synthetic phonics

Is your Kindy kid really reading? Find out with our 7 free mini-stories

15 December 2019 by David Kinnane

Regardless of which letter-sound sequence you use to introduce letter-sound links and teach children early blending skills, kids in Kindergarten should have mastered the basic alphabetic code by the end of the school year. They should also be able to blend the speech sounds most commonly associated with each letter to form short words, like “bat” and “sit”.

Unfortunately, some children are very good at tricking us into thinking they are better readers than they actually are. For example, some children with good expressive vocabularies and/or oral language structure skills are adept at pretending to read by guessing words from pictures or following simple language patterns (e.g. “I can see a…”, “There’s a…”). This is especially a risk when predictive texts that use repeated carrier phrases and lots of pictures. Other children simply memorise their readers and trick us into thinking they are reading by reciting books back to us on cue like secretaries from the 1950s.

Many children with problems decoding words fly under the radar until around Year 3. Then they are expected to read lots of things without pictures, and are also expected to learn new things – written words they have never seen before – by reading about them. If the child hasn’t learned to decode before Year 3, it takes a huge amount of work to catch up, and the evidence tells us that many kids never catch up.

To give families a reality check on their children’s true basic decoding skills, we have written some free, mini-stories for late Kindy kids (and older kids with reading issues).

They don’t have pictures or follow patterns. Nor are they fine literature by any measure. (If you are after quality literature to enhance your child’s oral language development, check out these links – audiobooks for preschoolers, audiobooks for kids in Kindergarten and Year 1, audiobooks for kids in Years 2-6.)

Instead, these mini-stories are designed for one thing: a basic check whether children can decode real, simple words without guessing from pictures or spotting oral language patterns.

To help us structure the stories, we used the Sounds Write letter-sound sequence and Units for reference. We tweaked it a bit to include some early developing morphemes, including 3S and possessive s. But most children who have finished Kindergarten should be able to read these silly little tales without too much trouble.

If your child struggles to read these tales, she or he might benefit from some more work on letter-sound links and early blending skills to kick-start their true decoding and reading skills.

Related articles:

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, and is a Board Member of SPELD NSW.

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

20 January 2018 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

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:

The Voluntary Prekindergarten Learning Activities: This section includes great activities and resources for important skills like alphabet knowledge and letter-sound knowledge, early phonological awareness skills, and oral language skills, including vocabulary skills.
The Student Center Activities for kids from kindergarten until fifth grade. This section includes free, downloadable activities and resources for phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, including morphological awareness and oral language comprehension (including lots of resources to teach story grammar and explanatory texts. The materials are divided into three groups based on (US) school years: K-1, 2-3, and 4-5. We particularly like the fluency and morphological awareness resources.

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.

Image: https://tinyurl.com/y7ufaan8

Banter Speech & Language

Yes to the Phonics Screening Check: my ‘Why’ in 10 points

5 November 2017 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

A few readers have asked for my views on the proposed Phonics Screening Check for all Year 1 students in Australia.

I’m against testing kids for testing’s sake. I know many overworked, and under-resourced teachers oppose the check for a range of reasons. For experienced teachers who have been trained in evidence-based reading instruction methods, the screener may not tell them much they don’t already know. I know that many parents are worried about yet another “high stakes test”. (Some have even referred to the test as a “mini-NAPLAN”.)

On this website over the years, I’ve reviewed and summarised over 300 peer-reviewed articles on language and literacy. Six days a week, I work with children, teens and adults with reading difficulties.

And, because of this work, I’m all for the Phonics Screening Check.

Here’s why:

Far too many kids and adults in Australia can’t read. Roughly a quarter of Australian Year 4 children are below the expected standard in reading; and 7% performed “extremely poorly” (ACER, 2012). 43.7% of adults lack functional literacy skills (ABS, 2009). Millions of Australians have insufficient language, literacy and numeracy skills to benefit from training or to participate effectively at work (ISCA, 2011).
Unlike spoken language (which is biologically natural), reading is unnatural. Everyone needs to learn how to do it. Kids need to be taught it. Many parents – especially parents from disadvantaged backgrounds who can’t afford tutors, educational psychologists, or speech pathologists – rely on teachers to teach their kids.
For our kids to read English words, they need to crack the alphabetic code. Kids need to link speech sounds to letters (e.g. Byrne, 1998). They need to “decode” words written on a page or screen into spoken words made up of speech sounds.
Teaching phonics to kids means teaching them to link speech sounds to letters and letter combinations. It also means teaching them to apply this knowledge to reading and spelling (Ehri et al., 2001). This includes decoding written words into speech sounds and blending the speech sounds together to read (e.g. “grand” = /g/-/r/-/ae/-/n/-/d/ = spoken word /graend/). It also means segmenting spoken words into separate speech sounds and “encoding” them into letters to spell (e.g. spoken word /graend/ = the letters g-r-a-n-d = the written word “grand”).
So far, the highest level of research evidence published in peer-reviewed, independent, scientific journals tells us – consistently – that teaching kids phonics – specifically synthetic phonics – is the best way to teach kids how to read (e.g. Galuschka et al., 2014, McArthur et al., 2012, Torgerson et al., 2006, National Reading Panel, 2000).
Kids need to understand what they read. That’s the whole point of reading. But phonics/decoding problems can be a bottleneck for the development of reading comprehension skills. Even fairly small gains in decoding skills for poor readers can have big positive effects on reading comprehension (Lervåg et al., 2017).
Despite the research evidence – and for lots of different reasons – many kids have not learned phonics. In our clinic, every week, I assess kids – including kids in Years 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and even high school – who have yet to crack the alphabet code: kids who can’t tell me what sound(s) are linked to even basic letters and letter combinations like “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u”, “g”, “l”, “sh”, “ch”, “th”, and “qu”, much less more difficult combinations like “ph”, “gn”, “ay”, “oi”, “eigh”, “igh” or “ough”. Instead, many kids seem to have been taught to memorise lists of words – many of which are decodable. Others seem to have been taught to guess words based on the first letter or word shape or “context”. More than a few can’t read without pictures to help them guess at what’s happening. These ‘strategies’ – which are not based on evidence – might get kids through Kindergarten. But they often fail to work when the game changes from learning to read, to reading to learn.
It’s upsetting for parents – and for me! – when I meet kids in Year 3 or older who don’t know how to translate letters into sounds, and to blend sounds together to read words. Why? Because, by Year 3, a kid’s reading performance compared to his or her peers becomes fairly fixed and a good predictor of his/her later academic outcomes (e.g. Spira et al., 2005).
In this context, it’s vital that we pick up kids who can’t decode words using phonics as soon as possible, including those kids who might look like good readers but are actually using guessing strategies (like pictures or word shapes) to mask their difficulties “decoding” written words into speech sounds.
The proposed phonics check is based on the UK phonics screening check. Studies on the UK phonics check have found that it “is a highly valid measure of children’s phonic skills”; and “a valid instrument for measuring word-level reading ability and sensitive in identifying children at risk of a reading difficulty”, although (as the authors’ note) this needs to be followed up with more studies (Duff et al., 2015).

Clinical bottom line

I support the proposed Year 1 Phonics Screening Check because screening phonics skills:

will help pick up kids who have reading difficulties or who are at risk of later reading difficulties; and
needs to be done when there is time to help kids at risk – well before Year 3.

As the son of two former teachers, I’m a big supporter of teachers. I understand the challenges teachers face at the coal face. I’ve never met a teacher who doesn’t want the best reading outcomes for their students. I also understand concerns about whether the check is a good use of time and resources.

Although a good start, the screening check is just a check. It won’t make a difference unless the kids picked up by the check get the extra help they need. If we want to change our appalling literacy levels, student teachers and teachers need good quality resources, training and support to learn and implement evidence-based reading assessment and instruction, especially for kids with or at risk for reading difficulties.

Principal source: Duff, F.J., Mengoni, S.E., Bailey, A.M., & Snowling, M.J. (2015). Validity and sensitivity of the phonics screening check: implications for practice. Journal of Research in Reading, 38(2), 109-123.

Read more:

Senator Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, Report highlights need for action on Year 1 literacy, numeracy checks.
Australian Government, Department of Education and Training, National Year 1 Literacy and Numeracy Check (Year 1 check): Expert Advisory Panel Key Findings and Recommendations.

Recommended reading:

Professor Pamela Snow: The story of an ugly duckling. Aka Phonics Check Furphies.

Related articles:

Image: http://tinyurl.com/yb52ehnv

Banter Speech & Language

Breaking the vicious cycle for older kids with reading problems: how to help

13 March 2017 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Older kids with reading problems get trapped in a vicious cycle: because these students don’t read well, they generally don’t read much. They miss out on countless opportunities for reading practice and for learning from what they have read (Anderson et al., 1988). They become victims of the Matthew Effect: while good readers get better, poor readers fall further behind and get poorer compared to their peers.

So what can we do about it?

A. Context: too many older kids can’t read properly

We’ve talked here about some of the terrible reading statistics in Australia.
Things are no better in the US: more than 1/4 of 8th grade and 1/3 of 4th grade readers do not read well enough to understand concepts and knowledge needed to understand grade-level texts (Perie et al., 2005).
Some of these kids can catch up if given extra, extended instruction in small groups (Torgesen, 2005). But, the older and further behind the student is, the more ground needs to be covered.

B. How to help older students with reading problems

1. Figure out what’s going on with a reliable test

There are five areas essential to effective early reading instruction: (1) phonemic awareness; (2) phonics; (3) fluency; (4) vocabulary; and (5) comprehension.
Each of these Big 5 areas should be assessed with a reliable standardised reading test. In our clinic, for example, we use the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension.
Because of the link between oral (spoken) language and reading disorders, oral language should be assessed too, just in case the student has an undiagnosed language disorder. In our clinic, we do this with either (or both of the) Clinical Evaluation of Language Functioning-4 and/or the Oral and Written Language Scales II.
A good report should cover the Big 5 and oral language development and summarise reading strengths as well as challenges.

2. Identify areas of difficulty and strength

Many kids who are labelled as having learning disabilities (LD) have problems with more than one part of the reading process.
Some older kids are “victims” of poor early reading instruction and have problems with basic phonics and phonemic awareness skills, including skills like letter-sound links and blending sounds into words. For these kids, a continued focus on synthetic phonics may be appropriate and necessary.
Other kids may have received good instruction in phonics but continue to have problems with reading fluency or comprehension.

3. Design a reading program targeting the student’s area(s) of reading weakness using evidence-based strategies

This may include:

Word-study instruction (e.g. Scamacca et al., 2007). If students can decode single syllable words correctly, but have difficulties with multisyllabic words, they may benefit from learning word analysis strategies. These are sometimes called “advanced word study” (Curtis, 2004) e.g. learning:
- rules of thumb about how to break a word into syllables;
- analysis of the parts of words (“morphology”), e.g.:
  - prefixes (e.g. un, ante, dis, magna);
  - suffixes (e.g. ous, ible);
  - word roots (e.g. ped meaning foot and “manu” meaning hand); and
  - inflectional endings (e.g. “ed” for regular past tense verb forms, and “‘s” for possessive forms); and
- letter patterns associated with predictable speech patterns, e.g.:
  - “si”, “ci”, “ti” being pronounced “sh” in second and later syllables of multisyllabic words (e.g. session, electrician, nation); and
  - the letter “c” pronounced /s/ when followed by an “e”, “i” or “y” (e.g. ceiling, circus, cycle).

Fluency instruction. Good readers read about 120 to 170 words a minute when reading aloud (Tindal et al., 2005). They read most words automatically allowing them to focus on higher order processes, e.g. understanding, inferring and interpreting (e.g. Archer et al., 2003).
- Fluency interventions: often involve repeated (“deep”) reading of the same passages; but older students can benefit from non-repetitive “wide” reading of different texts, which exposes students to new vocabulary, different content and text types (e.g. Homan et al., 1993).
- Fluency instruction can be combined with focused word-learning with target words embedded in otherwise readable text.

Vocabulary instruction.
- For typically developing students, up to 12 exposures of a word may be necessary for a student to learn it (McKeown et al., 1985). Students with LDs may need many more.
- Direct vocabulary instruction can speed up comprehension (Stahl, 2003), and may be particularly effective for students with learning difficulties (e.g. Jitendra et al., 2003).
- A reliable way to improve vocabulary for older students is to read a lot, read well, and read widely (Cuningham & Stanovich, 1998).
- The focus should be on words that are useful to know and likely to be encountered across a variety of settings (e.g. Beck et al., 2002), e.g. “regardless”, “compromise”, “evaluate”, “analyse”.
- Technical words (e.g. in science) can be taught using simple definitions, examples and non-examples, and the use of semantic maps that cover the likely uses of a word (e.g. Kim et al., 2004).

Reading comprehension instruction.
- Evidence-based comprehension techniques include teaching students to visualise, predict, summarise, make connections with existing world knowledge, re-read, restate, and question what they are reading with “why” and other “wh” questions (Vaughan et al., 2007). Click these links for more detail on evidence-based reading comprehension and studying techniques.
- Struggling readers may not have the prior world knowledge that supports integrating new information. Don’t assume knowledge.
- Graphic organisers e.g. story builder can be used to help students organise and remember what they read (e.g. DeCecco & Gleeson, 2002).
- For specific topics, knowledge organisers can also be used. I’m a big fan of these and plan to write more about them in a future article.
- We can help students by modelling important organisational steps, providing structured practice opportunities/feedback, and presenting examples of what we are after.
- Struggling readers should be taught multiple strategies.

Motivating the student. We don’t talk about this enough. Reading complex texts for meaning is hard work. Students need to be motivated to do it. Students with reading problems often lack this motivation (e.g. Morgan & Fuchs, 2007), which is part of the vicious circle we are so focused on breaking. So how do we do help here? Guthrie and Humenick (2004) identified four things that affect motivation to read:
- providing interesting goals that matter to the student (e.g. vocational, hobby-related goals);
- supporting student autonomy;
- providing interesting content/texts; and
- increasing social interactions between students related to reading.

C. Bottom line and further reading

Many older students with reading problems feel (accurately) that their learning falls further behind their peers every year they are at school. Poor reading creates a vicious cycle, which can be hard to escape.

Students need to know that it is never too late to get help. When helping an older student, teachers, speech pathologists and other reading professionals need to identify the student’s reading strengths and weaknesses with reliable tests and then tailor their help to the student’s needs and goals. Students need to be motivated to do the work. In this article, we outlined several ways of helping older students with reading problems.

Related articles:

Principal source: Roberts, G., Torgesen, J.K., Boardman, A., & Scammacca, N. (2008). Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 23(2), 63-69.

Further reading and research update: Interventions for Adolescent Struggling Readers: A Meta-Analysis with Implications for Practice – 2nd Edition (2010) retrieved from here on 13 March 2017. This site contains a wealth of evidence-based materials, including free training modules.

Image: http://tinyurl.com/hf9zeqc

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, 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 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.

Is your child struggling to read? Here’s what works

8 February 2017 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

On reflection, I’m incredibly lucky.

Both my parents were teachers. Growing up, my house was full of chatter, stories and books. My early state school education in regional Victoria was long on “old school” phonics and short on fads.

I learned to read without much trouble. I discovered many of the things I’m still passionate about in life – dinosaurs, planets, social justice, travel, speech and language, consumer rights, history, current affairs, philosophy, and bad science fiction – because I could read. Reading lets me learn new skills, explore the world, entertain myself and my kids, connect with friends and colleagues, and of course, earn my living as a speech pathologist and lawyer.

Children and adults who struggle to read miss out on many of the opportunities good readers take for granted. Helping people to learn to read is important work – far too important to waste time, energy and money on false ideas and programs that don’t work.

In this article, we summarise some of the key evidence-based principles to help children (and adults) to read. We also include links to peer-reviewed evidence, leading researchers’ websites, and some evidence-based literacy programs and resources.

12 principles I apply

A. Learning to read is a right, not a privilege

1. Reading is a human right, and affects your health, work opportunities and life-participation.

The General Assembly of the United Nations is convinced that: “[L]iteracy is crucial to the acquisition of every child, youth and adult, of essential life skills that enable them to address the challenges they may face in life, and represents an essential step in basic education, which is an indispensable means for effective participation in the societies and economies of the 21st century.” (GA Resolution 56/116.)
Low literacy may impair health, affecting the patient-doctor communication dynamics, and leading to substandard medical care. It is associated with poor understanding of written or spoken medical advice, adverse health outcomes, and negative effects on the health of the population (e.g. AHRQ Report, see below).
Early reading difficulties are related to children’s ability to develop positive social skills (e.g. Bennett et al., 2003).
Academic problems, like poor reading, often foster behavioural problems, which frequently result in disciplinary practices that remove the student from school (Christle et al., 2005).
Low levels of literacy affect educational attainment and labour force participation (ABS, 2009).

2. Learning to read opens doors; poor reading ability closes them. Literacy creates opportunities for lifelong learning and training, a good job, housing stability and improved health across your life (Gakidou et al., 2010). (Not being able to read has big negative effects on school achievement, job opportunities, mental health and participation in society.) Arguably, reading is more important than ever, with most jobs in the West now requiring literacy (e.g. Murnane, 2004), and with access to the Internet, social media platforms and even texting friends requiring a degree of literacy to participate socially (e.g. Durkin et al., 2011).

B. Reading instruction should be based on independent, peer-reviewed evidence (not ideology), and should take the client’s socio-economic background and oral language skills into account

3. Reading is “biologically unnatural“. Humans have only been reading since about 3000BC (Fischer, 2001). Unlike speaking, you have to learn to do it (e.g. Gough & Hillinger, 1980). That’s why literacy is still not universal (e.g. Gough, 1996). While it’s true some kids find reading easy to learn, others need a lot of help.

4. Reading instruction should be based on the “Five Big Ideas” (aka the “Big Five”). Independent, peer-reviewed scientific research evidence reviews (cited below) say that, to learn to read, you need to be taught these “Big Five”:

Phonemic awareness (also known as phonological awareness): knowledge about the sound structure of the language and the ability to manipulate the sound making up that structure (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, and Seidenberg, 2001).
Phonics: see below.
Vocabulary: it’s been estimated that, to cope with the curriculum, a Year 2 child needs to understand 300-400 words; a Year 3-4 child needs to understand 3,000-4,000 words; and a Year 5 student needs 10,000! (Hempenstall, 2005).
Comprehension skills.
Reading fluency.

5. As one of the Big Five, direct synthetic phonics instruction is essential. In the USA, Australia and the UK, independent evidence reviews affirmed the need for systematic, direct and explicit phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skills required for foundational reading proficiency. (The importance of teaching teachers to do this was recognised by the New South Wales Board of Studies in 2015 – New South Wales Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards. (2015).)

The best phonics to teach children is “synthetic phonics“. Synthetic doesn’t mean “fake”, here; it means “synthesising” (or blending) the sounds (phonemes) together to read words. You can read an excellent explanation of “synthetic phonics” by some of my favourite literacy researchers here.

6. It’s a myth that you can’t use phonics to read English words. In fact, according to Hanna et al., (1996):

50% of English words are directly decodable with synthetic phonics;
36% have only one “breach” of the sound-letter link (usually a vowel);
10% can be spelt properly if morphology and word histories/roots are taken into account; and
only 4% are truly irregular.

7. Oral language skills (talking and understanding) and reading skills are linked; oral language and reading skills are mutually beneficial. Improvements in spoken language skills improve reading skills, and vice versa. Oral language and reading skills piggy back on each other during the school years (Snow, 2016). If one is impaired or delayed, the other suffers. For example, children with speech-language language disorders (diagnosed or not) are at a high risk of having reading problems.

Similarly, children with reading problems may have problems learning new words and higher level language skills, which then affect their oral language development. (This, by the way, is why I screen oral language and phonological awareness in addition to decoding and reading comprehension when assessing a school-aged child with reading problems.)

8. Kids learn to read on an uneven playing field. Socio-economically disadvantaged children are at greater risk of language and reading difficulties than children from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Even though oral language development is biologically natural, it’s vulnerable to environmental factors. For example, the foundations of early language development (and the emergence of emotional security) both depend on a high dose of quality carer engagement. By the age of 4 years, on average, children of high income, professional parents may have heard 30 million more words than some children from a socio-economically disadvantaged background (e.g. Hart & Risely, 1995).

Different children have very different levels of exposure to language and books when the turn up for their first day at school. Unsurprisingly, this has knock-on effects for readiness to learn to read (see the discussion about the Matthew Effect below).

C. Evidence-based reading instruction for young struggling school-aged children is urgent: the critical 3-year window to teach children to read well

9. The 3-year learning-to-read “window”. In the first three years at school, the focus is on helping children learn to read. This is when good evidence-based reading instruction is most important. Your child’s access to good reading instruction in this period is important for all children, and vital for children from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and children struggling to read.

10. The “fourth grade slump”. Starting in the fourth year of school, the focus of the curriculum switches away from learning to read. Instead, children are expected to “read to learn”. For good readers, this is no problem. For poor readers, this is where the real trouble begins:

By the fourth year of school (year 3), a child’s performance relative to his/her peers becomes fairly fixed (Spira et al., 2005);
your child’s reading level by the start of the third grade is a good predictor of:
- later academic achievement; and
- later mental and social health; and
the “Matthew Effect” kicks into high gear.

11. The Matthew Effect. With reading (as with money), the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Good readers read more, learn more word meanings and then improve their reading skills. Children who are poor readers read less, and don’t learn new words as quickly, which further slows their growth in reading ability (Stanovich, 1986). As school progresses, the gap between good and poor readers grows and grows and grows.

That’s not to say that older kids and adults can’t learn to read. It’s just that it’s harder. As with language difficulties generally, the earlier you get help, the better. But it’s never too late!

D. Too many children and adults can’t read properly

12. Literacy levels are a big problem in Australia:

In 2011, a quarter of Australian Year 4 children are below the expected standard in reading; and 7% performed “extremely poorly” (ACER, 2012).
In 2009, 43.7% of adults were at or below Level 2 in their reading skills on a 5 point scale (ABS, 2009).
In 2011, the Industry Skills Council of Australia found that millions of Australians have insufficient language, literacy and numeracy (“LLN”) skills to benefit from training or to participate effectively at work (ISCA, 2011).

The human, social and economic costs of low literacy are enormous.

E. So what gets in the way?

A controversial question! Here are some candidates:

Professional divides: An unhelpful divide exists between the knowledge bases and expertise of teachers, speech pathologists and education psychologists. Teachers are educators, whereas psychologists and speech pathologists are health professionals. Reading failure is of course both an education and health problem. But the lack of coordination between different professionals doesn’t help clients with reading problems or their families. When I work with a school-aged child, my first port of call is the parents. My second port of call (with parents’ consent) is to teachers and any health professionals who’ve worked or are working with the child. The more we can coordinate our care and approach, prioritising the client’s interests and goals, the better things tend to go.
Ideological squabbling. If you’ve got a day or two to waste surfing the Internet and getting confused at all the navel gazing and self-interest, Google “Reading Wars”. In short, the “war” was fought between supporters of:
- a phonics- and phonemic awareness-based approach to reading instruction, focused on letter-sound links and blending sounds to read words; and
- so-called Whole-Language theories, based on post-modern theories of child development, teaching children to read words from “cues”, like context and pictures in predictable texts.

Although it was hoped that the independent reviews in the USA, UK and Australia (cited below) resolved the “reading wars” in favour of phonics and the rest of the Big Five, there are still programs influenced by Whole Language philosophies used today, including the much-maligned “Reading Recovery” program (which you can read about here). In any case, the key casualties of the war were and continue to be children failing to learn to read.

Inadequate training in the Big Five (and the “Peter Effect”). You can only give what you have; and you can only teach what you know. If you haven’t been taught properly how to teach reading using evidence-based teaching methods, you will have great difficulty teaching school children to read – especially struggling students. Unfortunately, some teachers, speech pathologists and psychologists haven’t been trained in how to teach reading using the evidence, especially if their University lecturers subscribed to the Whole Language ideology. Any education or health professional engaged in helping people to read should have training in how to teach the Big Five.
Commercial programs unsupported by independent evidence, glossy products and fads. Unfortunately, there is a big market for children and adults with poor literacy in Australia and elsewhere. Lots of reading programs seek to “exploit” this market, and some of them have no evidence to support their effectiveness. Of course, it’s hard for parents (and even some teachers) to know which ones are evidence-based. Fortunately, there are independent research groups that publish evidence summaries to assist. In our clinic, for example, we only use evidence-based programs based on the Big Five.

Whatever the reasons, we should all strive to read and apply the best quality, independent evidence to better support school-aged children, young adults, and adults with reading problems.

Related articles:

Principal source: Snow, P.C. (2016). Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: Language is literacy is language – Positioning speech-language pathology in education policy, practice, paradigms and polemics. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 18:3, 216-228. (This article should be mandatory reading for any teacher, speech pathologist or education psychologist working in literacy.)

synthetic phonics

Putting theory into action

Free reading resources, activities and ideas

Clinical bottom line

A. Context: too many older kids can’t read properly

B. How to help older students with reading problems

C. Bottom line and further reading

12 principles I apply

A. Learning to read is a right, not a privilege

B. Reading instruction should be based on independent, peer-reviewed evidence (not ideology), and should take the client’s socio-economic background and oral language skills into account

C. Evidence-based reading instruction for young struggling school-aged children is urgent: the critical 3-year window to teach children to read well

D. Too many children and adults can’t read properly

E. So what gets in the way?

Further reading

Footer

Join the conversation