Before I begin this blog, I would just like to share something exciting from my own life that happened when my youngest son was in his first year of school. He had previously had ZERO interest in reading, and for the first time, he actually READ, not “read” (with inverted commas), his first book. It was a decodable text and he sounded out each sound – painstakingly – in his head, before saying the words out loud. He had previously been sent home with predictable texts, with sentences such as “The hippopotamus jumped in the lake. The baboon jumped in the lake. The alligator jumped in the lake”. Without the accompanying images and predictable sentence structure, he would have had no chance of reading these books. Mind you, the pictures were extremely small in the photocopied book that came home in his reader bag. The message here is, stick with it. This took a whole term to get him to this point, but we were making progress, and the look on his face
was priceless. Absolute joy!
My previous experience with my eldest son had been completely different. Levi is 13 years old in Year 7 and has High Functioning Autism. He was reading words from memory at 3 years old, reading ANY books from 4 years old, and began his first year of school at a Level 27 PM. Not that I advocate levelled readers at all, but that was all they had back then to show me where he was at, and can give you a relatable point of reference. When being assessed for ASD, he was given an IQ test, which came out at 129! Levi’s passion was reading, and I couldn’t put him to bed without several books being read to him, and eventually, several books being read to me. So, to see my youngest son begin reading, and developing a joy for the printed text, warmed my heart.
Why am I telling you this?
According to Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading (see below), for 5% of students, reading seems effortless. That is Levi. For 35% of students, learning to read is relatively easy with broad instruction, for 40-50% of students , learning to read proficiently requires code-based explicit, systematic, and sequential instruction (possibly my youngest son), and for 10-15% of students, learning to read requires the same, but with many, many repetitions.
The first 40% are advantaged by a structured literacy approach, However, for the remaining 60% of students in our schools, a structured literacy approach is essential. Not all of our children are the same. Even brothers. If you want to provide the best opportunities for our students, continue reading.
So what are the Big 6 and why do we need to know these?
Studies over the past 40+ years have uncovered the essential elements in reading and how they can benefit all readers. Some elements are introduced only in the junior years and build a base for future learning, whereas other elements need to be built upon right the way through primary school. I will give a brief outline of each of the Big 6 areas and follow up in future blogs dedicated to each of the Big 6 in greater detail, and how we changed our practices at Clayton South Primary School, where I was the principal for 3 years.
Oral Language
Often the forgotten member of the Big 6, and leaving us with only the Big 5, is Oral Language.
Oral language has recently been described as ‘the substrate for literacy’ (Christensen, Zubrick, Lawrence, Mitrou & Taylor, 2014, p. 18). From the moment of birth, children are immersed in an environment that will have an immense
impact on their long-term language and literacy outcomes, as interactions with parents and other significant people in their lives shape the development of their language.
Children who are surrounded by, and included in, rich and increasingly complex conversations have an overwhelming advantage in vocabulary development, in understanding the structures of language, and in tuning into the sounds of English. As children engage in these early interactions, they are immersed in various aspects of language that will ultimately support their reading development.
Oral interactions build children’s vocabulary knowledge, with the number and variety of words that children hear being strongly correlated with later literacy achievement (Fernald, Perfors & Marchman, 2006; Hurtado, Marchman & Fernald, 2007, 2008). The explosive growth of vocabulary that occurs between the ages of two and six has a direct influence on children’s later reading ability (Biemiller, 1999). Preschool children with strong receptive vocabularies tend to have better listening comprehension, word recognition and reading comprehension in the later primary years (Scarborough, 2001).
Providing children with oral language experiences can help them to learn the grammatical rules or syntax of language unconsciously, to help them become familiar with how to combine words into phrases and sentences. At Clayton South PS we allowed our Foundation students 2 hours per week after lunch to ‘play’ alongside each other at various stations set up intentionally around the classroom. These include a Cafe, a Construction Site, a Writer’s Station, a Reading Corner, and many other stations to facilitate discussions, not only between students, but our teaching staff and Education Support staff interacted with the students and attempted to purposefully develop their vocabulary through discussions and suggestions linked to their interests. Some example dialogue I have heard on my learning walks have included:
Teacher: What are you doing here at the café?
Student: I buyed a drink.
Teacher: So, you bought a drink, what flavour was the drink that you purchased?
Student: Green.
Teacher: So, was it a lime flavoured drink? What other flavour options were there to choose from?
These discussions can help to develop better vocabulary in the students, and by allowing them to have much richer discussions. Research suggests, interacting with better language users provides opportunities for children to use their growing vocabulary and different language structures (Albany, Morrow, Strickland, & Wood, 1998; Hart & Risley, 1995; Morrow & Rand, 1991).
Don’t leave it to chance, the benefits for incorporating The Big 6 in your school rather than The Big 5 are overwhelming.
Phonological Awareness
Quite often the terms ‘phonological awareness’ and ‘phonemic awareness’ are used to describe the same thing. Phonological Awareness is the umbrella term for the sound structures of language and includes skills such as rhyming and alliteration, sentence segmentation, syllables, and onsets and rimes. Phonemic Awareness is further up the food chain and includes the more complex skills of phoneme manipulation (blending phonemes into words, segmenting words into phonemes, adding phonemes to words, deleting phonemes from words, and substituting one phoneme for another in a word).
Studies suggest that just 10 minutes of phonological awareness activities in the classroom each day (Prep – 2) can dramatically impact a child’s future reading success. In our junior school, we used The Decodable Readers Australia ‘Tune into the Sounds of Reading’ kits to build phonological awareness. The box set comes with 230 activity cards that incorporate knowledge around the foundation concepts of sentences and words, rhyme, syllables, and phonemic awareness.
These provided 5 minutes of daily phonological awareness activities for the students and required no resource preparation for the teacher as everything you needed was inside the box.
In just one term, we noticed huge improvements in all of the students. You can assess their understanding both at the beginning of the year (using the DRA Phonemic Awareness Assessment) and mid-year, to check on progress, but also to identify students who may require small group Tier 2 interventions.
Our Year 3-6 students hopefully won’t need a great deal of phonemic awareness activities in future years, but for now, they did. They didn’t receive any of this instruction in the junior years, and therefore we can’t leave them behind. In our Year 3-6 classrooms, we assessed every student using Dr Kilpatrick’s Phonemic Awareness Screening Test (PAST). We then created a lesson sequence based on the results in each classroom. For example, if the majority of students struggled with Level J (which was the case at CSPS) in the 5/6 classroom, then that was where we began our instruction and daily practice.
Dr Kilpatrick’s book, ‘Equipped for Reading Success’, provides 1 minute activities at each Level. This is plenty to get you through 2-3 weeks of practice. For individual Tier 2 and Tier 3 support, we had a tutor in the school who worked with all students who were deemed at risk after completing the PAST assessment.
Phonics
I’m not going to go into too much detail here, we all know what phonics is and just how important it is to get this right. We used Decodable Readers Australia’s scope and sequence for our Prep – Year 2 students. They were expected to know the ‘code’ and pass Level 8 by the end of their third year of schooling. As this was new to the school, the teachers, and the students – we continued this into our Year 3 classes. Again,
hopefully this won’t be the case once our Foundation – Year 2 students have had the chance to experience their explicit, systematic phonics lessons for three full years.
In the senior school, we purchased many decodable books for older readers, such as; The Moon Dog series, Talisman Series, Totem Series and many more. This allowed the students the opportunity to still practise their code knowledge, without feeling like they were reading a book for 5-8 year olds. I highly suggest purchasing resources for your senior school in this area. DRA are in the process of writing a Hi-Lo (high interest – Low decodability) series aimed at 9-12 year-olds and will be perfect for your senior school.
Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read a text with three components; accuracy (using orthographic mapping), rate
(automaticity), and prosody (or expression). Previously, we had not explicitly taught fluency in the school.
Since completing multiple readings on the subject, we decided as a school that the best and most efficient way to focus on fluency was to begin with fluency pairs. Fluency pairs involved two students reading the same passage for 1 minute each day. Student 1 will read, whilst Student 2 follows along, correcting any errors as they occur and providing assistance. Then the partners swap over for the next 60 seconds. Students will read the same passage for the week so they are getting 3-4 repetitions for practice. Ideally, students’ words correct per minute (wcpm) count should increase by the end of the week. In the first year of school, we used letter sounds and word lists for beginning readers rather than passages, and for those who are capable of blending phrases, we used decodable texts at the appropriate level.
DRA are about to release fluency passages for Year 1 and 2 based on our scope and sequence. In each booklet, there is an easy passage with just CVC words and minimum sight words with an 80 word count, and another passage with up to 3 syllable words and a 120 word count. They are very controlled texts with only previously taught PGCs. It gives the students a great opportunity to practise their new PGCs during fluency pairs. They are made from glossy material so they can be drawn on using whiteboard markers and the back page is photocopiable to track student growth.
Research suggests 3-4 repeated readings is enough to improve reading fluency. When our tutor worked with the students, she took a slightly different approach with a 1:1 session. To begin with, the student read to the tutor for 1 minute (uninterrupted). The tutor would then correct any errors made (accuracy and prosody) and model for the student how the passage should have been read, with expression and a good pace. The student then had another attempt for 1 minute. The tutor followed this same process one more time. We then averaged the wcpm over the 3 readings and put this result into a graph for the student to track their own progress and set their own goals. So far there has been great success with this activity.
Vocabulary
When I left the school, we were still developing this element and what it would look like in our classrooms. We introduced a Word of the Day at each year level, linked to our phonics lesson, where students pull apart the sounds of the word, the meaning, put it in a sentence, and look at the morphology (junior/senior school) and the etymology (senior school). There are some great examples online of how vocabulary can be developed.
In basic terms, if children know the meaning of a word, they are far more likely to be able to read it and make sense of it within a sentence. For example, assume the words demand and disturb are within the oral
vocabulary of a young reader and basic decoding skills have been mastered. On encountering the sentence ‘Tom’s teacher demanded to know what had caused the disturbance’, the reader will almost certainly be able to decode and process the meaning of the words demanded and disturbance. If, however, the reader
is not familiar with the meaning of those words, the sentence will be largely incomprehensible, even if some decoding attempt can be made. This will be the case for every sentence the child tries to read: word and background knowledge contributes in a major way to reading comprehension.
Comprehension
The final element. The culminating goal of reading is, of course, comprehension, which requires engagement with text at a deep level, and an array of skills that go far beyond simple word recognition. Research over several decades has shown that good readers engage in reading in particular ways that are not shared by poorer readers. By combining all of the parts of Scarborough’s Rope (see below), the end goal is skilled reading. Students will have fluent execution and coordination of language comprehension and word recognition.
We moved away from teaching the comprehension strategies over the course of a week as we previously did, like ‘finding the main idea’ and ‘sequencing events’, and have instead begun to focus on providing students with as much background knowledge on a topic as possible. We still continue to cover strategies, but only as they come up whilst reading with the students.
Not all in the course of a week, as when we read (as skilled readers) we need to apply all of the strategies in our repertoire during the same reading, rather than just one.
Don’t hide behind the WHY when teaching these elements. Let the students know exactly why we are starting the day with phonological awareness, or why it is so important to be able to read fluently. I would even go as far as creating a class version of Scarborough’s Rope with the older students and discuss each element with them. We created our own reading rope as a staff in the meeting room. This was a great discussion starter for the teachers and any staff visiting us from other schools. I think it would have equal benefits for the students to understand what the science tells us about learning to read.
Until next time, continue on your own science of reading journeys. I hope that as I add to these blogs, you can slowly and intentionally add to your school’s repertoire of practices. This is not a sprint, but a marathon. Staff readings and understanding are essential if you are to get the required buy-in. Don’t give up.
Data is a big influencer of stubborn staff. You can’t hide behind poor data. At the end of the day, this is for the students, and that is why we are here. Bring everything back to the needs of the students and even the most change-resistant educators will need to at least consider adjusting their thinking.
And as I have mentioned previously, if you would like me to work with your school to incorporate these practices and make them second nature to all staff, so that you, too, can see the immediate impacts that we saw at Clayton South PS, email me at gregclementconsulting@gmail.com and I can provide you with the package and price list for a visit or Zoom with your school.