Laying the Foundations
One teacher's journey
There has been quite a buzz created by Emily Hanford’s latest podcast Sold a Story. If you haven’t listened to it yet then I strongly encourage you to do so. At the time of writing I am eagerly awaiting the third episode to be released. Over the last five decades cognitive scientists, psychologists, and researchers have unveiled a lot about how we learn to read. Emily Hanford is exploring why this knowledge hasn’t made its way into our classrooms. There is a different idea about how students learn to read that is much more popular and prominent is schools and education faculties. “Here’s the idea. This origin of this idea is the focus of the second episode of Sold a Story, particularly focusing on Dame Marie Clay’s work and the Reading Recovery program she founded. It should be acknowledged that Clay did some important work in advocating for early intervention and remediation for students with difficulties learning to read. However there are aspects of her work that do not hold up to scrutiny today. I was taught this idea that beginning readers need to use cues, such as a picture, or grammatical structure, to decode unfamiliar word at university just over a decade ago. My first school used Reading Recovery as its intervention program. I remember being gently rebuffed when I tried to work out what students in my class were doing in intervention so that I could better support them in the class. Little did I know how expensive this program was, both financially, and also in terms of costing children the chance for effective reading instruction. Reading Recovery is an expensive intervention. It costs to train a teacher in Reading Recovery. According to their Australian website you must have at least 5 years’ experience teaching before embarking on a yearlong training course. These teachers work with students 1:1 for half an hour, five times a week for 10-20 weeks. In Victoria, this equates to a cost of over $2500 for every student who receives a 10-week Reading Recovery intervention. While expensive, it could be argued to be worth it if Reading Recovery was an effective intervention. However, numerous studies have indicated that any short-term positive impacts from this intervention are not sustained. The real cost of Reading Recovery is that precious instructional time is spent teaching children to focus on words in inefficient ways. Clay was aware of different theories of how we read, claiming “On the one hand the traditional, older view sees reading as an exact process with an emphasis on letters and words, while on the other hand, a more recent set of theories sees reading as an inexact process, a search for meaning during which we only sample enough visual information to be satisfied that we have received the message of the text (Clay 1979, p.1- emphasis is mine). This idea using just enough visual information alongside other cues is a recurring theme in Clay’s writings. She explores the idea that “text carries redundant information, more than the reader usually attends to (Clay 1991, p.331). This idea is explored through by blanking out a number of letters or words in passages to demonstrate how good readers supposedly ‘problem-solve’ or predict as we are reading. I am not quite sure how these activities aren’t guessing. In fact Ken Goodman, who according to Clay was a leading authority on the reading process, refers to it as the ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’. It’s interesting to note that Clay suggests that we should observe eye movements, as this is exactly what scientists started to research in the 70s. It became really clear that, instead of just sampling the letters in a word, proficient readers track every letter in each word in order. The idea that readers just need to get an approximate shape of a word was clearly debunked in the 80s (Ehri & Wilce 1985). It was demonstrated that proficient readers use their knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences to decode words accurately and seemingly automatically. Clay appears to be aware of this research, having referenced Ehri in 2005. Unfortunately, systematic phonics is not something that Clay advocated for. A trusted colleague has told me that when they were trained in Reading Recovery they were told to never use the prompt “sound it out” to a child came to a word they had difficulty with. By 2005 there was an acknowledgement that some phonics instruction was needed within Reading Recovery, it appears to be analytical, where the focus is on breaking a word gradually into smaller parts. There does not appear to be a clear scope and sequence to this approach. In fact they appear to be discouraged as Clay states “teaching sequences of a standard kind are unlikely to meet the needs of struggling students”. The resulting ‘word-work’ (avoiding the term phonics) activities are somewhat baffling. Clay suggests that no more than 2-3 minutes per half-hour session is spent ‘taking words apart’. This limits the crucial phonic knowledge that struggling readers need in order to be able to gain meaning from a written text. There is also a big focus on separating words into onset & rime, which is a less efficient strategy than teaching how to blend individual phoneme-grapheme correspondence. There is a more subtle yet equally worrying argument that emerges throughout Clay’s work. The idea that “well-prepared children seldom fail to learn to read” (Butler & Clay, 1987, p37) implies that if a child doesn’t learn then blame can be placed with their home background. I believe that this is a dangerous idea. It creates division between educators and families. Of course, students come from a wide variety of experiences before school. However, educators should take ownership of the things within our control. Ensuring that every child receives quality literacy instruction is the core work of teachers. I don’t understand why people continue to defend Clay’s work as the basis for effective intervention. It is costly and doesn’t have long term positive effects. Struggling readers are taught to use cues other than the word when reading. The limited, unsystematic approach to phonics further compounds the disadvantage that struggling readers. Readers who struggle must be taught how to decode in order to gain any message from a written text. “There is a message here. We adults may be wrong about what we think the child needs to know, to read.” I wonder how many more people would be able to read today if Clay had heeded her own words.
References: Butler, D. & Clay, M. (1987). Reading begins at home. Heinemann Publishers Clay, M. (1979). Reading: The Patterning of Complex Behaviour. Heinemann Education Books Clay, M. (1991). Becoming literate: the construction of inner control. Heinemann Education Clay, M. (2005). Literacy lessons: designed for individuals, Part 1 & 2. Heinemann Education Ehri, L. C., & Wilce, L. S. (1985). Movement into Reading: Is the First Stage of Printed Word Learning Visual or Phonetic? Reading Research Quarterly, 20(2), 163–179. https://doi.org/10.2307/747753
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It's a bit of a weird thing for a teacher to spend their Sunday at a professional learning. But I'm not the only weird one and I joined hundreds of other people passionate about education in Melbourne today at LDA's event 'A Day with Linnea and Friends'.
LDA (Learning Difficulties Australia) somehow managed to lure the Professor Linnea Ehri to Australia to receive the 2022 AJLD Eminent Researcher Award. When I heard that she was presenting in Melbourne I booked a ticket before I had even consulted my wife! Alison Clarke (founder of Spelfabet) had the MCing duties and introduced each speaker wonderfully, as well as hosting the panel discussion brilliantly ( and had the dubious privilege of sorting out the initial tech issues). Professor Ehri spoke eloquently about the research she has done about how children learn to read. Her work on orthographic mapping is something that all teachers of English and literacy should understand. Orthographic mapping is reliant on children having the knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to be able to decode and encode written words. This is the process that enables us to recognise words almost instantaneously. I'm not going to go in too much detail as Professor Ehri will be presenting with more of her friends in Sydney on Tuesday, but I found the level of detail her studies on the Four Phases of Word Reading and Development went into fascinating. I was particularly intrigued by her findings when she compared instruction of syllable units against grapheme-phoneme units (in Portuguese). I believe that this level of intricacy is exactly what we need to disseminate further to help inform our teaching practice. After a morning tea break full of discussion we were back to listen to Emina McLean. Emina is the Head of English and Literacy at Docklands Primary School, trains pre-service teachers and student speech pathologists, provides professional learning, consults and is a guru on education. She is also the co-recipient of the Mona Tobias Award. Emina spoke about excellence and equity in Australian education and how Docklands PS is trying to achieve both of these. My hastily scribbled notes say: excellence = finding success for our students equity = ensuring ALL students are successful Emina unpacked four ways that Docklands PS does that help build excellence and equity.
The other co-recipient of the Mona Tobias Award was Dr Nathaniel Swain. He is the founder of Think Forward Educators, a teacher, instructional coach and researcher. Nathaniel encouraged us to reflect on our literacy instruction so that we can more effectively teach. He encourage us to teach the basics well, not so that we can go 'back to basics' but so we can move beyond the basics. A whirlwind tour of word instruction at Brandon Park Primary School, saw us looking at graphemes, words, morphemes, sentences, and extended texts through PhOrMeS and Read2Learn. The tinkling bell came all too soon to signal time was up. Jocelyn Seamer was the recipient of the Bruce Wicking Award. Jocelyn is an educational consultant with many (and varied) years of experience as a teacher and school leader. She talked about how we need to help support our colleagues as we embrace educational change. Jocelyn unpacked the value of working with our colleagues and how, like we do with our students, we need to meet them at their point of need. At times this involves coaching, supporting, directing and delegating. We need to be as intentional with mentoring as we are with our teaching. Lunch was another golden opportunity for discussions with others. It was nice to put faces to people I've previously only met online. And all too soon we were heading back into the theatre for the next session. Dr Jennifer Buckingham is the founder of Five from Five and is an expert on educational policy. She led us on an exploration of the policies in literacy education over the last twenty years. The messages from the Boys' education inquiry in 2002, the Rowe report (2005), and Dyslexia Working Party report (2010) all seemed very consistent that schools need to be teaching "a strong element of explicit, intensive, systematic phonics instruction” (Boys' education inquiry, 2002). And while it might feel like no progress is being made, Jennifer shared positive examples in the changes in the Australian Curriculum, the increased uptake of a Year 1 Phonics check, the SA Literacy Guarantee unit, and the Catalyst project of Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn. It was time for the panel discussion, which saw all our presenters gather and answer questions that had been submitted throughout the day. There was talk about whether graphemes should be incorporated into phonemic awareness instruction, the usefulness of spelling tricky words, the importance of primary schools getting literacy instruction right, the need for secondary schools to have a consistent approach to supporting their students. And Emina gave me a new motto for school change "Less, done well, is more." Then it was time for us all to go home (after a bit more chatting and navigating the Greek Festival), and more importantly to our schools and communities to keep improving our literacy instruction so that all children can achieve their success. |
I'm JamesI am a father of two (8 & 5), married to a future Early Childhood Educator. Archives
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