Banter Speech & Language

Sydney speech pathologists helping adults and children speak for themselves.

reading comprehension

Five ways to boost your child’s oral language and reading comprehension skills with sequencing

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First things first: sequencing and language comprehension skills may be related

Sequencing skills appear to be related to children’s oral language and reading comprehension abilities. For example, compared to children aged 8-11 with poor reading comprehension, age-matched children with good reading comprehension skills:

  • perform better when sequencing events; and
  • produce more accurate sequences, even when presented with stories that are narrated out of chronological sequence (Gouldthorp et al., 2017). 

By understanding more about the relationships between sequencing skills and language, we can support children to understand spoken and written language, including children with with reading difficulties, language disorders (or both).   

In this article, we provide five, evidence-based ideas to do this, with lots of examples.

Second: what does “sequencing” mean?

The word ‘sequence’ means different things in different situations. As a noun, ‘sequence’ can mean:

  • a particular order in which related things follow each other, e.g. as in a non-verbal pattern, a cause-effect relationship, a procedure or a set of instructions; or
  • a set of related events, movements, or items that follow each other in a particular order, e.g. as in an historical recount or a story.

As a verb, ‘sequence’ can mean:

  • to arrange in a particular order perceptually, e.g. from least to most, smallest to biggest, shortest to tallest, lightest to heaviest, weakest to strongest, slowest to fastest;
  • to arrange in a particular order conceptually, e.g. by value, function in a process, alphabetically, membership within a category, or hierarchy;
  • to order things chronologically (i.e. by the order in which the events occurred in time); or
  • to order things causally, e.g. by moving from simple cause to effect (e.g. rain-open umbrella), or through chains of cause and effect (e.g. the spread of an imported pest into a new environment, and its effects).

Third: concrete examples of school, work and life tasks requiring both sequencing and language skills

Sequencing tasks can be verbal or non-verbal.Verbal sequencing tasks require you, e.g. to:

  • understand or process spoken or written language (e.g. to follow multistep classroom instructions or to follow and execute detailed written instructions for a task); and/or
  • use words, sentences, and discourse-level language (e.g. monologues, conversation, recounts, stories, essays etc.) to order information in speech or writing (or both).

In speech pathology, we often work on language goals that involve sequencing tasks. For example, in a given week, I might help different clients to:

  • understand daily routines, or school timetables;
  • work on sentence order, e.g. subject-verb and subject-verb-object sentences; 
  • understand and use temporal cues like ‘first, next, and last’, ‘then’ and ‘finally’, or ordinals (1st, 2nd, 3rd) to sequence thoughts logically;
  • understand, follow, and give multi-step instructions in complex sentences that include time-related words like ‘before’, ‘after’, and ‘while’; 
  • order, then narrate a series of pictures or points summarising process-steps (e.g. for growing a sunflower, or making a Lego Millennium Falcon);
  • summarise and recount events in a story (e.g. in an Aesop’s fable or school-assigned novel);
  • solve problems involving cause-effect relationships, making predictions, or weighing up options;
  • summarise an historical event, like the months leading up to the start of World War II;
  • outline a complex process, with multiple causes and effects, like the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster;
  • explain a complex relationship, e.g. between interest rates and the value of the dollar over time;
  • script difficult conversation, e.g. asking a boss for a raise, or appealing the decision of a government agency; 
  • plan complex tasks, like starting a business or attending a conference; and
  • generate and write original texts, including stories, professional presentations, reports and proposals.

All of these tasks require both sequencing and language skills (oral, written, or both).

Fourth: Sequencing and language comprehension at the discourse level – the importance of building mental representations and situation models

When we read or hear a story, at least two things happen:

  • we process the exact words and sentences, including the vocabulary and the grammar used, to understand what is being said (a ‘surface level’ or ‘lower level’ task) (Dijk & Kintsch, 1983); and 
  • construct a mental model or situation model of the characters, events, objects, places and actions described and the relations among them (a ‘higher level’ task) (Tapiero, 2007; Johnson-Laird, 1983).

Interestingly, the exact words and grammar of the text tend to fade from memory pretty quickly. But the situation model lasts longer (Graesser et al., 1997). For example, I can:

  • remember a joke a friend told me many years ago, even though I’m sure my wording is very different to his when I re-tell it; 
  • tell people the order of countries I visited when backpacking in the late 1990s, including detailed descriptions of key events – like getting lost in a forest in the Czech Republic and accidentally trespassing onto a Turkish military base – even if I can’t remember exactly what I said to my son before school yesterday; and
  • remember the stories (main characters, plot, setting, etc.) of Dr Faustus, Mansfield Park, Nineteen-Eighty Four, and Antony and Cleopatra  – texts I studied over 25 years ago – even if I struggle to remember any of the words or sentences used in the book I just finished reading.

Fifth: Some people have difficulties constructing situation models or mental representations, including some people with: 

Sixth: How can we use our knowledge of sequencing skills to boost language and reading comprehension?

Here are five evidence-based tips:

(A) Sequence information chronologically

For example, consider two versions of the same story:

Max looked down at his bag with horror after reaching down and unzipping it. He’d forgotten his calculator, and the maths test was about to begin. Max thought back to the night before, when he’d stayed up late, studying. He must have left the calculator on his desk. Even after sitting for a minute in class, Max was still out of breath. He’d had to borrow his Dad’s ancient BMX bike after missing the bus that morning. He couldn’t believe that he’d slept in on such an important day! He remembered how, before he’d pedaled off to school, he’d wiped off the cobwebs and pumped up the tires on the bike, all the while wondering whether he’d make it in time for the test later that morning. He imagined how embarrassed and irritated he would feel with himself tomorrow when he reflected on what had happened and what was happening.

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Max. One Thursday, Max stayed up very late to study for his Friday maths test. The next morning, Max slept in and missed his bus to school. He rushed to the shed and pulled out his Dad’s ancient BMX bike. He pumped up the tires, brushed off the cobwebs, and took off for school. Max pedalled furiously for over 20 minutes. He arrived just in time for maths. Huffing and puffing, Max sat down at his desk and opened his bag, discovering all too late that he’d left his calculator on his desk at home. Max’s day was off to a bad start!

The second version is much easier to understand and to sequence. Why? Its sentences and events are ordered chronologically.

(i) Sentences: Studies show that children aged 3-7 have more difficulty sequencing information when the information is presented in reverse order rather than chronologically (e.g. Blything et al., 2015). This is also true for people with language disorders. I suspect it is true for most people. For example:

  • ‘He went to the beach before he went to the park’ is much easier to understand than ‘Before he went to the park, he went to the beach’; and
  •  ‘After he went to the hardware store he went to the supermarket’ is easier to understand than ‘He went to the supermarket after he went to the hardware store’.

For this reason, I recommend that parents and teachers should avoid using complex ‘before’ and ‘after’ sentences where the order of the words does not match the order of events. 

Instead – following a great tip I learned from Dr Julia Starling – I suggest using:

  • ‘When…then’ sentences instead:, e.g. ‘When you have finished your maths questions, then sit on the floor’; and 
  • temporal cues like: ‘first, next, then, and last’ to help children understand and express sequences of ideas.

(ii) Stories and other texts

The order in which events are presented in texts affects how easy the text is to understand. Both children and adults understand what they are reading better when events are presented in chronological order, compared to reverse or other orders (e.g. Ohtsuka & Brewer, 1992; Kucer 2010; Gouldthorp, 2017). Situation models of stories and mental representations of real life events are usually structured in chronological order (Radvansky et al., 2005). (Narratives often (but not always) organise events in the order in which they are perceived in real life.)

As with sentences, readers and listeners expect the order of events in stories to mirror the order they are experienced in real life: chronological and continuous (Zwan, 1996). For example, some studies show that reading speeds slow when readers encounter a time shift (either a flashback or flash forward) (e.g. Rinck & Weber, 2003; Speer & Zacks, 2005).

(B) After finishing a text, recap the first events

Events in stories become less accessible as more time passes in stories and other texts. Indeed, the first event in a chronological sequence is less accessible to readers than later events, even when the events depicted in the story are not presented in chronological order (e.g. Kelter & Claus, 2005). This might be one reason I find it hard to remember the events and other features of The Phantom Menace, although I remember the events of A New Hope clearly.* (Editors note for people who are not into Star Wars: A New Hope was made much earlier, but its events occurred later than the events depicted in The Phantom Menace.)

(C) Highlight “cause and effect” relationships in texts

With sequences, we often focus on linear chains of events: A then B then C, and finally D. But some researchers think that memory for events is better described as a network of causally-related (cause-effect) events (Tapiero, 2007). 

During story reading, concepts with more cause-effect connections to other concepts are accessed more easily than concepts that do not have cause-effect relationships with each other (e.g. van den Broek et al., 1996; Lynch, 2008). Some researchers think that events may in fact be organised in memory according to their causal structure (rather than chronology) (e.g. Tapiero, 2007). 

For example, compare these two stories:

Once upon a time, there was an old lady who lived in a cottage on the outskirts of town, on the edge of a forest. One hot day, there was a huge bushfire. As soon as the woman smelled smoke, she got down on her hands and knees, crawled out of her cottage and ran to the main road leading into town. With her mobile phone, she called the emergency number. Five minutes later, a fire truck pulled up outside the old lady’s cottage and a young firefighter jumped out. After a fierce battle, the firefighter put out the fire with her hose. ‘You’ve saved my house and the town!’ said the old lady to the firefighter. ‘Thanks mainly to you,’ said the firefighter, smiling. ‘I’m going to recommend you for a bravery medal.’ 

Once upon a time, there was an old lady who lived in a the middle of a large city. One freezing day, there was a huge bushfire. The circus arrived, and the ringmaster invited the old lady to see the shortest acrobat. The old lady decided to bake a cake for her grandson, Peter, who was in the army. The cat ran away from home. Just then, Jack brought in a bunch of flowers, a pet rock, and a plastic flute.

The first story is packed with cause-effect relationships. The second story is just a random collection of events. Two key points:

  • The first story is much easier to remember and to recount, even though it is longer; and
  • When you were reading the second story, did you find yourself trying to find/impose causal connections between the events? I did, even though I wrote the story to avoid cause-effect relationships!

Using cause-effect-based study tools, like elaborative interrogation and self-explanation, can be effective in increasing recall of events in both stories and non-fiction. You can read more about these free, evidence-based study techniques here.

A important caveat here: As with the first example story above, when it comes to story sequences, it is hard to separate comprehension of time from cause-effect relationships because cause precedes effect logically. Cause-effect relationships are less likely to be identified when presented out of time order (e.g. Briner et al., 2012; Fenker et al., 2005). This suggests that understanding time order remains important for causally linked events to be remembered.

(D) Provide and use visual supports

Children with difficulties sequencing events and understanding texts may benefit from using graphic organisers and other visual supports to understand them.

Common examples include:

  • visual timetables outlining routines and activities in order;
  • mini-comic strips with stick figures to depict main events in a story in order;
  • text type scaffolds like this one that help children to develop and update mental representations of texts;
  • Novakian concept maps for learning or testing knowledge of complex processes by creating active links between ideas. Here’s an example explaining the key processes involved in the mitosis of animal cells:

Source: Ian Kinchin, Visualising Powerful Knowledge to Develop the Expert Student, extracted from  Christian Moore Anderson, 2019 (see full source link below).

  • well-designed concept maps that explicitly sequence and link ideas with colours, lines, arrows, boxes, verb-links, and concrete examples. Here is a great example of a concept map used to explain Dual Coding, using left-to-right sequencing of ideas and clever graphics to aid comprehension. 

Source: Oliver Caviglioli (see full link below).

(E) Use sequenced-based memory techniques to help children to build associations between ideas and to remember them

Sometimes, you have to learn things that are not naturally well-connected to each other, even arbitrary. You can use sequencing principles, including time-order, cause-effect and already learned sequences to help.

Hundreds (if not thousands) of years of memory research has shown that forcing sequential and visual associations between objects can you to help remember them. This can work with:

  • related objects and concepts, e.g. cranial nerves from I-XII, world capitals, or the elements of the periodic table in order; or
  • otherwise unconnected lists, e.g. passwords, shopping lists, and people’s names.

Alphabet and number peg systems are examples of using over-learned or automatically-named sequences to remember otherwise unconnected things. We have made a short video demonstration of a simple but effective number memory peg system here. 

More advanced techniques like Buzan’s Major Memory System also use number sequences (linked to sounds) to help people remember long lists of information in sequences. We will cover this system in a later article.

Seventh, and finally: the clinical bottom line

Children vary in their sequencing and oral language and reading comprehension skills. Sequencing skills and comprehension skills may be related, but we’re not entirely sure how. 

Many children have difficulties with both sequencing and understanding language, including some children with language disorders and reading difficulties. Parents, teachers, speech pathologists and others working with children can support children to understand spoken and written language by presenting information sequentially, explaining or narrating things chronologically, highlighting cause-effect relationships, recapping early events in sequences, using visuals, and using sequencing skills to help children to remember and link things together. 

Related articles:

Related resources:

Principal source: Gouldthorp, B., Katsipas, L., & Mueller, C. (2017). An Investigation of the Role of Sequencing in Children’s Reading Comprehension, Reading Research Quarterly, 53(1), 91-106.

Other resources:

*Of course, the more likely reason I can’t remember the events of the The Phantom Menace is that it is a terrible film, and I’ve actively suppressed all memory of it! 

My child struggles to understand what she’s reading. Should I give her a text-to-speech tool?

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A confession: my navigation skills are abysmal. I’ve been known to get lost in car parks and Mario Cart. But, since downloading Google Maps a few years ago, I’m rarely lost (for long) these days. I’ve used a cheap technology to compensate for a skill gap that really bugs me.

In the same way, text-to-speech and read-along software tools are being used in many homes and schools to help students and others with reading comprehension difficulties.  

Are they a good idea?  As with many tricky questions, the answer is that “it depends”.

What do text-to-speech tools do?

Software, such as Classmate Reader or Texthelp Read&Write, can ‘translate’ written text into spoken words, enabling you to listen to text while reading along, or simply to listen.

The idea itself isn’t new: we’ve had audiobook tapes and CDs, for several decades, for example. But recent, major improvements in voice recognition software – including some of the technologies underpinning Artificial Intelligence-enabled tools and apps aligned with products and assistants like Google Cloud Text to Speech, Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana to name a few – are making text-to-speech (and voice-to-text) tools much more accessible and potentially much more useful and socially accepted than in the past. 

Remember that reading comprehension problems are not all the same 

We’ve written at length about reading comprehension difficulties. To recap the most relevant points: 

  • Reading comprehension difficulties are caused by two main things:
    • difficulty ‘decoding’ (or translating) written letters, words and sentences into speech sounds and spoken words and sentences; and/or
    • difficulty understanding the language used in written texts (e.g. the vocabulary, sentence structures, or inferences to be drawn in a particular reading task).
  • Some people experience only one of these problems, i.e. decoding problems or language disorders. Others have difficulties with both. The “Simple View of Reading” implies that:
    • when decoding skills are poor, they limit reading comprehension; and
    • when decoding skills are stronger, language comprehension becomes a more important influence on reading comprehension.
  • “Dyslexia” or “specific learning disorders with impairments in reading” are both normally used to describe children with significant decoding issues. Poor reading accuracy and rate has a direct negative effect on reading comprehension and may leave fewer cognitive ‘resources’ free to try to figure out the meaning of texts (e.g. Smythe, 2005). Even fairly small gains in decoding skills for poor readers can have big positive effects on reading comprehension (Lervåg, 2017).
  • During the school years, oral language comprehension and reading skills ‘piggy back’ on each other (Snow, 2016). People with decoding problems may have problems learning new words and higher level language skills, which can then hamper their oral language development. Poor decoding skills can drag down higher level language skills that students learn as they read to learn.  

Why are text-to-speech tools potentially helpful

Text-to-speech tools remove the need to decode reading material. This helps people with decoding issues understand the material. For example, ‘read aloud’ tools might help students who have decoding problems complete assessment tasks at school (much like human readers in exams help many students with reading difficulties).

Text-to-speech and voice-to-text tools are no longer fringe technologies

Voice-to-text and text-to-speech software used to be hampered by poor accuracy, poor voice selections, and poor speech naturalness.

Now have a look at this amazing chart:

In 2018, Google’s machine learning word accuracy rates exceeded 95% for the first time. Some of their competitors are not far behind. Many of these technologies now sit nested in home and electronic devices: tools like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. Increasingly, I’m writing notes and even blogs using Google voice-to-text, plugged into apps with voice-to-text features like Evernote or Google Docs. 

These technologies can also be used the other way around to read text using artificial voices (or even clones of your own voice): artificial intelligence-driven voice technologies like those developed by Lyrebird, Baidu and Mozilla and Google’s DeepMind are coming along in leaps and bounds.  It’s an exciting time to be involved in communication science!

Back to the current state of play: what does the peer reviewed research evidence say?

The research base lags the use of text-to-speech tools, and is far from cohesive at this point. There are a few reasons for this, including:

  • the fast rate of technology advances;
  • different research goals: some studies look at text-to-speech tools as a way of compensating for decoding issues; and other studies look at text-to-speech tools as a way of improving decoding skills. (The goal of compensation is to help students access texts they would otherwise not be able to read because of decoding problems. The goal of treatment is to improve decoding skills.);
  • the number of different commercial programs available, including:
  • the number of different features that can be manipulated in differences services, including reading rate, voice type, document tagging, dynamic highlighting;
  • the different populations of people that researchers have looked at, e.g. people with unspecified disabilities, reading disabilities, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder and many other disabilities; and
  • the different outcome measure used in different studies to measure effects.

In 2014, two meta-analyses were published on the compensatory effects of read-aloud accommodations on assessments:

  • Li (2014) looked at the effects of read-aloud accommodations on reading and maths assessments, comparing their effects on children with and without disabilities (broadly defined and not restricted to children with reading difficulties alone). Li found positive effects for both groups on reading and maths tasks, but smaller effects for maths.
  • Buzik & Stone (2014) looked at the effects of read-aloud accommodations for students with and without disabilities on standardised assessments. Again, read-aloud accommodations helped both groups with reading and maths tests, with smaller effects for maths.

In 2018, Dr Sarah Wood and colleagues from Florida State University published a more focused meta-analysis of 22 studies on the effects of text-to-speech technologies on reading comprehension for students with reading difficulties (see citation below). They found that text-to-speech technologies may assist students with reading comprehension. However, as noted by the authors, the findings were limited by the small number of studies on the issue to date, the diversity of the tools and measures, the lack of detail in many studies about appropriate dosage, and the lack of controls for placebo effects and bias. 

Clinical bottom line

For children with reading comprehension problems caused by decoding issues, text-to-speech tools may help children to understand texts that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to read. The evidence is not clear for children with good decoding skills and poor language comprehension skills. We don’t yet know exactly how or why text-to-speech tools help some children. But students with normal oral language comprehension are likely to benefit from having the text read to them when decoding is the bottleneck.

When advising parents and students about text-to-speech tools, teachers, speech pathologists, education psychologists and others involved in helping students with reading difficulties should think hard about:

  • the main factor(s) contributing to the student’s reading difficulties – decoding, language comprehension, or both;
  • the goal(s) of using the tool – i.e. is it to compensate for a student’s reading difficulties (e.g. in an assessment), or is it intended to help improve reading skills? (and if so, how?);
  • the positive functional impact using the tool might have on the student’s participation in class and access to the curriculum; and
  • whether the time spent using the tool might better be spent working on improving decoding skills through explicit synthetic phonics instruction, which has a higher level of evidence at this point. Just as a physiotherapist might temporarily tie up a patient’s “good arm” to encourage her to use and rehabilitate her injured arm, might we be better off in some cases working directly on decoding skills and turning off tools that might enable the patient to avoid using them.

Fundamentally, we all want people we care about to succeed and participate at school, work and in life. And let’s be honest. As these technologies become more mainstream, people with reading difficulties will no doubt turn to their smart phones and other devices to help them to understand what they’re reading – regardless of what experts may think about the merits and evidence base. 

In exactly the same way that I turn to Google Maps to find a destination.

Important note: We do not have any commercial relationships with any of the text-to-speech products or services referred to in this article, and make no recommendations about them. They are provided as examples only.

Related articles:

Principal source: Wood, S.G., Moxley, J.M. Tighe, E. & Wagner, R. (2018). Does Use of Text-to-Speech and Related Read-Aloud Tools Improve Reading Comprehension with Reading Disabilities? A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 51(1), 73-84. 

Image: https://tinyurl.com/y2fvujsk

Banter Speech & Language Banter Speech & Language
Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Concord West, North Strathfield, Rhodes, and Strathfield, and all other suburbs of Sydney.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the PreLit early literacy preparation program by MultiLit, the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP). David is a part-time Associate Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney’s Graduate School of Health. David sits on Speech Pathology Australia’s Ethics Board and Professional Standards Advisory Committee.

Should we spend time teaching our kids to spell? If so, how, and what should we teach them?

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Learning to spell is hard and time-consuming. Should we invest precious school time teaching kids how to spell? I think so. Here’s why:

1. Teachers, bosses and peers judge people who can’t spell negatively

Misspelled words:

  • make writing more difficult to read (Graham et al., 2008); and
  • cause readers to devalue the quality of a writer’s message (Marshall & Powers, 1969).

At school, papers with misspelled words are scored more harshly by teachers for the quality of ideas than the same papers with no spelling errors (Graham et al., 2011). This is consistent with my experience in the corporate and finance sectors: many professionals (me included!) judge spelling errors as a sign of sloppiness and even incompetence – especially in business communications like resumes and business proposals.

2. Spelling problems detract from a person’s writing quality and can reduce motivation to write

For example:

  • if kids have to think hard about how to spell words correctly, they may have less brainpower to expend on the content of what they are writing. They may forget ideas they have yet to write down (Graham et al., 2002);
  • spelling problems can affect a child’s choice of words: they may choose a more general or even incorrect word to describe an object or idea simply because they are unsure of how to spell the more exact word precisely (Graham & Harris, 2005); and
  • kids who are aware that they have spelling problems may avoid writing whenever possible, and become convinced that they “can’t write”, leading to less writing practice and development (Berninger et al., 1991).

3. Learning to spell improves other literacy skills

Learning to spell can improve a child’s:

4. Spelling skills improve more when they are expressly taught to kids than when they are not taught to kids

For decades, researchers have argued about whether spelling should be explicitly taught to kids, or whether it’s better for kids to figure out spelling “naturally”, i.e. without being taught, e.g. from reading lots of stuff and recognising spelling patterns – so-called “statistical learning”. In other words, researchers argue about whether spelling should be “taught” or “caught”.

The weight of good quality, peer-reviewed evidence tells us that:

  • to learn a skill from our environment (e.g. spelling) without being explicitly taught it, we need to pay attention to the to-be-learned material (e.g. Toro et al., 2005). It’s true that kids do learn some spelling patterns from their environment and interests, e.g. how to spell their name. But, for many kids, printed words are simply not attractive enough for them to pay enough attention to spelling as they read. For example, a study showed that, on average, 4 year olds spent only around 5% of the time paying attention to written words when being read to by parents, with the majority of their time spent looking at the pictures (e.g. Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005; Justice et al., 2008). This is not surprising: unlike with speech, humans did not evolve to pay attention to writing (Treiman, 2018); and
  • the best way to improve a child’s performance on a skill such as spelling, is to focus on the skill directly. In other words, to improve spelling, you need to practice spelling (and not other skills, such as working memory or pattern recognition) (Smith et al., 2015; McArthur & Castles, 2017; Treiman, 2018);
  • children learn to spell more efficiently and effectively when they receive systematic instruction about spelling than when they do not. A major meta-analysis of peer-reviewed spelling studies showed that direct and systematic spelling instruction:
    • improves students’ spelling skills by slightly more than one-half of a standard deviation, across a range of ages/years of school (from Kindergarten to Year 10!);
    • results in long-term gains;
    • results in gains that transfer to students’ performance in some writing tasks; and
    • improves phonological awareness and reading skills, including word reading and comprehension skills (but – interestingly – not fluency) (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).

5. Components of effective spelling programs

Spelling programs come in many shapes and sizes, ranging from practising lists of spelling words, to teaching specific spelling skills, to more sophisticated programs targeting a range of spelling skills. Consistent with our approach to literacy teaching and the weight of peer-reviewed evidence, we favour a phonics-based approach to teaching spelling, combined with phonological and morphological awareness training. This includes teaching students:

  • phonological awareness skills like blending sounds most often linked to letters to form words (and segmenting words into sounds);
  • links between combinations of letters and different speech sounds, e.g. “sh”, “ee”, “ou”, “ow”, “ai”, “ay”, “oi,”, “oy”, “oa”, “er”, “ir”, “ur”, “wor”, “ear”, “au”, “ck”, “ng”, “ch”, “ph”, and “ough”;
  • common spelling probabilities and patterns, including context rules (sometimes referred to as “graphotactics”), such as:
    • English words rarely ending in the letters “i”, “v” or “u” (hence “spy”, “love”, “have”, and “blue”);
    • “ck” being used to signify /k/ after a short vowel (hence “black” and “kicking”);
    • “ll” and “ff” being used to signify /l/ and /f/ after a short vowel in stressed syllables (hence “full” and “biff”);
    • vowel letters at the end of open syllables signifying a long vowel sound (hence “navy”, “be”, “I”, “no” and “music”);
    • using a silent “e” at the end of a word to signify a long vowel (hence “like” and “mate”); and
    • “c” signifying a /s/ sound when followed by “i”, “e” or “y” (hence “circle”, “ceiling” and “cycle”);
  • syllable segmentation tactics (recognising that, usually, each syllable in English contains at least one vowel sound); and
  • morphological awareness skills such as the meanings of common:
    • prefixes, e.g. “un”, “dis”, “super”, “sub”, “pro”, “pre”, “con”, “trans”, “ex”, “in”, “uni”, bi”, “tri”, “quad” and “bene”; and
    • suffixes, e.g. “s”, “es”, “ed”, “ing”, “er”, “est”, “ful”, “less”, “able”, “ous”, and “ness”; and
    • common word roots.

While the purpose of this article is not to promote any specific spelling program, we use a range of spelling and word attack programs in our clinic, including Spelfabet, Spalding and Yoshimoto’s morphological awareness programs. We’re also fans of Sounds-Write and other phonics-based programs that aim to teach kids to read through writing.

Clinical bottom line

Kids should be taught to spell because:

  • it improves their spelling, phonological awareness and some reading skills; and
  • poor spelling skills can affect academic and work achievements.

Kids can learn spelling skills through reading/exposure to print – through statistical learning – but progress depends on how much attention they pay to spelling when reading. Many kids don’t pay much attention to spelling patterns when they read.

Structured spelling instruction is more effective and efficient than statistical learning. Spelling programs that focus directly on spelling are more likely to benefit spelling than interventions that focus on other skills, such as working memory or pattern recognition.

Related articles:

Principal references:

  1. Graham, S. & Santangelo. (2014). Does Spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27, 1703-1743.
  2. Treiman, R. (2018). Statistical Learning and Spelling. Language, Speech, and Hearing in Schools, 49, 644-652.

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Banter Speech & Language Banter Speech & Language
Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Concord West, North Strathfield, Rhodes, and Strathfield, and all other suburbs of Sydney.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the PreLit early literacy preparation program by MultiLit, the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP). David sits on Speech Pathology Australia’s Ethics Board and Professional Standards Advisory Committee.

Free resources to help our preschoolers and primary school-age kids to read

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To help our kids to read, we need good tools to put independent, peer-reviewed research into practice. Decades of evidence-building tells us that kids need phonological awareness, vocabulary, synthetic phonics, comprehension and fluency skills to read well; and that oral language comprehension and morphological awareness are important, too.

Putting theory into action

The key challenge is how to teach these skills to kids with reading difficulties. It’s time-consuming (and often expensive) to find quality, evidence-based reading resources. But, there are researchers out there focused on how to implement evidence-based reading practices.

You just have to know where to look.

One of our favourite organisations is the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR): a multidisciplinary research centre based at Florida State University.

Free reading resources, activities and ideas 

The FCRR houses a goldmine of free pre-reading and reading resources, ideas, and activities.

Most of the resources we use are found in two sections:

So check out the FCRR! We hope you find their marvellous free resources as useful as we do.

Related articles:

Key source: Florida Center for Reading Research, reviewed by Carol Westby, Word of Mouth 28:5 May/June 2017.

Editor’s note: we’ve used US spelling conventions for FCRR’s name; and Australian spelling conventions for everything else.

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Banter Speech & Language Banter Speech & Language
Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Concord West, North Strathfield, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the PreLit early literacy preparation program by MultiLit, the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).

Too many stories, not enough facts? Free tips and resources to boost your child’s knowledge and reading comprehension skills

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Reading comprehension is complex. Teaching kids evidence-based comprehension strategies helps.

But it’s not enough (e.g. Catts & Kahmi, 2017).

Kids also need to learn – and to organise – knowledge about:

  • words;
  • different kinds of reading (e.g. stories and explanations); and
  • the world.

Kids struggle with reading comprehension for lots of reasons, including limited prior knowledge

Reading comprehension involves lots of different kinds of brain tasks. We need to dig out meaning from what we read and then form a “model” that holds it together in our minds (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002).

Multiple factors – alone or in combination – explain why many kids struggle with reading comprehension:

We’ve talked about many of these before.

But what do we mean by “prior knowledge”?

To understand what you read, you need to know more than just the words and what each means. For example, consider this excerpt from a Wikipedia article on American Football strategies; a topic I know very little about:

“Despite the multi-receiver sets, the spread option is a run-first scheme that requires a quarterback that is comfortable carrying the ball, a mobile offensive line that can effectively pull and trap, and receivers that can hold their blocks. Its essence is misdirection.”

I know what each word in this quote means. But I have no idea what some of the words mean in context (e.g. “run-first, “pull and trap”). Nor do I know exactly what the words mean together because I don’t know much about Gridiron. I can get a rough idea by drawing on my scant knowledge of American football (from movies), and by drawing on my knowledge of other football codes, such as Rugby League and Aussie Rules. But I lack the background knowledge to understand the simple passage fully.

So to understand what you are reading, you need knowledge about what is being discussed or read. This is called several names, including “prior knowledge”, “background knowledge” or “domain knowledge”.

Why is background knowledge important for reading comprehension?

We’ve known for ages that:

  • struggling readers tend to have less developed content knowledge and greater difficulties using knowledge to build mental models of what they read (e.g. Bransford et al., 1981; Oakhill, 1983);
  • readers with more knowledge on a topic outperform others on reading-comprehension and memory tasks (e.g. Recht & Leslie, 1989);
  • readers with prior knowledge out-perform readers who have better reading comprehension skills but little background knowledge in the tested topic (e.g. Schneider et al., 1989);
  • having some knowledge of a topic in a passage is positively associated with correctly answering questions about the passage (Compton et al., 2013);
  • struggling readers with poor background knowledge have difficulty recalling a passage’s main ideas, but when given background knowledge can often do so (Miller & Keenan, 2009); and
  • without well-connected knowledge, students have difficulty making inferences (e.g. Kendeou & van der Broek, 2005; McNamara & Magliano, 2009).

How does knowledge help?

Prior knowledge:

  • speeds up basic comprehension and leaves working memory free to make connections between new and previously learned information;
  • helps readers to make sense of word combinations that have ambiguous meanings. Knowing, for example, that “I slipped off the bank and made a huge splash” is about falling off a riverbank, and not a saving and lending institution;
  • helps with inferencing, e.g. making sense of: “The explorers huddled in their tent, 20 kilometres away from the South Pole”, is easier to understand if you know it’s very cold in Antarctica; and
  • helps older students to understand metaphor, idiom, irony, and other higher level language uses, e.g. “Victory is sweet”, “Don’t count your chickens” or “Donald Trump really loves the mainstream media”.

In other words, having a vast store of quickly available, previously acquired knowledge enables the mind to take in new information in less time and with less effort and to link it to existing knowledge (Hirsch, 2003).

Why is background knowledge a problem?

Controversy alert!

Some researchers have found that kids, especially in the early years of school, spend too little time reading non-fiction, information-based texts (e.g. Danilow et al., 2013; Palinscae & Duke, 2004). Other researchers think that some teachers focus too much, for too long, on comprehension strategies and generic skills like critical thinking, and not enough time on imparting knowledge about the world (e.g. Catts & Kahmi, 2017).

Needless to say, not everyone agrees!

What we do know is that, as readers develop, they need more advanced reading strategies to cope with the curriculum, especially for specialised areas of the curriculum like history, science and maths (e.g. Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008 and 2012).

How can we improve a child’s knowledge? Free resources and tips

Here are several evidence-based suggestions and resources, many of which are completely free:

  • Read/listen to more information/non-fiction texts. This will help children learn words and concepts needed to understand the news, social media, and books aimed at the general public. (My kids are big fans of Horrible Histories, for example, which has given them (amongst other things) a surprisingly solid understanding of the history and major personalities of the Roman Empire and Kings and Queens of England – especially the revolting bits.)
  • Read fiction that is set in real places or time periods, e.g. “The Hole in the Dike“.
  • Avoid jumping from topic to topic without considering knowledge development. Instead, pair narrative and expository text within a topic or theme. There are some great online resources you can use for this, e.g.:
  • Use various media, e.g. listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos or movies about a topic as well as reading about it (e.g. Kendeou et al., 2008). For example, use interactive online resources such as:
  • Use read-alouds in class until Year 8 (Chall et al., 1996).
  • Explicitly teach content-related vocabulary. Here’s a free tool to teach a child new words. Here’s another resource from the Florida Center for Reading Research
  • Morphemic awareness training, which may be more useful in some areas (e.g. science) than others (e.g. history).
  • Semantic feature analysis (e.g. Bos & Anders, 1990), e.g. for a free template, see Reading Rockets.
  • Discussion about texts, which have been shown to increase comprehension (Gersten et al., 2001).
  • Close Reading of texts with repeated readings of complex short texts (e.g. Fisher & Frey, 2014).
  • Using Frameworks or Schema to help kids to assimilate new information more quickly, e.g.:
    • Story structure maps, like this free one, have been shown to improve reading comprehension (Perfetti et al., 2005).
    • Graphic organisers for story mapping, expository texts and concept mapping (e.g. Gersten et al., 2001). See several free ones from the Florida Center for Reading Research.
    • Knowledge Organisers. I used these to summarise my notes at school and uni and love them! You can read more about knowledge organisers here.
  • Teach “signal words” to help determine the structure of a text, for example, words like:
    • first, second, next, last, while, during, after, before, then, until, immediately and meanwhile, signal a time (or temporal) structure, like a procedure;
    • either/or, neither/nor, compared with, likewise, similarly, yet, differ, different and however, signal a compare/contrast relationship;
    • because, so, thus, therefore, if/then, for this reason, accordingly and as a result, signal a cause and effect relationship;
    • in order to, problem, solution, steps, may be due, solve, result and leads to, signal a problem and solution text; and
    • is like, by way of illustration, including, for instance and as [big] as a, signal a description.
  • Put down our devices, and get out and explore the world together.

Some examples of full programs that integrate reading and knowledge content instruction

Clinical bottom line

To improve a child’s reading comprehension skills, evidence-based training in decoding, work attack, reading fluency, comprehension strategies and vocabulary instruction is essential. But so is systematic knowledge-building. In this article, we’ve listed a number of resources to help parents and teachers help children to increase their knowledge of the world around them.

Principal sources:

  1. Elleman, A.M. & Compton, D.L. (2017). Beyond Comprehension Strategy Instruction: What’s Next? Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 48, 84-91.

2. Hirsch, Jr., E.D. (2003). Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge – of Words and the World, American Educator, Spring, 10-46.

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Banter Speech & Language Banter Speech & Language
Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Concord West, North Strathfield, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the PreLit early literacy preparation program by MultiLit, the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).

My loved one has reading problems. Where can I find evidence-based answers to get help? New free eBook

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Instantly download our new, 188-page, free eBook here:

What is it?

There’s so much information out there about reading difficulties, including dyslexia. It’s hard to sort:

  • the good stuff – based on independent, peer-reviewed evidence; from
  • the nonsense – the fads, the snake oil, patent-protected “systems”, “special lenses”, and expensive products and courses that are not backed up by independent evidence.

We wrote this book for parents, carers and other loved ones who have a family member or loved one with reading difficulties.

This book is fad-free. People with reading difficulties don’t have time to waste on stuff that doesn’t work. This book is designed to help you find the quality information you need to get good help, quickly.

What’s in it?

Evidence-based, plain English summaries answering our 24 most frequently asked reading questions.

How to use it

Read the bit (or bits) that seem most relevant to you, and then go from there. We’ve included hundreds of clickable links between the articles, so you can choose your own adventure through the book, at you own pace.

We hope you find it useful. If you have questions or feedback, please get in touch.

Banter Speech & Language Banter Speech & Language
Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Concord West, North Strathfield, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the PreLit early literacy preparation program by MultiLit, the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).