the video read that he seems to be able to decode words with “short” vowels and basic consonant spellings with VC, CVC, VCC, CVCC and CCVC structures, knows about past tense -ed, open syllables with “long” vowels like “no”, “he” and “my”, and consonant digraphs “ck”, “sh”, “th”, “ss” and “ff”.

However, I could tell you that kind of thing from watching him read any book written for a child around his age. However, it doesn’t matter which book he reads, I won’t be able to tell you whether he knows all the graphemes and word types he’s been taught, unless I use an assessment specifically designed to sample them all, such as a word reading test.

The child in the video was also able to read some words containing other digraphs: “down”, “please”, “ride”, “bike”, “you”, “your”, “too”, “looked”, “said” and “little”, but further assessment would be needed to find out whether he can read unfamiliar words containing these digraphs. He didn’t know the digraphs “ay” in “today” or “al” in “walk”, but other common digraphs were not sampled.

The child read “back” as “dack”, then changed it to “duck” so he is still reversing some letters, and sometimes guesses words, in this case on the basis of sound not meaning. This suggests some Set for Variability skills, and he was also able to correctly work out the words “path” and “grass” after sounding them out with /a/ as in “cat” (Set for Variability is discussed from 32:22 on the video clock here). I don’t  know how to formally assess Set for Variability, but I wish I did.

Running Records tell us nothing about a child’s phonological memory or working memory, though these can have a massive impact on a child’s learning. Running Records also don’t help us understand kids’ oral vocabulary or Rapid Automatised Naming skills, though deficits in these areas are strong predictors of ongoing reading difficulties, more details are here.

Like many young school-aged children, the child in the video says “holded” not “held” and “hisself” not “himself”, so is still learning irregular past tense verbs and reflexive pronouns, but this kind of incidental linguistic information is not captured by the Running Record.

Finally, and most importantly, Running Records don’t more than a subjective comparison of a child’s skills with other children the same age. They don’t and can’t tell us, clearly and objectively, who is falling behind and needs intervention. This still requires teacher judgement, and if the reports I get from parents are anything to go on, many teachers are still condemning children to ongoing reading failure by saying “wait and see“.

Humour me

There’s a lovely Creative Commons emoticon version of the four different personality types thought to result from too much of each of the Four Humours:

If I wasn’t far too busy I’d make stickers of these saying “and don’t forget the four humours!” and make them available to readers of this blog to stick on all mentions of the Three Cueing System/Multicueing on school noticeboards, until the blasted things are all taken down and shredded. A kind of fun-though-going-on-a-bit-too-long form of BS Bingo, to keep our spirits up.

Tests I use most

Here are the tests I’ve been using a lot lately, with their age ranges, what they assess, and how long each one takes:

The recommended times on some of these tests are pretty generous. The actual testing part of the TOWRE-2 is two 45-second tasks, so it’s possible to do it in well under 10 minutes with a cooperative older child or adult with good oral language.

These tests give me a rich source of information about how far a client’s reading and spelling-related skills are behind their peers, what intervention they need, and whether they are likely to have long-term problems.

Most of these tests are expensive, clinical ones that can’t be used by classroom teachers, sometimes the test forms cost ~$10 each! However, the CC2 and other MOTIF tests are free and can be used by teachers, and the Articulation Survey is inexpensive and can be used by teachers.

Form A of the PAST and its instructions also seem to be freely available online, though I’d recommend buying the book Equipped for Reading Success (now available in Australia for $99.95 from Silvereye) because it contains all four forms, relevant theory and plenty of finely-graded phonological awareness activities.

I have suggested a few minor edits to the PAST author, Dr David Kilpatrick (did I mention he will be presenting seminars in Australia for LDA in August?), to make this test more relevant to Australian English, where deleting the “l” sound from the word “love” does not result in the word “of”. Fingers and toes crossed he can find time for this, and if anyone has time to go through his One Minute Activities and identify the Americanisms that don’t work in our accent, I’d be happy to share suggested changes to these here, so that people can make their copy of his book more relevant for use with Aussie kids.

My list of assessments that are more consistent with the reading science than Running Records is here, and please let me know if you have a good one that isn’t listed, so I can add it.

Thanks to a nice, frustrated teacher called Therese whose email prompted me to write this post, and to Heidi G for proofreading it.

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If you’re in Australia’s state of Victoria you might have seen yesterday’s article in The Age online about a new petition to remove Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention from our government schools. It appears to have been bumped by election coverage yesterday, but should be in the paper version of The Age today.

The petition is backed by three leading groups which advocate for children with learning difficulties: Dyslexia Victoria Support, Code Read Dyslexia Network and Learning Difficulties Australia.

I have signed this petition and am quoted in The Age in support of it, because children with learning difficulties need programs with solid, scientific evidence behind them.

Reading scientists now know that children simply do not learn to read by memorising whole words or guessing words from pictures, context and/or first letters. Children who seem to be doing this are actually taking the words apart and figuring out how the sounds and letters work, something many kids can’t do without explicit and direct instruction.

Sounding out right through words should simply not be reserved as a strategy of last resort, as Reading Recovery’s Dame Marie Clay recommended.

The US Reading League has an excellent video online in which the very witty Dr Steve Dykstra talks about how to understand scientific research and statistics, and unpacks the “gold standard” research on Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, and your school is using Leveled Literacy Intervention, start at 52.33 on the video clock. If your school still uses Reading Recovery, start at minute 1:03:43.

The DVS/CR/LDA petition to replace Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention is addressed to our state Education Minister, and you can read and sign it online here. It has just clocked up over 1000 signatures, so I hope many more readers of this blog will also sign and share it.

Struggling readers and their teachers deserve more effective programs.

Australians keen to learn about the most effective programs/approaches for struggling readers should attend seminars by US academic and experienced school psychologist, Dr David Kilpatrick, who will be the guest speaker for the Learning Difficulties Australia National Tour in August.

These seminars will be held in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Cairns and Sydney, click on the relevant link for a flyer. Dr Kilpatrick is the author of the very accessible Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, so I’m looking forward to getting him to sign my dog-eared copy when he’s in Melbourne.

If you are in/near one of the seminar locations and have access to a school staff room, please print a copy or two of the relevant seminar flyer and leave it/them on the table and/or noticeboard, or otherwise circulate it to people who might be interested, to help LDA promote the tour.

Please also book early to avoid disappointment, as Legendary Kerrie, the LDA admin person, tells me some of these seminars are filling fast.

PS I was just interviewed on radio 3AW about this issue, you can hear the interview here.

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