How the brain learns to read – A basic summary
After watching the video link here, I have really been able to understand the inner workings of the brain in relation to reading. I’m no doctor, so there is absolutely no point in me telling you all the finer points, but in summary, our brain is not naturally hard-wired to read. It is, however, made to naturally learn to speak and understand speech. If a child is spoken to, in whatever language, they will pick up the basics of that language and be able to communicate, without explicit teaching. In order to learn to read, we specifically need to target parts of the brain through exercises and explicit, systematic teaching of phonics and phonological awareness. There is a lot to go into and watching the first 18 minutes of the video link provided, I guarantee you will want to immediately alter the way you currently teach children to read. I found it particularly interesting how he labelled the part of the brain that stores all the words we have orthographically mapped, the ‘letterbox’, and how we can use particular tasks every day in our classroom to activate those parts of the brain, to allow easier access to reading for all of our students. Grab your morning coffee, sit yourself down, and spend the next 18 minutes learning about something so important to know about the children in our classrooms. As Stanislas states, “we often know more about the inner workings of our cars, than the brains of the children we are working with every day.” Something to think about.
Before I continue, and begin to share screenshots of documents and data from my previous school, I would just like to add that you are more than welcome to send me an email to gregclementconsulting@gmail.com and included in any PD booking, I can provide you with any documents you see, if it will make it easier for you to track the progress of your own students. I am putting myself out there to share what some could perceive as low scores, or poor results, but without previously using the instruction we now know is best practice, we can now look to improve the instruction in the classrooms and address the errors of our ways in the past. Don’t fear your own data, use it as motivation to do better. My new favourite quote that I read somewhere recently was that, “if they aren’t learning, then you aren’t teaching.”
Links to Phonological Awareness
As I described in my previous post, Phonological Awareness is the umbrella term for the sound structures of language and includes skills such as rhyming and alliteration just to name a few. Phonemic Awareness, on the other hand, delves a little deeper and covers more complex skills such as phoneme manipulation, blending phonemes into words, and segmenting words into phonemes. These are very important skills to begin to develop in our learners from a very early age. In an ideal world, all of our local Kindergartens would be using P.A. programs within their walls to give the students an early taste before they arrive at school. Phonological Awareness and Phonics are the biggest influencers of later reading success. When we orthographically map a word, we use the letters we see and the sounds we hear to process these together and store that in our ‘letterbox’ in the brain. Orthographic mapping is not a skill that can be taught (Kilpatrick, 2019), but we can teach phonemic awareness and phonics skills, which enable orthographic mapping. There is a brilliant blog here that explains the process of orthographic mapping that is well worth a read to get your head around this concept and begin to teach high frequency words in a new way, https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/the-role-of-orthographic-mapping-in-learning-to-read/
Phonological Awareness in our Junior School (Prep – 2)
At Clayton South Primary School, we had never looked into or kept data on our phonological awareness lessons. The Foundation teacher was providing the students with P.A. activities during remote learning, but as we all know, it was very hard to engage all the students, our microphones and their speakers weren’t the best, and over a webcam is not the best way to test something that is done purely through hearing and pulling apart the sounds in words. So, our journey really didn’t begin until the students returned to the classrooms in 2021.
After some consideration of programs versus practice, we ended up deciding to purchase the Tune Into the Sounds of Reading box set from DRA. It comes with an online tracker to use a pre-test in order to identify the point of need of students, and to show growth. That way you can focus on the areas needed for the cohort in front of you. It is very easy to administer and takes less than 5 minutes each morning. There is no physical preparation needed for the teacher, as the cards are separated into clearly labelled sections by dividers.
The data below is from our Phonemic Awareness screening on all of our Year 1 students after a full year using the resources. They were receiving PA instruction daily from Day 1 of Term 1 in Prep, but this was just a snapshot of where they were at as a class after 12 months. Green is proficient, orange is developing, and red is beginning. We then compared this data to new data at the end of the semester, to see how much progress has been made, and to see if there are any sections of the P.A. kits we can perhaps reduce or take out, if the whole of the class has mastered the learning. From the data below, (the red box indicates Foundation skills) we can clearly see that all but two students have mastered the skills required in the first year of school. The focus in this Grade 1 classroom will be to become proficient at the skills of phoneme deletion, phoneme addition, and phoneme substitution. These are largely considered skills to master by the end of Grade 2. So the students have 8 terms to work on those three skills.
As this is only the beginning of Grade 1, we would continue to develop each child’s phonemic awareness skills over the next 2 years until they have completed Year 2. They would be tracked at the individual and cohort level, and the necessary interventions put in place where needed. Our hope would be that by providing amazing TIER 1 intervention (prevention), we will not see the numbers of non-readers and struggling readers that we have seen in the past entering Year 3 and beyond.
Phonological Awareness in our Senior School (Year 3 – 6)
Now this was the more confronting data for us. Our Year 3 – 6 students had not received the same level of reading instruction that our junior school had been lucky to receive the previous year. Understandably, our senior school data looked worse than the junior school. This will not always be the case. With brilliant, evidence-based instruction from Foundation, our students will arrive at our senior school building equipped with the right tools for reading success. This is something we are all striving towards.
In our senior school we opted to go with the work of Dr Kilpatrick for our Phonemic Awareness instruction. With our senior school not having been previously exposed to phonological awareness activities, we felt we needed to give them the best chance at reading success before they move onto secondary school. All Year 3 – 6 students were assessed using the Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) by Dr Kilpatrick. This test can be obtained free here https://www.thepasttest.com/ and if you haven’t grabbed a copy of Dr Kilpatrick’s book, ‘Equipped for Reading Success’, I highly suggest you purchase it as it is a great read and provides an abundance of materials, including daily exercises that you can complete in your classroom in as little as 1 minute!
Here is our Year 3 – 6 PAST data.
As this data is 4 different year levels combined, normally each grade has their own spreadsheet, but I thought I’d show you our whole senior cohort prior to any phonemic awareness instruction. Each classroom teacher would then assess the data and work out an entry point for their class to begin instruction. In the case of the Year 5/6 cohort, I know that they began their whole-class instruction at Level J, which was substituting a long vowel phoneme for another long vowel phoneme in the middle of a word. This was a skill most of the year 5 and year 6 students had failed to complete to mastery. Each student was only marked green if they passed the skill to mastery.
Dr Kilpatrick’s book has about 20 1-minute exercises for each level that you can complete as a class. We chose to complete 2 for each level each day and try to work on two skills per day. So, all up, students spent just 4 minutes per morning on phonemic awareness skills, and the progress they have made to date has been remarkable. I remember being invited into the room by the students so they could show me their progress. I tested them at Level M2 as a class. M2 was their weakest skill, and the last skill tested on PAST (apart from Level N, which we didn’t use, which assesses you for reading sounds backwards – we didn’t find that necessary).
The students did the first 1-minute activity as a class and were all answering in unison perfectly. So, I went around the circle asking each student one question each from the next 1-minute activity. 95% of the students could answer correctly instantly. 1 or 2 had to pause and think, before answering correctly. This program is working wonders for the students and their confidence, and to challenge the principal to come down to test their class was a real reward for effort for all involved in my opinion.
Response to Intervention (RTI)
We were so lucky to have such an amazing tutor in our school. She worked with all of our struggling readers, as identified from phonemic awareness assessments, phonics screeners, and Dibels (fluency) assessments. A typical tutoring lesson covered all areas of reading for the students, including all of the Big 6.
For our older readers who scored low in an area of phonemic awareness, the tutor initially began with counters to represent sounds. Students were given a word, such as ‘snip’, and they then needed to tell the tutor how many sounds are in the word and name them. For example, there are 4 sounds, /s/ /n/ /i/ /p/. Each counter then represented each sound. The letters are not on the counters, they are blank. The tutor then asked the students to move one counter so that the word is now ‘sip’. The student will remove the second counter, explaining that they are removing the /n/ sound, so that we are left with ‘sip’. The final tile goes back, and the tutor will then ask them to show how they would substitute a sound to make the word, ‘skip’. Again, the student would need to indicate that they are removing the second counter /n/, but replacing it with another counter /k/, thus making /s/ /k/ /i/ /p/. This is the initial phase we used with the students who were struggling to manipulate phonemes in their head. We have found that by using manipulatives (counters) in this way, and with lots of practice and exposures, the students are then making the next progression into manipulating sounds without physical objects. Once they are at this point, the connection becomes quicker, until mastery.
This video here featuring Louisa Moats demonstrates what I believe to be an easier beginning point, by using the actual grapheme images on the tiles to substitute sounds. This is now backed by the latest research surrounding phonemic awareness as best practice. Using the graphemes whilst teaching phonemic awareness is your best path to phonemic awareness success. The Decodable Readers Australia SoR Toolkits come with a teacher guide, which has Word Loops and Word Chains for classroom use, which only use taught GPC (Grapheme phoneme correspondences) and save you lots of time in creating your own.
In summing up phonological awareness, it is such a small investment (both financially and time-wise) in setting up all of your students for success in reading. You can’t gloss over or ignore phonological awareness in your reading block. After all, it is 1 of the 2 most important skills that students require, along with phonics, to orthographically map words to memory and become fluent readers.