I wrote an opinion piece in The Age newspaper this week called “Premier’s Reading Challenge no fun for kids who can’t read“, arguing we need to close the gap between research and practice in early literacy education, so more kids can enjoy, not dread, the Premier’s Reading Challenge.

I hope it’s helped put another nail in the coffin of common, but extremely poor, literacy-teaching practices like rote wordlist-memorisation (the “magic words” etc) without regard to their structure, incidental-not-systematic phonics, and encouraging kids to guess words from first letter, sentence structure and context/pictures.

I hope it also helps kill off the idea that reading is natural, and replace educational blah-blah about reader identity and teacher literacy philosophy with more interesting discussions about what science tells us about how to best teach reading.

I’m sorry they didn’t include my link to Emily Hanford’s great “Hard Words: why aren’t kids being taught to read” audio documentary, but otherwise happy with it, especially the mention of David Kilpatrick’s seminar on 19 August at Melbourne Town Hall (have you signed up yet? He will also speak in Perth and Cairns, and Sydney and Adelaide, but they’re booked out).

Of course letters to the editor appeared the next day disagreeing with me. People who agree with something they read in the paper don’t generally rush to write to the editor. Editors don’t usually give a right of reply to these letters, so I’m giving myself one here.

A couple of the letters will have made many teachers cringe for their profession. Their authors seem blissfully unaware of the work of researchers like Marilyn Jager Adams, Stanislas Dehaene, Maryanne Wolf, Mark Seidenberg, Louisa Moats, David Kilpatrick, and Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle and Kate Nation.

It’s kind of embarrassing that there are still teachers out there defending ideas and approaches reading researchers have long shown are bunkum. But here’s one letter:

Like a zombie that just won’t die, the common “three strategies” practice she describes (usually called the “three-cueing method” or “multicueing”) has no scientific basis. It’s a great way to teach the habits of weak readers, not strong readers.

It’s based on the always-dumb, half-baked idea that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game, rather than a precise, skilled, learnt behaviour.

It’s hard to know what to say when someone succinctly describes something you’ve called poor practice, calls it “common practice” and then asserts that the poor practice you’ve described does not occur in schools. Since this letter was published on World Emoji Day, I think I’ll just say

Also (oh kill me with a spoon), a “digraph sound” is not a Thing. Can teachers of reading please be given a basic grasp of phonics terminology?

I checked the Premier’s Reading Challenge rules, and can’t find any mention of it being OK for kids to count books they’ve listened to someone else read, not read themselves. Maybe you can.

I hope what I write doesn’t just drive literacy teachers who aren’t interested in the science of reading to despair. I hope it drives them to retirement. People who aren’t interested in the science of teaching reading should not be teaching reading.

Here’s another letter from a Dr Jennie Duke of the Literacy Alliance Group. I have never heard of this group, so I googled it. Sadly, Google seems not to have heard of it either.

Dr Duke clearly hasn’t sat through a whole-school, waste-of-time Drop Everything And Read session during the Premier’s Reading Challenge as I have, watching kids pretend to read books that are simply too hard for them, to save face with their peers.

A third letter argues meaning comes first, and reading is “a naturally acquired acquisition”.

I’m not sure why the meaning-first brigade are so shy of asking kids to do important but hard work. As Stanislas Dehaene explained to us at the Language, Learning and Literacy conference earlier in the year, learning to read is at first very effortful, but if you don’t put in the effort to build the reading circuit linking vision and language in your brain, you’ll read poorly.

Building this reading circuit is a lot harder for some kids than others. Quality books, a smattering of phonics tricks and a focus on meaning are not going to cut it for the kids who currently inhabit the long tail of literacy under-achievement, and aren’t going to permanently arrest then reverse our medium-term measurable decline in reading standards.

Happily, we now seem to be getting a bit of leadership from the International Literacy Association regarding the place of systematic, explicit phonics in early literacy teaching. Here’s their 2019 brief on the topic, which asks:

I hope this leadership helps ALEA, PETAA and the AARE bloggers catch up.

Also, happily for me, the Age letters editor did publish a letter supporting my article:

Thanks, Jan!

I’ll give the last word to another letter submitted to the Age editor by Dr Tanya Serry of La Trobe University, but not published, which I think deserves wider circulation, and again my thanks:

Kate Finlay and Carol Marshall (letters 17 Jul 2019), in response to Alison Clarke’s previous letter, both describe ‘methods’ for reading instruction that do not align with the empirical evidence.

Goodman’s Psycholinguistic Guessing Game; which includes visual strategies among others, has long been discredited by advances in Cognitive Psychology research.

Systematic instruction in Phonics, as noted by Alison Clarke, essentially enables children to ‘crack the alphabetic code’ and is far more intellectually rigorous than teaching children ‘tricks’ with various letters of the alphabet.

Further, in support of Alison Clarke’s support for explicitly-taught systematic phonics, anyone who reads the scientific evidence on teaching children to read, will find clear statements that phonics alone will never be sufficient. It is now well-established that phonics must be embedded into a comprehensive program alongside instruction in phonemic awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary and oral language comprehension.

In light of the very recent ‘Short-Changed’ report by Buckingham and Meeks, who meticulously and objectively documented widespread shortcomings about the preparation of teachers to teach reading, we should all take heed of the vast amount of high-quality empirical research available to us all about how best to teach all children to read and to support those who struggle.

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American Public Media journalist Emily Hanford has made some accessible, powerful and widely-discussed documentaries about the gap between reading science and classroom practice in the US. It’s a gap that also exists here in Australia, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

If you haven’t listened to her documentaries yet, please make the time to do so. You can click on the pictures below to access each one.

She started in September last year with this:

In October 2018, she followed up with this:

She also wrote a New York Times opinion piece entitled “Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?”

My apologies to blog subscribers who missed these till now. I circulated them on social media but was too stupidly busy with my new office and sick mother to write a blog post about them.

In January this year, on National Public Radio, Emily made:

In March came this video interview called What Teachers Should Know About the Science of Reading:

Emily’s most recent, again brilliant contribution to aligning teaching with reading science in a pro-teacher, pro-equity way, is this:

I very dare you to get to the end of this documentary and not be gobsmacked by “Father of Whole Language” Ken Goodman’s extraordinary comment “My science is different”.

Goodman shows he is simply not interested in the mountain of scientific evidence contradicting his theory-and-observation-based ideas about how children learn to read, yet his ideas are still the basis of the “three-cueing system” approach to teaching reading that’s still widely used.

The game is up, the facts are out, and thanks to Emily Hanford and APM they’re in a free, accessible and easily digestible format. Please share them with every teacher, parent and other person who might be able to help get a more scientific understanding of how to teach reading into our education system.

I don’t enjoy having to spend a lot of my day undoing damage caused by well-meaning, hard-working teachers who were taught half-baked “my science is different” ideas at university and by “meaning-first” educational consultants. And I’m sure that (as the US Reading League people say) when teachers know better, they will do better, and so will their students.

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I was glued, green-eyed to Twitter a couple of weeks ago for tweets about the US Reading League’s conference, wondering whether Greta Thunberg and the polar bears would forgive me if I planted 40 trees before I flew to their conference next year (global overheating freaks me out even more than education’s research-to-practice gap).

Excellent local linguist-teacher-blogger Lyn Stone attended the conference, and you can read her reports on it here:

• A rising tide lifts all boats Part One and Part Two
• Hey dumbass! The marketing problem in the Reading Wars

The latter report concerns a presentation by Psychologist Steve Dykstra, who I’ve been nagging LDA folk to invite on a speaking tour of Australia. He makes incisive, witty contributions to the Spell-Talk listserve, and I nearly choked laughing at his critique of the “gold standard” research on Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery at the 2018 Reading League conference. This video is still online, and though I know I’ve shared the link before, it bears repeating. He expertly skewers the LLI research at 52.33 on the video clock, and the Reading Recovery research at 1:03:43.

If Steve Dykstra’s presentation at this year’s conference was filmed, it’s not online yet, but I’ll be watching out for it on the Reading League YouTube channel. According to Lyn, he says “We don’t need better science. We need better marketing. And the worst marketing plan ever, was to alienate teachers by approaching them with an attitude that screamed, “Hey dumbass!”’

This is timely because lately, people have been writing some really dumb things about explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics, and the model of reading which underpins it, the Simple View of Reading. It’s difficult to critique content in a way that prevents anyone from extrapolating the criticism to the authors, but such content promotes poor teaching practice, which damages children, and silence is too easily interpreted as agreement. So without casting any personal nasturtiums (yes, I’m from the same town as Kath & Kim) let’s look at a couple of recent articles.

Give your eye muscles a workout

A recent online article by a US Reading Recovery teacher called Gen (like Cher and Madonna she gives only one name) entitled M is Not For Picture Cues says: “The simple view of reading maintains that accurate decoding leads to comprehension”. This is simply not true.

The article goes on: “The complex view of reading asserts that readers use decoding and other sources of information in a text in order to understand during reading.” So Gen hasn’t understood the whole point of the Simple View – to explain how decoding and language comprehension work together to produce reading comprehension.

She writes that balanced literacy contains systematic phonics instruction, “moving from the smallest to the largest phonemes over time”, so she doesn’t know what a phoneme is. She defends teaching kids to guess words from pictures as “a brief step in a continuum of complex word solving skills”, though in current models of reading, context is not involved in word identification, and this strategy directs a child’s attention away from the words they’re trying to read (click here for more on this from Reading Rockets).

Gen writes, “context is meant to receive the message of what has been read, not to solve the word” then contradicts herself with “young readers do use information from pictures because they are new to this! They don’t know how to make sense of the squiggles on the page yet”.

Closer to home, Australian education academic Misty Adoniou has written an online opinion piece for an English Language teaching audience, to which Prof Pamela Snow has written an excellent response. Dr Adoniou selectively quotes statistics, and claims that in synthetic phonics teaching “word meaning is considered irrelevant – even a hinderance (sic) – to initial instruction” and “involves teaching the children to read ‘nonsense’ words, like ‘flug’ or ‘pob’. I’ve been a dreadful phonicator for years, but only use pseudowords for assessment, and regularly check students know possibly-unfamiliar vocabulary.

Dr Adoniou goes on to allege that for English Language Learners “a synthetic phonics approach is particularly harmful…exclusionary and possibly racist” as “non-native regional variances are given a fail”. Warming to this emotionally-charged topic, she continues, “The student’s first language competencies, their English language comprehension all count for nothing – what counts is the pronunciation of anglocentric sounds”.

This suggests that Dr Adoniou hasn’t read Mark Seidenberg’s important book Language at the Speed of Sight, which devotes considerable attention to the issue of minority dialects. Obviously she hasn’t seen my well-worn copy of Learner English, or watched me research the phonology of Somali, Tigrinya, Rohingya, French and other learner home languages as part of preparing their intervention, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who does this. Perhaps she’ll next write an article for a nationalist publication calling synthetic phonics (gasp) un-Australian.

Perhaps this is a marketing conversation

In M is Not For Picture Cues, Reading Recovery Gen rebrands what US journalist Emily Hanford (hurrah!) calls balanced literacy with a phonics patch as “the complex view of reading”, implying the Simple View of Reading is simplistic.

My initial reaction was, “Simple and complex are both loaded terms, but this is not a marketing conversation, so cut out the spin. Your teaching approach is based on observing skilled readers, imagining what they are doing, ignoring what science shows they are actually doing, and conflating experts with novices. The Confused View of Reading, more like.”

But actually, if Steve Dykstra is right, maybe this IS a marketing conversation. If you ignore what advocates of the teaching status quo are saying, and listen to how they’re saying it, it often sounds more like marketing or campaigning than rational argument. Unsubstantiated assertions. Loaded, emotive language. Reassurance to supporters. Appeals to status.

To counter this and close the gap between research and practice, we probably do need to get better at marketing what scientists know about reading, and campaigning for the teaching methods that flow from this knowledge, in a positive, appealing, pro-teacher, pro-social-justice way.

The Reading League to the rescue again. Another of their great videos features Dr Jan Hasbrouck, and is called “The Science of Reading: An Overview”. If a teacher role model prototype existed, she could be it. She’s warm, she’s funny, she’s articulate yet accessible, and she’s on team science! I suggest you skip the chat at the start, and watch from 4.45 on the video clock.

The highlight for me is at 38.17, where Dr Hasbrouck quotes neuropsychologist Jack Fletcher on the importance of teaching children to read: “What teachers need to understand is that they are doing brain surgery by instruction. They are changing how these brains work, not the structure of the brain, but permanently changing the function of the brain. That’s what powerful instruction does, rewires the brain, for language, for reading, for literacy activities”. If that can’t be used to market reading science to teachers, I don’t know what can.

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After my last blog post about the new Reading Eggs – Fast Phonics program, its activity that looked exactly like a Nessy activity suddenly got new graphics. Then someone asked me why I’m not a fan of the original Reading Eggs program when it includes a lot of phonics, so I decided to take another look.

With hundreds of new COVID-19 cases daily (yeek) and a new face-masks-in-public rule, my state is heading back into another protracted period of home-based learning, probably including lots of e-learning. I want children to use programs that maximise their chances of successfully learning to read and spell.

Is Reading Eggs from the ABC?

I used to think that Reading Eggs was owned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, because it uses the ABC logo.

Incorrect. Reading Eggs is owned by a company called Blake e-learning. It uses the trusted ABC name and logo in Australia under a retail partnership with ABC Commercial. The Reading Eggs site visible outside Australia, https://readingeggs.com, has no ABC logo (it quickly redirects Australians to the Australian site).

The ABC Commercial website says, “As an iconic, trusted brand, we are the only Australian distributor equipped to maximise the rights and opportunities across all product categories to help drive your business.” As a member of Friends of the ABC I was pretty surprised at that.

How should early reading and spelling be taught?

Beginning readers/spellers need be told from the very start that spoken words are made of sounds, which we write with letters. This seems obvious to literate adults, but is not at all obvious to young children, or many older learners. I once told a smart, illiterate teenager who’d had ten years of Australian schooling this fact, and he asked: “Why didn’t anyone tell me that?” (if you don’t know why, read journalist Emily Hanford’s reports or watch/listen to her recent PATTAN network talk here).

The sounds in our speech are invisible, quick and smoosh into each other, so splitting them up in order to spell them is hard. English is a mishmash of languages, warped over time (the wonderfully nerdy History of English podcast has details), so our writing system relates 44 speech sounds to 26 letters using five different types of logic:

1. One sound can be written with one letter.
2. One sound can be written with two, three or four letters e.g. sh, ou, dge, augh.
3. Most sounds are written more than one way e.g. out, cow, drought.
4. Some spellings represent more than one sound e.g. out, you, touch, cough, soul.
5. Meaningful parts used to build longer words often have special spellings e.g. er, ed, ly, al, est, ous, chron.

Reading and spelling software for young beginners should stick to the simplest logic (#1). It should focus on teaching children to break up spoken words into sounds and write them with letters, and read words by saying a sound for each letter then blending the sounds together.

Like all good systematic, explicit, synthetic phonics programs (see examples) this software should start with just three to five sounds, represent them with single letters, and teach kids to use them to spell and read little words e.g. am, at, it, sat, sit, sis, mat and perhaps names like Sam, Sim, Tam and Tim.

Note that the words “is” and  “as” don’t follow logic #1, as their last sound is /z/ (logic #4). Including them might confuse some children and undermine logic #1, so if they’re included they should be explained e.g. “at the end of words we often say /z/ for this letter”.

Extra sounds and their spellings should then be gradually, explicitly, systematically introduced and practised to mastery in short words (two or three sounds). Words can then be made longer e.g. with two consonants together as in “clip” and “tent”, then three as in “split” and “helps”, as consonant combinations can be quite hard to segment and blend.

This gives beginners a solid foundation for learning the additional sounds and remaining logic and patterns of our complex spelling system.

How does Reading Eggs stack up?

Reading Eggs offers a free trial period, so anyone can sign in and see the following things for themselves. It first introduces “the sound m, like in mouse” and presents the lower case letter m for children to click on to hear /m/ (I’ll put sounds in slash marks). There’s just letter m at first, and then children must discriminate it from two other letters. There’s no need to link sounds and letters in this activity, so it can be done using visual memory (not the kind of memory used in reading, see this blog post).

The program then asks “which picture starts with the /m/ sound?” and there are two pictures on screens e.g. “moss” and “sat”. I pretended to be a child without any awareness of sounds in words, and answered randomly. When I got it wrong, there was a “boing” sound with zigzags on the screens and I was told to “try again”. When I got it right, a cartoon character said a (less interesting) “yes”. No matter how many times I got it wrong, no help was offered. Eventually, thanks to having a 50-50 chance, I fluked it and went up to the next level.

I was then asked to “find /m/ in these words”, and printed words containing the letter “m” appeared the screen, but the words were not spoken, so again visual memory was all I needed. The words included digraphs (“moon”), split vowel digraphs (“time”) and two-syllable words (“metal”), examples of spelling logic #2 and #4.

When I clicked randomly I was told to “try again” till I eventually fluked enough correct answers. There was a song about words with “m” in them. The words flashed on screens with the letter m in a contrasting colour. To preliterate children, they probably look like chicken scratchings.

Next I was told to “complete the dot to dot to make the letter”, and there were numbered dots on the screen in roughly this layout:

I pretended I hadn’t learnt my numbers yet, and clicked randomly. I got three “boing” sounds and three red crosses on the screen, and then was asked “again?”. This happened no matter how many times I got it wrong. When I clicked on the dots in numerical order, the lower case letter “m” was filled in between the dots, and I was asked to do it faster. I hope a handwriting expert can tell us in the comments whether this sort of numbered-dot-clicking is a good way to teach early letter formation.

Next came a 6×6 letter grid with six copies of the letter “m” in it, in slightly different fonts, and including visually similar letters like “n”, “h” and “w”. I was told to click on /m/. When I made mistakes I got red crosses and “boing” sounds, and after three errors was asked “again?”, but the game did not adjust to my confusion by reducing the number of choices, providing hints or otherwise helping me.

I was then shown a letter “m” and told “This is the letter em, it makes the sound /m/’. Capital em looks like this (M), it also makes the sound /m/”. Preliterate me wondered why we have two letters for the same sound, but this wasn’t explained. A 6X6 grid like the previous one appeared, this time with capital letters, and again if I couldn’t find the M’s, the task was not simplified, I just went round and round being asked “again?” till I fluked it.

Next I was shown a letter “m” in a book and asked to click on the picture that begins with /m/. With only two pictures presented at a time, I had a 50-50 chance. The picture names were not spoken unless I clicked on the speakers next to them, and when I made three mistakes I had to go back to the start. There was no slowing down or stretching out of spoken words, or other explicit assistance with making the connection between the sound in words and the letter.

Next I was shown a screen arranged like this, and asked to drag the words to the pictures:

So far in this program kids have only learnt one letter, so can’t read the words, but that doesn’t matter because you just click on the words and they’re spoken, so all you need to do is match spoken words to pictures. You can just ignore the written words, and since reading them requires logic #2 (moon, mess, mice) and #3 (/s/ as in mess, mice), probably that’s a good thing.

Next there was a book with a different word starting with “m” on each page, including words with vowel and consonant digraphs, consonant blends and two syllables, and a total of 15 different sound-spelling relationships, some based on logic #2 (ey as in monkey and money, oo as in moon, ou and se as in mouse) and logic #4 (o as in money, monkey, mop; n as in man, monkey).

This type of book teaches preliterate kids to “read” by looking at first letters, pictures and guessing words. This is reading-like behaviour, but should never be confused with reading. So far only one sound has been taught, so kids aren’t yet equipped to start reading.

Next, the sound /s/ and letter “s” are introduced in much the same format. There is letter identification and matching, spoken word to picture matching (including the three-syllable word “spaghetti”), and a book about “s” with 23 different sound-spelling relationships involving logic #1, #2, #3 and #4.

In the third level I am invited to “Click on the word I” (my italics) and the capital letter “I” appears, first by itself and then with two other capital letters. Then I’m told I’ll be shown “the sound ‘am’ like in ‘clam'” (my italics). So this activity introduces two extra levels of word analysis – rimes (mislabeled sounds) and whole words. Preliterate me wondered why “I” is called a word, when it has only one letter, while “am” is called a sound, when it has two letters.

Next I was told to click on “am”, first by itself and then with distractor items like “xi” and “lu” on bowls of sugar cubes (Reading Eggs has also offered me cakes and marshmallows, so it’s not from the I Quit Sugar brigade).

Then I am asked to “click on the picture which has the am sound in it”, and pictures offered include “dam”, “ham” (which lots of people don’t eat), “lamb” and “stamp” (the latter being especially hard for little kids to discern the “am sound” in, as it’s not at the start or end of the word).

Then I’m shown the sentence “I am Sam” and asked to click on each word, after which the words are scrambled and I am asked to click on them again. Then I’m asked to “complete the dot to dot to make the letter”, though it doesn’t say which letter. It turns out to be a capital I. Preliterate me wonders why they’re now calling it a letter, not a word.

So far, Reading Eggs seems to be a mixture of initial, letter-of-the-week type phonics, picture-guessing and memorising whole words. In the next activity I’m asked to “say each sound and make the word” and shown how to blend “a” and “m” into “am”. This happens once only, and then I’m told “now it’s your turn”, and the visuals repeat, but not the sounds. The same thing happens for the word “Sam”. Then “a” and “s” (/s/) are blended to make “as” pronounced /az/. Nobody explains the sound change.

Next, lower case letter i is given its letter name (“I”), which you’ll recall was earlier taught as the “word” for upper case letter I. I’m asked to find six of them in a grid, but when I get to the grid I’m told to “click on /i/” (the “short” sound).

Sorry, but I really can’t justify spending any more of my time looking at a program that I am not going to recommend to anyone.

If you’d like my recommendations for early literacy iPad apps for little kids, see this blog post. Several of them have versions on other platforms, including Graphogame, Phonics Hero, Nessy and Reading Doctor.

I don’t know who advises our national broadcaster on the content of its early literacy education videos, but I find them pretty underwhelming.

Please don’t show children in your care the Learn A Word series on ABC iView. It teaches children to rote-memorise the appearance of words, recite letter names, and “take a photo with your eyes” of words.

The sounds in words (phonemes) aren’t even mentioned, though awareness of these sounds is the glue needed to make letters and written words stick in memory.

The Learn A Word videos first say “Let’s all learn a word” and a written word appears on the screen. The first word is “after”.

The video script goes like this:

“After. This word is after. Can you point your finger at the word after?

Now use that finger to write with me. Around and down, up and down, around and straight down, then across, from top to bottom then across. Start in the middle then back around, down, up and over. Ay eff tee ee ar. After. We did it! Let’s say it together. After!

Can you write it slowly? Ay eff tee ee ar. Can you say it quickly? Ay eff tee ee ar. Great work!

I can use it in a sentence: After lunch I like to read a book

Take a photo with your eyes and remember this word: After

You just learnt a word!”

Then there is a pause, a new word is presented (the next word is “again”) and the whole thing repeats with much the same script. Well, I haven’t watched them all, as that would make my head explode with frustration, but I’ve watched quite a few, and they’ve been highly repetitive.

Even one-syllable, entirely sound-outable words like “up”, “at”, “it”, “if”, “on”, “get”, “run” and “from” are given this treatment. So are words with common two-letters-for-one-sound (digraph) spellings, like “them”, “good”, “boy” and “say“. Nobody points out that two letters represent one sound in these words, because nobody even mentions sounds.

The videos explicitly encourage a visual whole-word-memorisation strategy, e.g. for the word “it”, the video says: “put it in your head and say it for when you need it. It comes in handy all the time. It is a great word. It.” Here’s how this is illustrated:

Occasionally children are encouraged to write words in the air, on their hands, arms, feet or the floor, very small or very big, very slowly or very fast. There’s music, pictures, and occasional giggling and sound effects.

Two-syllable words, and words with tricky spellings like the Greek-origin “ch” in “school” and the no-longer-pronounced Old English “w” in “two” get the same treatment. There’s no phonics teaching sequence, no patterns, nothing that would make sense to reading scientists, just rote visual memorisation, over and over.

I wish someone responsible for kids’ content at the ABC would read or listen to Emily Hanford’s reports, understand that a mountain of scientific research shows that we don’t learn to read by visually memorising words, and produce better content for Aussie kids. Maybe ABC presenter Dr Norman Swan can be asked to take this up, as he’s the patron of AUSPELD. Learn A Word on iView is simply not up to the ABC’s usual high standards.

Someone recently asked me why I’m not a fan of the phonics English mini-lessons on ABC iView. They seem to me to demonstrate what American Public Media journalist Emily Hanford calls “The Phonics Patch”. Rather than designing a literacy-beginners curriculum to systematically and explicitly teach sound-letter relationships to automaticity, a Whole Language/meaning-first teaching approach is supplemented with a few phonics activities, and rebadged as Balanced Literacy.

Title and learning intention

The title of ABC iView’s mini-lesson 16 (you’ll find it here if you scroll down: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/mini-lessons-english) is “Decoding words by segmenting individual sounds”. But segmenting is what we do to spoken words, in order to spell them. When you’re decoding, you start from written words, and must figure out the sounds and blend (not segment) them. So the title doesn’t really make sense.

The stated learning intention is to break words into individual sounds to read them. This makes about as much sense as the title. Is the learning intention talking about spoken words, or written words? It’s hard to know.

This is a systemic problem

The teacher in the video seems like a nice woman whose students probably adore her, and who teaches phonics in the way that many teachers have been taught to teach it. Typical initial teacher education courses focus on language meaning and don’t teach teachers much about the language structure which is the basis of our writing system (sounds, spelling patterns, meaningful word parts), so unless teachers learn this during a placement at a school with strong phonics teaching, or do inservice training after graduation, it’s hard for the typical teacher to teach phonics well.

This problem is systemic, and both teachers and students are being badly let down by the system. So please don’t interpret any of the following as personal criticism of the lovely, otherwise-skilled teacher in the video, or teachers generally. As the good folk at the US Reading League say, when we know better, we do better.

There seems to be no phonics teaching sequence

The video introduces children to three important words: segmenting, blending and digraphs. But saying you’re going to teach “blending” is a bit like saying you’re going to teach “riding”. Riding what? A skateboard? A bicycle? A horse? Two-sound words like ‘in’, ‘up’ and ‘at’ are a lot easier to blend and segment than four or five sound words like “stop” or “slips”, and English syllables can have up to seven sounds.

Which digraphs will be taught? English has dozens, it’s not possible to teach them all at once. It’s hard to figure out where the teaching in this video might fit into a systematic phonics teaching sequence.

Precise sounds and precise language matter

The teacher in the video sits at a whiteboard with plastic letters and nice Elkonin boxes on it, but the very first sound she says is mispronounced. She says “PUH” not a crisp, voiceless /p/. When teachers say consonant sounds sloppily/with additional vowel sounds, they make blending difficult for young children, as instead of blending /p/, /i/, /g/ they are blending puh-i-guh. When the video’s teacher blends, she doesn’t actually blend phonemes (p-i-g), she blends onset and rhyme (p-ig).

The teacher says “a digraph is two letters that make one sound”. Young children are literal creatures, so some will think this is literally true, and wonder if they should sit closer to the letters so they can hear them making sounds. Digraphs are two letters that represent one sound. I sometimes simplify this by telling young kids that sounds are invisible so we can’t really draw them, so we use letters to draw them instead. Using more accurate language makes for fewer confused children.

The teacher says that the first sound in the word “the” is voiceless /th/, which it isn’t. “The” starts with voiced /th/. I’m starting to wonder if this teacher has been taught what all the phonemes in our dialect of English are. Also, if this lesson is introducing the concept of digraphs, probably “th” (whether pronounced as in “then” or “thin”) is not the best one to start with, as lots of five-year-olds can’t say these sounds yet, or hear the difference between them and /f/ and /v/. That’s why they cutely say things like “Fank you” and “Can you help me wif vis?”.

How to spoil storytime

The next section of the video I found frankly bizarre. The teacher starts fluently reading a fun story book which contains two and three-syllable words, vowel digraphs and trigraphs, doubled consonants, contractions and other words that are hard for beginners. Then she randomly stops, just as the story is getting going, and pretends not to be able to read the word ‘stop’. She says “I’m stuck on a word. I’m going to segment (??) out the sounds, /s/, /t/, /o/, /p/, blend it together /st/, /op/, stop! Back up and reread…” and then she goes back to reading the story.

It turns out this teacher can fluently read almost all the words in the book, including the following quite hard words: believe, reason, simple, lose, quivering, loudly, Trevor, reply, ain’t, supper, faster, race, face, gobbled, biscuits, kibble, sausages, whoppers, munched, gnashing, choppers, swallowed, minute, something, know, guess, stuffing, notice, lucky, squeezed, tantrums, ceased, sometimes. She doesn’t notice that she misreads “wolfed” as “waffled”.

She pretends to get stuck on three more words, which she laboriously sounds out: stamp, thank, bin. These words are much easier than the many hard words she reads with ease. If any actual child read the way she does, they’d be a scientific curiosity. Is she trying to teach children that we only sound out easy words, and the hard ones you just have to know somehow? I counted 435 words in the story, and the teacher sounded out four of them. Is she trying to teach children that sounding-out is a relevant strategy for fewer than 1% of words?

If you like, you can try this embedded phonics strategy yourself next time you’re reading a lovely story to a young child. I very dare you. You’ll find that even polite, placid children will soon be giving you the “can you cut that out and just read the story?” evil eye. Highly recommended, if your jam is annoying kiddies and spoiling storytime.

If you’re teaching kids to blend sounds, then blend sounds (not bigger chunks)

Back at the whiteboard post-story, the teacher says we’re going to practise segmenting and blending, and to “get your mouth ready” (which is my suggestion for the subtitle of the Phonics Patch Movie, what does it even mean?). She says /p/ and most other sounds correctly this time (yay), but the words she’s chosen to study from the story are a mixture of levels of difficulty. Where C= consonant and V= vowel, they are a CVC, a CCVC, and two CVCC words, one of which includes a digraph. So if the kids can only manage three-sound words, the last three words are too hard, and if the kids can do four sound words, the first one is too easy. The digraph in the last word is a new one (ch), though children have had no chance yet to practice the first digraph she taught.

When the teacher blends the four-sound words, she does it by saying the onset then the rime, not by blending the individual sounds, i.e. she’s not blending /s/, /t/, /o/, /p/, she’s blending /st/ and /op/. She blends “best” as /b/, /est/ and “champ” as /ch/, /amp/. For kids with poor phonemic awareness, this will be mighty confusing. Where did “op” and “est” and “amp” come from? They weren’t the sounds she said.

A puppet sequence at the end of the video has the teacher saying individual sounds to read words, but then blending onsets and rimes, or for the word “munch” she says /m/, /un/, /ch/, but then having blended the /n/ with the vowel, she segments it out again to get “much”, and has to self-correct. At the end of this sequence we have yet another new digraph, “sh”, again before kids have had a chance to practise the ones taught earlier.

……

Will any five-year-olds learn how to blend or segment from watching this video? Will they be able to read or spell more words, including perhaps words with digraphs? Highly unlikely.

That might not matter to you if you’re used to teaching early reading via multicueing, repetitive texts, and rote-memorisation of high-frequency wordlists with an occasional phonics patch, or if you think getting 85% of children reading well enough is something to celebrate, as a PETAA spokesperson recently said. Or if you have no knowledge or experience of really powerful, effective phonics teaching.

People often ask my opinion of the THRASS (Teaching Handwriting, Reading and Spelling Skills) approach, which has long been used in many Australian schools. Till now I’ve mostly replied that I’m no expert on it, but I’m yet to see robust research evidence supporting it, and aspects of it have never made enough sense to me to invest in the training.

I once worked at a school in a tiny room where lots of THRASS resources gathered dust. Two huge, laminated THRASS wall charts kept overwhelming their blu-tack and falling on my head.

I looked through the resources, but was working mostly with kids with language disorder or intellectual disability, and they would have been overwhelmed by wordy, THRASS-chart-based spelling explanations like this or this (cognitive load!). The THRASS graphemes kit was too big for our room’s tiny table, and lacked example words and some of the graphemes I wanted, so I made my own.

I tried using a THRASS board game but found it a bit incomprehensible. I don’t like teaching program-specific jargon, like “phoneme fists” or “grapheme catch-alls”, and rapping THRASS chart words might be fun, but I’m not sure why else you’d do it.

The kids I work with often get sounds and letter names mixed up, and write “left” as “lft” and “car” as “cR”, so I like to focus on sounds and how we write them, not letter names. Letter names are vital to THRASS. Co-author Denyse Ritchie even commented on my recent blog post, “How can you spell a word without using letter names?… Spelling is identifying sound patterns and writing letter names”. I disagree.

However, I thought of THRASS as a systematic phonics program, so was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, and not make the good the enemy of the perfect. I even included it as an example phonics program in my (not in the least perfect) 2012 video How Phonics Got Framed.

Since then, I’ve worked with many struggling readers/spellers attending schools using THRASS. Most have had very poor phonemic awareness, and been very confused about how graphemes represent phonemes.

Sometimes parents showed me mind-bogglingly awful THRASS-based homework activities, like using the chart to generate multiple possible (but, um, incorrect) ways to spell a word e.g. boat, bote, bowt, bot. I have no idea whether these were officially-sanctioned THRASS activities or just a teacher being too creative, but it did make me wonder.

Rather than representing phoneme-grapheme relationships with complex, pre-printed charts like the THRASS one, I like Sound Walls, which children co-construct and refresh over time (click here for a 20-minute Sound Wall summary from PATTAN, or here for a longer video by Dr Mary Dahlgren). Teachers wanting static, readymade charts showing all the main phoneme-grapheme correspondences for use with older kids can find free ones on Debbie Hepplewhite’s Alphabetic Code Charts website, whereas the largest THRASS charts (for the floor) cost $770.

Call that a phonics scope and sequence?

You can download the THRASS scope and sequence here. I expected it to state which sound-letter/spelling relationships, word types and prefixes/suffixes are taught over time, like other explicit, systematic phonics programs.

However, the THRASS scope and sequence contains almost nothing to suggest it’s an explicit, systematic phonics program. It has objectives related to knowledge of the THRASSCHART and THRASSWORDS. There is reading and spelling of “Hotwords”: high-frequency words and words about numbers, days, months, time, seasons, colours, plus a group of “sizzle words” including “friend”, “because”, “people” and “birthday”. The Reading Skills section requires children to read and understand six THRASS books, a set of which are available in Big Book format from the THRASS website for $192.95.

The scope and sequence also has objectives like “articulate own name”, “distinguish between a letter and a drawing”, “identify what defines a word” and “understand and identify the IPA symbols“. THRASS still apparently teaches Aussie kids the old Mitchell and Delbridge IPA vowels, not the current Harrington/Cox/Evans ones (which I must learn sometime, sorry, Libby Clark, I still haven’t).

Only towards the end of the Language Knowledge page in the THRASS Scope and Sequence document does it mention things like plurals, prefixes and suffixes, tense endings (aren’t they suffixes?) and “common syllable groups”, whatever they are.

In the absence of information to the contrary, it seems that in THRASS, any phoneme-grapheme relationship can be taught (or not taught) whenever a teacher chooses.

Research, or the mysterious mimeographs

Google Scholar is widely used by researchers to search for scholarly literature. If you type “THRASS” into Google Scholar, the first item it finds is a 2010 article from the Psychology of Education Review describing a study comparing a Jolly Phonics intervention with a THRASS intervention for 54 school beginners in the UK, though 19 were excluded from the analyses for various reasons. The authors expected that THRASS-instructed children would be better at non-word reading and short-term memory performance, but found they weren’t. This research isn’t mentioned on the Australian THRASS website’s research page.

The second article offered by Google Scholar, again not on the THRASS website’s list, is a 2010 South African study of preservice teacher perceptions of THRASS. It found they felt confident about teaching reading but not spelling or creative writing, and that some teachers liked THRASS, but “the way the programme was introduced to the teachers led to most of them disliking it and not using it to its full potential. The training period was too short and confusing for the students to fully understand THRASS. Many students commented on the disorganisation of the THRASS programme when they went to teach it in the schools. While some students enjoyed using the resources, some of them commented on how expensive these were” (p273).

After that, Google Scholar offers:

• A single case study in the Malaysian English Language Teaching Association journal.
• A 2003 opinion piece by THRASS co-author Alan Davies, arguing that all teachers of English should learn THRASS.
• A 2006 description of THRASS used with 12 children in a journal briefly published by SPELD Victoria. It says “a major limitation of this research was the lack of a matched control group”.
• A 2007 article in the same, short-lived journal about the use of THRASS for 10 weeks with 19 Year 7 students in rural Victorian schools. 20 students at the same schools formed a matched comparison group, but the report doesn’t say what intervention they received, if any. So this research might only show that (as US Psychologist Steve Dykstra would say) THRASS is better than doing nothing, but almost everything teachers do is better than nothing.
• A NZ principal’s sabbatical report which enthusiastically describes a trip to Perth to meet with Denyse Ritchie and learn about THRASS.
• A Masters Thesis studying Grade 2 students in Pretoria also not mentioned on the THRASS website, which found THRASS improved students’ reading but not their spelling. I know I’m not supposed to care about this, but it contains a lot of typos.

I have searched for the other research listed on the THRASS website. The first article, Johnson (1995), seems not to be on the internet, but is referenced in the fourth article, Brooks (2002), which also references another article on the THRASS website list, Matthews (1998). The Brooks (2002) reference list gives the Johnson (1995) and Matthews (1998) details as:

Johnson, M. (1995). The Handwriting, Reading, and Spelling Sequence (THRASS): an Evaluation of a Two Term Pilot Study September 1994-April 1995. Sheffield: City of Sheffield Education Department. (mimeograph)

Matthews, D. (1998). Special Initiative to Enhance Literacy Skills in Bridgend, Spring 1998. Bridgend: Bridgend County Borough Council Special Needs Services. (mimeograph)

Mimeographs were things we had before photocopiers. At my 1970s primary school, we called ours the Roneo machine. It had purple ink and sometimes if you were good and finished your work quickly, you were allowed to go to the office and Roneo the newsletter.

The Brooks article is actually a series of influential articles called “What works for children with literacy difficulties – the effectiveness of intervention schemes”. The 2016 edition replaces the Johnson (1995) reference with a reference to “unpublished data supplied by Roger Norgate via Alan Davies”, and says of THRASS that “Data from an evaluation in Hampshire in 2005 also provide evidence of a useful gain in reading”, but not who did this evaluation or where to find its report. I don’t know why someone at THRASS doesn’t scan and pdf the Mathews mimeograph and upload it to their website so we can all read it, or why they are still referring to Brooks (2002).

The other items listed on the THRASS website research page are a single case study (Lovegrove 1998), an education department leaflet (DfES 2003), and articles with incomplete citations and no links which the internet seems to have never heard of, except from THRASS. Try putting them into a search engine yourself, perhaps you can find them. Please put any leads or links you find in the comments. Scientific research is supposed to be replicable, but you can’t replicate what you can’t read.

Oxymoron or phonics patch?

Learning Difficulties Australia stalwart Molly de Lemos recently dug Denyse Ritchie’s submission to the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy out of her archives for me. In this submission, Denyse succinctly summarises my problem with THRASS, by calling it “The phonics of Whole Language”.

She writes, “THRASS is a powerful phonics program that is the phonics of whole-language. THRASS supports whole language strategies as it allows teachers to use any book with a child and to explain any word, thus taking away the confusion that is caused by restrictive phonics practices.”

Under the heading “Phonics Danger”, her submission goes on, “The problem with ‘old/traditional’ phonic practices is that the strategies presented are very misleading, restrictive and unsustainable and actually set up both the learner and the teacher for failure. The child does not understand the process and the teacher has to revert to terms and inexplicable rules such as ‘sight words’, magic ‘e’ and ‘silent letters’, leading to confusion for teacher and student alike.”

Well, yes, rudimentary, outdated, initial/incidental “sounds of letters” phonics teaching does restrict teaching in this way. However, today’s well-designed synthetic phonics programs systematically teach all the speech sounds and their main spellings plus major affixes incrementally, without the need for complex jargon or rules, and with regard to key factors known to affect learning like cognitive load.

The THRASS website says THRASS assumes “that the learner is regularly helped to use picture, context and spelling-choice cues to read text, suitable books and environmental print.” Which sounds like classic Whole Language to me, but with THRASS providing what US journalist Emily Hanford calls a Phonics Patch.

Explaining English spelling to children

One of the key benefits claimed for the THRASS chart is that it allows teachers and parents to explain the spelling of any word, any time. Except if you’re out in the playground or the supermarket, sans chart, and are suddenly asked why the word “extinguisher” or “linguini” has a letter U not a letter W.

Spelfabet to the rescue! Take out your smartphone and google “spelfabet u as in extinguisher” or “spelfabet u as in linguini”, and you should get this page with lists of words with this phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Show your small linguistic inquirer that we don’t write “gw” in English, we write “gu” as in “penguin”, “language” and “iguana”, just as we write “qu” not “cw” or “kw”. Add that /k/ and /g/ are a voiced-voiceless pair of otherwise identical sounds produced at the back of the mouth, which probably has something to do with it.

You smashed it! The child will think you know everything about spelling, even without a massive chart held up by about a kilo of blu tack that occasionally falls on your head.

Thanks to Molly De Lemos and Tessa Weadman for help researching this post, and to the  DDOLLers, who always make me think.

You might have seen the recent, excellent guest posts on La Trobe University academic Emina McLean’s blog by teachers, telling their stories about discovering the science of reading. If you haven’t read them, her blog is here, and the posts so far are:

• Keep the balance, Sheryl, keep the balance (Sheryl Ferlito)
• Knowledge is Power (Brooke Wardana)
• This is personal (anonymous)
• My long journey towards the science of reading (Shaun Killian)
• I was told to immerse the child in print (Julie Mavlian)
• Seeing the light (anonymous)

Emina also writes about what research shows does and doesn’t work in getting people to change their minds and their practice, which is pretty consistent with one of my favourite YouTube videos:

Since stories are more powerful than facts, I’ve decided to have a go at communicating my Spelfabet story: realising a lot of my clients couldn’t read because they hadn’t been systematically and explicitly taught to decode/encode words, teaching them successfully and setting up my website to share this knowledge and related strategies, resources and research.

Instead of a blog post, I have made a nearly nine minute (yeek! Too long! But it’s hard to cut back) video, which is now on my website home page. I hope it helps encourage others to also share their stories and connect with each other in a No-Shame zone, realising that we’ve all made mistakes and missed opportunities, are all always doing our best, and that (as the good folk at the US Reading League say) when we know better, we do better. Here it is:

Thanks to Emina for her excellent, strategic insight (she might still be looking for guest posts if you have an inspiring story you’d like to tell!), her storytellers, and also to former colleague Nicole Erlich who bought me the book “The Influential Mind” a few years ago, and I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I should have (another mea maxima culpa, I’m not even a Catholic, sigh).

We’re still in COVID-19 Stage 4 lockdown here in Melbourne, but had only 14 new cases today (huzzah!) so fingers and toes crossed the end is in sight. Stay well!

In 2018, my state’s Department of Education and Training (DET) produced a brochure for parents called “Literacy and numeracy tips to help your child every day”.

Its top recommendation for “Helping your child work out difficult words” was to tell them, “Look at the picture. What word makes sense?”

Its authors clearly weren’t across the scientific research on how the brain learns to read, which shows that strong readers read (surprise!) the written words in books. Guessing words from pictures or context is only the strategy of 1. weak readers, and 2. learners trying to read books containing spelling patterns they’ve never been taught (e.g. predictable texts, still sadly widely used in schools).

I wrote a cranky blog post about the DET brochure at the time. Then, as my hands were still itching to tear my hair out, I made a free phonics workbook with the same teaching sequence as affordable decodable books, to give parents without much cash a better alternative.

Three years later, parents of five-year-olds have once again been given the same crappy advice in the same brochure, in the 2022 Prep bags. This is the Australian state with the car number-plate slogan “The Education State“, I kid you not.

The brochure only contains the word ‘phonics’ in a section called “Making the most of screen time”, but doesn’t help parents find quality early literacy programs, or consider the difference between them and Reading Eggs, as I have here and here.

There are five nice story books in the Prep bags, suitable for parents to read to children, but not a single decodable book suitable for young beginners to read themselves (unless the book “Hark, It’s Me, Ruby Lee!” is different from “It’s Me, Ruby Lee!” in the Education Minister’s media release).

For a calm, thorough discussion of the difference between the approach recommended by the DET in this brochure, and the approach recommended by reading scientists, see this article: Balanced Literacy or Systematic Reading Instruction? by Prof Pamela Snow.

There has been lots of media discussion about the importance of evidence-based teaching in the early years – recent examples are here, here, and here – and so many wonderful schools and teachers are enthusiastically embracing reading science, that I’d imagined further taxpayer-funded distribution of bad advice to parents wasn’t possible.

Our system not only fails many children with language-based learning difficulties at the start of their education, it bizarrely offers non-evidence-based “Colour Themes” during NAPLAN tests, and this year is making life even harder for the ones who battle on to Year 12, by adding a literacy assessment to the General Achievement Test. The result will be recorded on their graduating certificate for potential employers to see.

Instead of going back to tearing my hair out, I’ve made my January 2019 free Letters and Sounds workbook available again. If you can afford something better, use it instead. If not, and if your child is being taught to read and spell by memorising and guessing words, I hope it helps get them decoding and encoding. The leaflet size Pocket Rockets follow the same phonics teaching sequence, and I think they’re still the cheapest printed decodable books for beginners around.

I look forward to the day when the Victorian DET provides more solidly evidence-based early literacy information and resources to children and parents.

Someone from a major educational publisher rang me today to extol the virtues of their new range of decodable texts. I think she was hoping I might help promote them.

I’ve had a look at their decodables, but haven’t bought any for our decodable books display, because (A) our budget is tight, (B) I’ve been fairly underwhelmed by the new decodables from mainstream publishers I have bought, and (C) the last time I checked, they were still selling predictable/repetitive texts.

The only thing I like about predictable/repetitive texts is making spoof AI ones:

I consider predictable/repetitive texts harmful products for vulnerable beginners. Anyone who works in literacy intervention can tell you that undoing the bad habits encouraged by these books is hard work. They encourage children to memorise and guess words, not decode them. Here’s a daggy video I made nearly a decade ago explaining what’s wrong with them:

As education academics Simmone Pogorzelski, Susan Main and Janet Hunter wrote in their excellent 2021 AARE blog post Decodable or predictable: why reading curriculum developers must seize one: “there is no instructional value in using ‘levelled’ predictable readers to support children’s development once formal reading instruction has commenced”.

Margaret Goldberg of the Right To Read Project has some great ideas for repurposing predictable/repetitive books already in schools. By now there should be no market for new predictable/repetitive books for beginning readers. Are they really still available? Check publisher/vendor websites for yourself, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.

If you’re speaking to publishers/vendors keen to get a slice of the booming decodable books market, but still selling predictable/repetitive texts, please tell them this is not smart marketing. It shows they’re newcomers to the difficult task of producing decodables, and not fully committed to teaching young kids to decode, not memorise and guess. If they want their decodables to be taken seriously, they need to ditch predictable/repetitive texts.

There’s now such a confusopoly of decodable texts available, I don’t envy teachers and librarians the task of deciding what to buy. I’m a bit confused myself, and we have heaps of them, we aren’t relying on website or catalogue information. Which are good quality? How many of each? Which ones are OK to use with older kids? What about struggling readers who will only read about gaming/unicorns/football/princesses/cars? Please share your thoughts and thorny questions in the comments.

Alison Clarke