Everyone is advantaged by a structured literacy approach

Inquiry question: What strategies will best support students literacy learning in my class?

Bridging the gap between neuroscience, evidence-based research and classroom teaching

‘Structured Literacy approach’

Liz Kane Literacy

Tuesday 16th April 2019

Reading is like Tennis - Tennis is complex

• Specific skills that develop to a level of automaticity
• The strategy of how to play the game
• We wouldn’t teach children the whole game of tennis, rather specific skills

In the same manner, we shouldn’t go to the whole to teach children to read.

Children with good memories and guessing strategies can look as though they are reading. Then you present them with words they have never seen before.

Centre for Independent studies education researcher

Jennifer Buckingham

The English alphabet has 22 letters (44) sounds and (over 200) spellings of the sounds.

What does the last 20 years of research tell us?

What happens in the brain when we learn to read?

What implications does this have in how reading should be taught?

Phonemic awareness

• To learn the alphabet the brain first must learn to speak
• Brain not wired for reading
• We use circuits in the brain that we already use for recognising faces to start recognising letters
• The challenge is to turn the letters into sounds

Dr Stanislas Deheane

Phonemes - a set of motor movements that are encoded with the sound signal

explicitly showing the movements as well as hear the sound.

Phonemic awareness - Identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in words

is a strong predictor of reading success

David Kilpatrick

Aggressively teach the code to these kids. - orthographic mapping

http://www.multisensoryeducation.net.au

The English Alphabetic Code - the most complex code

Teach 5-year-olds the consonants and vowels of the word

Lesson sequence

Authors to follow up

• The Simple view of Reading (Gough and Tunmer 1986)
• Scarborough’s Reading Rope (2001)
• Excellence and Equity in Literacy Education James Chapman and Bill Tunmer
• Alison Arrow
• Canterbury University Literacy Education
• Maryanne Wolf

So what does this mean for me?

• In Term 2, I am going to be very intentional about teaching ‘the code’ explicitly.
• I am going to carry out a number of phonological awareness assessments.