It takes a village: Changing reading instruction in the Education State.

 

                                                                    Image source: PPT stock

This week was an historic one for the state of Victoria, with our Education Minister and Deputy Premier, the Hon Ben Carroll MP announcing a major change in government policy settings pertaining to reading instruction. You can access the Department’s media release Making Best Practice Common Practice in The Education State as well as reading about it via open access links such as this one from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Students at Victorian state schools will all be taught reading using phonics from 2025. The centrepiece of this announcement is that as of 2025, systematic synthetic phonics will be mandated in all classrooms in the first three years of school. This means Victoria is effectively the last Australian state or territory to formally abandon balanced literacy, an approach I have written about previously, here and here, and have described as being “neither fish or fowl” – it is not whole language and nor is it structured, explicit literacy teaching. It is unfortunately whatever the person using the term wants it to be.

Many people and organisations, including Hedi Gregory and Sarah Gole, and their team at Dyslexia Victoria Support, countless individual school leaders, teachers, allied health professionals, and parents, and of course the La Trobe SOLAR Lab team (including our PhD students, Master of Education students, and dedicated tutors), ably supported by the La Trobe Education Dean, Professor Joanna Barbousas have contributed to this outcome. Alison Clarke OAM deserves a special mention in this regard, as she has campaigned for many years via persuasive, “cut-through” blog-posts, as well as making high quality resources available to classroom teachers, parents, and clinicians – often at no charge. Dr Jennifer Buckingham, FRSN CF has provided countless policy briefs to support decision-makers and practitioners, and Jordana Hunter and Amy Haywood from the Grattan Institute contributed their highly influential Reading Guarantee Report earlier in 2024. Dr Jenny Donovan and her team at AERO have been synthesising evidence for policy-makers and practitioners since the establishment of AERO in 2020, and folk like Lyn Stone have been out there treading the boards in schools, tirelessly providing professional learning to teachers, left high and dry by initial teacher education that missed the mark on reading and spelling instruction. Dr Nathaniel Swain's Think Forward Educators has been a grassroots and low-budget source of high-quality professional learning for teachers and school leaders. Several Victorian primary school principals who have been early adopters well ahead of the curve, have been generous in supporting peers in other schools to make changes. Jo Rogers, a retired Victorian primary teacher has written countless opinion pieces for The Age, such as this one as well as making inquiry submissions, such as this one. Let’s not forget too, the Australian children’s authors, who’ve backed this in over the long haul, such as Jackie French and  Sally Rippin.

Many in the mainstream media have also contributed considered and incisive articles and commentary to the public debate in recent years, with names such as Adam Carey at The Age, Rebecca Urban, formerly of The Australian, Louise Milligan at the ABC, Ellen Fanning of Radio National, Dr Norman Swan of Radio National, Lucy Carroll at the Sydney Morning Herald, Robyn Grace at The Age,  Jordan Baker at The Sydney Morning Herald, and Sarah Duggan at Education HQ, coming to mind. A little further afield, but no less influential, was Emily Hanford, and her award-winning Sold a Story podcast. 

These are not exhaustive lists and I apologise to any people or organisations I have unwittingly overlooked.

Less helpful in this debate, has been the Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union, that released a statement this week denouncing the Minister’s backing of evidence-based reading instruction and claiming a lack of respect for the professional autonomy of teachers. My message to the union, which I tried to post on their Facebook page, but strangely, comments were “restricted”, is this:

Unfortunately, the AEU seems to have a definition of "professionalism" that is at odds with the rest of the community's. Professions which are held in high esteem at community-level are those whose practitioners are mandated to operate within narrow parameters and are held to account (often publicly) when they do not do so - think pilots, medical practitioners, nurses, psychologists, engineers, etc. They do not get to "choose their own adventure" in the way that schools and teachers have been able to with respect to selecting from a buffet of approaches on reading instruction.

The Education Minister's decision will result in reduced workloads and improved professional satisfaction for teachers - two key outcomes that unions are normally invested in. This has already been demonstrated in schools that have adopted this teaching model, without any additional resourcing. The Education Minister took advice from a number of teachers and school leaders, including attending an event on a Saturday, attended by some 360 passionate and committed teachers from across the State, and fielding spontaneous questions from the audience - without exception demanding greater rigour and a requirement from government that reading be taught explicitly and systematically in every school, not just those who happen to choose to do so.

The Union has a fantastic opportunity here to be on the right side of history and be part of a major overhaul in which everyone can be a winner: students, teachers, parents, and the community at large. In all likelihood, others will be rolling up their sleeves and working around the union rather than with them.

Questions put to me by journalists this week were in the main, well-informed, but there’s still a number of misconceptions that we need to address.

First and foremost, we need some clarity around what the term “phonics” means. I prefer to see the word “phonics” used as an adjective, with a noun to follow, either knowledge or instruction. Phonics knowledge is what we want children to acquire, through their instruction and through the process of statistical learning, about how speech and print map to each other in rule-governed and morphologically patterned ways in English. Phonics instruction, however, is what is delivered by teachers, in order to support this learning by students. There are a number of different approaches to phonics instruction and they vary enormously with respect to:

·         *The teacher knowledge they require about how the writing system works in English.

·         *The extent to which children are taught explicitly, with a scope and sequence.

So, we need to work hard to help the media (and by extension, the public) understand that this is not a debate about “phonics Vs no phonics”. Every primary teacher in Victoria already teaches phonics, but there is currently enormous variation in how this is done, given that responsibility for reading instruction has been devolved to individual schools. I have written previously about the fact that I believe school leaders should be demanding less rather than more autonomy on this, and that sentiment was loud and clear at the recent SOTLA-La Trobe event in Melbourne, attended by Education Minister the Hon. Ben Carroll, at which Emily Hanford was the keynote speaker. School leaders are not able or required to choose their own adventure on child safety or prevention of anaphylaxis (both issues on which evidence and recommendations continue to evolve), yet this has been the case on the core business for schools of reading instruction. This makes no sense and is the fundamental turn-around in this new policy.

So - what lies ahead?

Although there was rightly a sense of celebration and relief at this week’s announcement, we must not be starry-eyed about the challenges inherent in the implementation of new practices and equally importantly, the de-implementation of practices that need to be removed, because they are in the balanced literacy DNA – i.e., they are part of an eclectic bundle of approaches that teachers have been forced to fall back on when not adequately prepared for reading instruction by their initial teacher education.

Many schools are already on this journey, and some are established in their new practice, with data (academic and wellbeing) to attest to its effectiveness. From those who have started the journey, we at La Trobe hear many stories of the steep hill teachers have to climb to acquire new knowledge that translates into new practices. We also hear about how difficult it can be to relinquish practices that are balanced literacy comfort-zones. Here I am thinking of the following (as examples), which will all need to be de-implemented as part of this new policy:

·         *The use of three cueing strategies for teaching students to identify unfamiliar words.

·         *Sending banks of sight-words home with children for their parents to teach to them as visual wholes.

·         *The use of predictable, levelled texts as early instructional supports.

·         *Use of “letter of the week”.

·         *Use of Running Records as the go-to progress monitoring tool.

·         *The use of cute but trivialising and demeaning “strategies” like Lips the Fish, Skippy Frog, and Eagle Eye – see more in this 2024 open access paper by Kearns and Borkenhagen.

In their place, we will be looking to see:

·         *Teachers gaining expert knowledge about how the English writing system works and how oral language and written language both relate to and differ from each other.

·         *Teachers trained in, and applying one of many evidence-aligned systematic synthetic phonics programs for initial teaching of novices about how the writing system works.

·         *Reading instruction and writing instruction being closely aligned so that mastery of the English spelling system occurs for both.

·         *The use of “decodable” (phonically controlled) texts in the early stages of reading instruction, to enable children to practice the elements of the writing code to which they have been exposed, and in turn, develop the essential skills of automaticity and fluency that contribute to reading comprehension.

·        *Explicit teaching of vocabulary, sentence structure, inferencing, and background knowledge, so that the upper strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope are being developed alongside code knowledge, from the outset.  

·         *The use of rigorous progress monitoring tools that have strong psychometric properties (validity and reliability) and articulate to instructional decisions and actions. This should include the introduction of a full-scale Phonics Screening Check, not a light-touch version that under-samples the knowledge and skills in question.

I was asked by a journalist this week “How will we know we have got this right?

We will know we got this right in five years’ time if policy makers and academics are no longer falling for the fallacy of the Golden Mean and assuming that all ideas about reading instruction are worthy of a seat at the table just because some stakeholders loudly assert opinions not backed by evidence. There may well be many ways of teaching a child to read, but that does not mean they are equally effective at a population level. Government policy has to be about population level prevention of difficulties and promotion of success.

We will know we have got this right when we see gatherings of highly motivated teachers at professional learning events (invariably in unpaid time on weekends) such as Sharing Best Practice and researchED focusing their discussion on the details and nuances of classroom practice, not on the demoralising and exhausting struggles of arguing for better practice and working around colleagues who resist change – sometimes because they are anxious about it and sometimes because they have not yet had an opportunity to fully understand its rationale.

We will also know we got it right when we see public health thinking, via Response to Intervention (and its broader “home” Multi Tiered Systems of Support) employed as the conceptual framework for the ongoing planning, delivery, and review of reading instruction in Victorian schools.

We will know we have got this right when we no longer need to despairingly reflect on the poor translation into practice of recommendations such as those of the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, that has gathered metaphorical dust on virtual shelves for nearly 20 years.

No society can afford (or justify) the level of reading failure described in the recent Grattan Reading Guarantee Report and no system can resource the intervention services such levels of failure necessitate. Let’s not forget too, the downstream consequences of low literacy in the form of mental health/substance abuse problems, unemployment, involvement with the criminal justice system, and unstable housing. These are all burdens unfairly distributed to children who start from behind in the first place.

As the adult village around our children, we must therefore, not squander the opportunity afforded by the Education Minister’s announcement this week.   

© Pamela Snow (2024)

Refocusing the biologically primary Vs biologically secondary distinction: Oral language can be vulnerable and reading can be resourceful.

 

In the context of early years reading instruction, one of the most helpful entry-points for understanding the difference between oral language and written language is the distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary skills, as articulated in the work of US (University of Missouri) evolutionary psychologist, Professor David Geary.

Geary has collaborated with Dr Dan Berch on what is known as “an evolutionarily informed theory” which holds that ‘Folk domains represent universal forms of knowledge and competencies that emerge from a combination of inherent cognitive biases and evolutionarily expectant experiences’ (Geary & Berch, 2016, p. 219).

By folk domains, Geary and Berch mean those knowledge and skill sets that humans have an evolved, and hence biologically primary advantage for developing. These include social domains such as recognition of the meaning behind each other’s facial expressions (e.g., friendly or hostile), the development of oral language (expressive and receptive verbal skills), the emergence of theory of mind*, and ecological domains such as folk biology and folk physics, i.e., our “commonsense” understandings, acquired early in life, about how the world around us works. An example of folk biology is the inherent understanding that parents are older than their children. Folk physics on the other hand, takes in concepts such as gravity, and the inability of humans to fly unassisted.

Geary and Berch explained that biologically primary skills have assisted humans to hone capacities that support vital physical and social survival in groups – hence the nod to human evolution in the name of the theory.

So - this is a theory that asks us to think about what knowledge and skills we might expect children to absorb or “intuit” through everyday life experiences “in the village”, as opposed to the knowledge and skills that they can learn, if appropriate instructional experiences are provided. Here we might think of playing a musical instrument, learning how to play chess, and of course, the icing on the life-trajectory cake…..learning to read, and then to write.

In his commentary on Geary’s work and its applications to education, David Didau (2017) summed up its significance for educators this way:

If it’s a primary adaptation, then maybe we don’t need to teach it at all as children will have an innate ability to pick it up from their environments. That said, maybe we do need to make sure that children’s environments are conducive to acquiring the folk knowledge we all take for granted.

As can be seen, a close read of Didau’s words highlights that there may need to be some qualifications to this conceptual framework. While I think the biologically primary-biologically secondary distinction is profoundly important as a macro lens on education, I also think there are some notable caveats to bear in mind.

I have written previously that  “. . . although oral language development is biologically primary and ‘natural’, it is by no means ‘set and forget’”. This is because a range of biological, ecological and circumstantial factors come into play in children’s lives that result in them experiencing different home language and literacy environments in the preschool years, and different instructional environments in the school years. We have known for decades that there is a social gradient, for example, that impacts the quality and quantity of language exposure children experience in the preschool years (see here for references). Language development is not configured to succeed without adult input. Adults (parents and teachers in particular) invest considerable time into encouraging and supporting the development of connected discourse skills (especially conversation and narrative genres in the early years) through repeated serve-and-return interactions across the day, real-time modelling, and expansions and elaborations as part of everyday feedback and encouragement. Oral language is clever, but it doesn't get there on its own.

I often make the observation when I present professional learning, that oral language is a paradox. It is both biologically primary and highly fragile. Certain neurodevelopmental disorders (otherwise known as forms of neurodiversity - sometimes diagnosed, sometimes not) impact on children’s oral language development, notably developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various forms of syndromal and non-syndromal intellectual disability, to name a few.

Epidemiological research carried out by Professor Courtenay Norbury and her team in the UK tells us that we should expect two children in every class of 30 to meet diagnostic criteria for Language Disorder/Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) on formal assessment at school entry. What we should not assume, however, is that the remaining 28 are flying, unencumbered with respect to their oral language skills. A significant, but unknown proportion of children will have weak language skills that may go undetected and/or may be mistaken for disinterest/poor motivation and/or lack of social skills. Some children’s language disorder is not identified until they struggle with reading comprehension, in spite of adequate decoding skills. This 2018 open-access paper by Adlof and Hogan is a recommended read on this and on DLD.

So, this capacity for which humans have evolved a special evolutionary advantage is not quite as self-sufficient as it is sometimes made out to be.

Nowhere is this lack of self-sufficiency more evident, in fact, than in the expansion of children’s vocabulary beyond everyday so-called “Tier 1” words, to the other side of what the late Dr David Corson described as the “lexical bar”, to the higher-order, more literate language that is needed for academic success. Corson observed that (my emphasis):

To look at the impact that students’ life histories have on their learning and use of academic English words, one starting point is the commonplace fact that the vocabulary of English falls into two very different categories. (There is a)….. striking incompatibility between Anglo-Saxon and Graeco-Latin elements in English: ‘the familiar homely-sounding and typically very short words’ that we learn very early in life and use for most everyday purposes and ‘the more learned, foreign sounding and characteristically rather long words’ (p. 138)” [that are used for academic purposes].

Corson was, of course, referring to the categories of words that we now commonly describe as Tier 2 (relatively common but less so than Tier 1) literate language used by educated citizens, and Tier 3 words, which are subject-specific and only infrequently arise in decontextualised ways, for example words such as enzyme, catalyse, rhomboid, and isthmus. Readers are referred to the work of Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan for a more detailed consideration of tiers of vocabulary and how to teach across them.

Corson’s reflection provides an important “yes, but” to the cut and dried idea of oral language being biologically primary. This maxim holds to the extent that under typical circumstances, children will acquire a generous store of Tier 1 words, with which they can navigate the business of everyday life, in the here and now with those around them. Without exposure to impactful classroom instruction, however, most children are not going to experience enough of the literate language that authors use, to get across Corson’s lexical bar, as users and consumers of more sophisticated language. This exposure needs to occur both through classroom-based vocabulary teaching and through children’s own reading. The latter of course forms a compelling argument for impactful early reading instruction, so this is not left to chance and a never-ending game of catch-up for all concerned.

Interestingly, there are also some “yes but” scenarios in play on the biologically secondary side of the ledger, with respect to children learning to read. These are borne out in Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading and Writing infographic (see below), which represents the fact that a small percentage of students (5-10% in the darker green shaded area) are successful with seemingly little to no formal reading instruction. They appear to skip across the metaphorical bridge from biologically primary (oral language) to biologically secondary (reading) skills on the strength of a positive alignment between genetic endowment and preschool language and literacy experiences, followed by a compounding Matthew Effect on school entry. A further 35-40% (those in the paler green zone) seem to succeed at school, regardless of where the reading pedagogy they experience sits on a continuum of explicitness (see here for an open access paper contrasting balanced literacy and structured literacy teaching). 

Reproduced with permission from https://nancyyoung.ca/the-ladder-of-reading-writing/

The existence of these “early adopters” of biologically secondary skills should not overly surprise us, given that reading skills, like intelligence and language skills are spread across a distribution. Reading is probably most accurately conceptualised as a bio-psycho-social skill – one that draws on genetic influences, individual temperament/motivation factors, and the nature of the child’s environment (including the instruction to which they have been exposed). Some children will be very high performers, some will be very low, and most will clump around the mid-point. This pattern is strongest where a so-called normal distribution occurs, but of course a core aim of education is to disrupt the normal distribution by pushing the entire curve to the right, in a more peaked (less spread out) pattern. They key thing when considering this bio-psycho-social framework, though, is the fact that schools cannot influence children’s genetic endowment. They can, however, influence the psycho-social domains by teaching reading sub-skills and promoting a strong sense of self-efficacy as a reader.

What is perhaps not discussed enough, is the potential value-add for these early adopters, of explicit teaching of spelling and the incorporation of morphological awareness and knowledge to (a) promote vocabulary development (especially on the high side of Corson’s lexical bar, as discussed above) and (b) provide explicit understandings of the ways in which morphology and spelling interact with each other. Consider for example, the convention that we double a final consonant in CVC words when we add the suffix “-ing” (e.g., cup becomes cupping) and we drop word-final “e” in the same situation (e.g., cable becomes cabling). We could hope that all strong readers notice and intuit these conventions, which of course some do, or we could explicitly teach them, as a way of fast-tracking improved writing. In the same way, we can hope that strong readers intuitively “notice” that the words construct, destruct, instruct, structure, and obstruct all have the same (Latin) base “struct”, and make the conceptual leap that it means “build”. Alternatively, we could invest classroom (instructional) time into teaching the meanings of the Latin and Greek bases that make up so much of the literate language over which successful students achieve mastery. In so doing, we can teach them the generalisable habit of being curious about word meanings, origins, and connections. In a language with the large and rich vocabulary we have to work with in English, this would seem like a solid investment.

Moving down into the red-shaded area of Nancy Young’s infographic, we see how the other half lives – the 50% of students for whom the bridge from biologically primary to biologically secondary skills is experienced as a flimsy rope assembly suspended over rapidly running waters a long way below. These are the students who truly embody Geary and Berch’s evolutionarily-informed theory with respect to reading skills. They are also the 50% who remind us that we cannot build entire education systems around the good fortunes of half of the population. Doing so is to wilfully sentence half of the populace to under-achievement and its associated social and economic baggage across the life-span. Nor, however, should we build entire education systems exclusively around those for whom the journey is especially challenging. We must build systems that effectively meet the needs of all, ensuring that every student makes continuous progress and is extended in their learning, wherever they are under the curve, and whatever their starting point.

While reading scientists are rightly at pains to emphasise that, in the words (and indeed book tile) of Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, we have a language instinct, (but not a reading instinct), there are certain adaptations that our brains seem to make once we begin to learn to read, and these should be understood and capitalised on in early reading instruction. Right across the proficiency spectrum, we want children to be cashing in on what Professor David Share described back in the 1990s as the self-teaching hypothesis.  This is especially important in an orthography such as the one we use in English, where there is not a reliable two-way 1:1 correspondence between grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), and some GPCs occur relatively infrequently. Those low-frequency, less regular GPCs occur more and more in texts children are reading beyond their mastery of basic GPCs and fluent reading of decodable (phonically controlled) texts in the early stages of reading success. Share cited evidence that the average fifth grader encounters around 10,000 new words per year, a phenomenon he aptly described as an “orthographic avalanche”. He argued that only efficient, transferable decoding skills afford children opportunities for high rates of incidental success in decoding novel GPCs in printed words. Such success of course contributes to reading fluency, which is a strong driver of reading comprehension.

You can learn more about Share’s self-teaching hypothesis at this Five from Five page. A closely related construct, statistical learning, is outlined by Joanne Arciuli in this 2018 open-access paper. She notes (p. 634) that:

Children are given explicit instruction regarding some of these regularities to assist them when they are beginning to “crack the code.” Such instruction is vital in the early years of decoding. However, in a language such as English, which has a deep orthography with many-to-many mappings between orthography and phonology rather than one-to-one mappings and complex mappings that depend upon positional and other contextual regularities, it is not possible to convey explicitly all of the regularities that children need to know in order to become skilled readers. Thus, it must be assumed that some regularities are acquired implicitly.

Self-teaching and statistical learning, in turn, are related to a third contemporary construct in reading science research and practice: set for variability, otherwise known as mispronunciation correction. I touched on this in my most recent blog-post and provided a range of links there to readings and podcasts for more information. Mispronunciation correction means that we are guiding students to form hypotheses about possible pronunciations of unfamiliar GPCs and then supporting them to use this information to test a spoken (pronounced) approximation against their oral language lexicon and assess its likely accuracy.

These lines of research and classroom/clinical practice remind us that reading, while a biologically secondary skill, does not have to flail around like an upturned tortoise every time an unfamiliar word is encountered. Under optimal circumstances, it can be resourceful and like a bank account, earn compounding-interest on its returns over time.

The bottom line then, is that oral language skills are biologically primary, yet can be vulnerable, and reading skills are biologically secondary, yet can be resourceful. The challenge (and opportunity) is to titrate instruction to ensure that a biologically primary skill like oral language is not taken for granted and is supported to develop beyond the proximal horizon of Tier 1 words and simple sentence structures. On the flip side, its biologically secondary cousin, reading skill, should be supported through high-quality initial instruction to become autonomous and a secret weapon for ongoing oral language development. This requires a nuanced understanding on both sides of the biologically primary Vs secondary ledger by teachers and curriculum leaders.

[*Theory of mind (ToM) is sometimes mistakenly treated as being synonymous empathy, but that is not correct. The two are related, but ToM is the understanding that another person my hold a false belief, by virtue of their application of the information they have available to them. You can watch a video demonstrating its features here]. 

(C) Pamela Snow (2024)

 

Help! My Literacy Lead has said we have to send lists of sight-words home for parents to teach to their children.

 

Image source

I am but one of many academics whose work brings them in contact with schools to support a transformation away from balanced literacy (BL) to structured, explicit literacy teaching (SELT) that is informed by the evolving body of knowledge known as the science of reading. It’s pleasing to see so many teachers, schools, and in many cases, entire systems, getting on board with the need to provide reading instruction that is delivered by teachers with a deep knowledge of their language and writing system and in ways that promote success for the largest number of students as a result of Tier 1 teaching.

All good so far.

In this role, though, I am often contacted by teachers with implementation questions, as per the title of this blog-post, which was the subject-line of a recent email I received from a teacher.  These questions are a valuable lens on the change processes teachers are undertaking and the sense that they are seeing a ghost emerging out of the fog, as they gain a clearer understanding of the enormity of the differences between BL and SELT. Their questions also shine a light on what needs to be made clearer for teachers with respect to (a) the coherence of their new instructional approaches and (b) what they need to stop doing, in order to be teaching in ways that entail high levels of internal consistency and don’t confuse our youngest school learners.

Nowhere is this more evident I think, than on the question of teaching so-called “sight words”.

When I recently received the email mentioned above, I hurriedly put together a number of links and resources for the teacher who had made contact with me. This teacher also attached a letter from their principal, addressed to parents informing them of the importance of them (the parents) teaching sight words to their beginning readers, at home, through “lots and lots of repetition”.

There’s a number of fundamental flaws in this position. Let’s look at them one-by-one.

1.      It is not the job of parents to teach children how to read. I have blogged about this previously. If we accept that this is the job of parents, we have to also accept that parents are responsible for teaching measurement concepts in maths. Why stop there? We could add in hand-writing, fractions, spelling, algebra, the life-cycle of insects, the nature of tides, and while we’re at it, Newton’s theory of gravity. Come to think of it…… what’s the job of school again?

When we kid ourselves that we can out-source to parents something as essential to the early school years as teaching reading, we are simultaneously (a) displaying a fundamental lack of understanding about the complex nature of reading, and (b) de-professionalising teachers, who have gained four-year university degrees that purport to equip them with specialised knowledge about the reading process and how to teach it. Perhaps the decision to send banks of sight words home for parents to teach is an admission (albeit not spoken) that in most cases, teachers are not well prepared for classroom reading instruction, so have to rely on hope-for-the-best approaches like devolving this responsibility to parents.

Once again - it is not the job of parents to teach their children how to read. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s see if we can untangle some further knots with respect to so-called “sight-word” teaching.

2.      There is a lot of confused and confusing terminology on this topic. Confused terminology almost always means confused understanding. Hence, we see terms such as “tricky”, “irregular”, “high-frequency” and “heart” used as synonyms for “sight” words. The bottom line, as I will attempt to clarify here, is that sight words are best thought of as instructional outputs or endpoints (things children learn) – they are not (with some minor exceptions*) instructional inputs (things teachers teach). I can’t recall who first quipped that “Every word wants to be a sight word when it grows up” but I first heard this said by Associate Professor Lorraine Hammond AM, of Edith Cowan University. It is also sometimes attributed to Dr Jan Wasowicz and is a helpful mantra to keep in mind.

*When teaching using decodable texts in the early stages, it’s wise to give a boost to fluency by ensuring that students are familiar with a small number of words that form the mortar in such texts, but are sometimes not at the most phonically regular end of the continuum, e.g., my, the, I. You can read more about this on the Five From Five website.

3.      Can words in English be classified as regular Vs irregular? It seems that many teachers have been told in their pre-service education, some version of “Lots of words in English have irregular/random spellings, so children just have to learn them by rote as wholes”. Let’s put this assertion to bed:

a.      The notion of regularity is most helpfully considered as a continuum, not a dichotomy. Some words are highly regular, even for our novice learners, e.g., the words “mat” and “pit”. Some words are highly irregular, e.g., “eye” and “yacht”, and other words sit somewhere in between, e.g., “said” and “young”. The villain of the piece, in the case of relative irregularity is often a vowel or vowel team, especially in the case of words that children encounter as beginning readers (consider for example break Vs bread).

b.     When knowledge of etymology and morphology are taken into account, the notion of “irregularity and randomness” gives way to consideration of known spelling patterns and conventions. Louisa Moats has written about this here.

c.      When children are learning how to read via systematic synthetic phonics instruction, it can be helpful to apply the word “yet” to the question of whether a pattern is regular or not. The “ph” spelling for the sound /f/ is perfectly regular if you have been taught it and have had experience applying it in your reading of phonically-controlled texts, have perhaps noticed it in environmental print, and had opportunities to practise writing it. It is not something you will regard as “regular” however, if you have not yet been taught it.

4.      Learning to read is not a visual memory process. Children need to understand the code with which their writing system represents language meaning. For historical reasons, English has a complex (relatively orthographically dense) code, which takes longer for children to learn than in countries that have more transparent orthographies. Teaching children sight words (or more precisely, expecting that they somehow learn them by osmosis on their parents’ watch) is treating reading as a right-hemisphere, visual memory task. It is not allowing the language areas of the left hemisphere to do the necessary but not automatically generated heavy-lifting, to map speech and print to each other. The work of French neuroscientist Professor Stanislas Dehaene is useful for understanding this process and its importance.  

5.      Teaching sight words does not equip children with a transferable set of decoding skills that they can take to any unfamiliar word. Instead, it sends the unhelpful message that the writing system is opaque and random, and words need to be learned one-by-one, as hieroglyphic “wholes”. This is an extremely inefficient way to become a proficient reader in a language that is (a) morpho-phonemic in structure and (b) contains a larger number of words than most other languages, because of rich borrowings over a two-thousand year period. The rich borrowings have obviously also entailed a range of spelling patterns, and rather than teaching these effectively as “wingdings”, instruction can be informed by teachers’ knowledge of word families (and their spellings) from different languages. This brings order into what would otherwise be chaos.

6.      Many words on so-called “sight word” lists are easily decoded by children who have been given some basic code knowledge. So – why aren’t we just teaching the skill of decoding? Teaching banks of sight words is pretending that we have a language made up of logo-graphs (like Chinese), which we do not. As noted above, English is morpho-phonemic in structure. We encode sound through phonemes, and meaning through words (free morphemes) and affixes (bound morphemes). Author of Beneath the Surface of Words, Sue Scibetta Hegland uses the term "linguistic Lego" to describe the way English adds and removes word elements to change meaning.

 7.      Ironically, learning words by sight flies in the face of the BL argument that “context and meaning reign supreme in early reading instruction”. Nothing could be more de-contextualised in fact, than an isolated word on a flash-card. That irony seems to have been lost in BL classrooms and lecture theatres. If we want to promote students’ early fluency and reading comprehension, we need to provide them with a transferable toolkit for decoding unfamiliar words, alongside teaching them the small bank of words mentioned above, that are both more irregular and more frequently occurring, so we are removing (or at least lowering) the hurdles facing novice readers on their journey to fluency and comprehension.

8.      What we want is for initial reading instruction to result in orthographic mapping – the formation in longterm memory of permanent links between phonemes and graphemes in a word (for reading and spelling), and for these to be tied to the word’s meaning. The term orthographic mapping was introduced to the reading science field by Dr Linnea Ehri and is regarded as a theoretically robust and empirically borne-out construct with major implications for early reading instruction. You can read a detailed and thorough essay outlining her work and reasoning, and its significance for classroom teachers, in this 2022 blog-post by Stephen Parker.

Anna Geiger (The Measured Mom on social media) explains orthographic mapping in this brief video. 

      The more words we have orthographically mapped, the less mental effort we need to put into getting words off the page, and the bulk of our cognitive and linguistic resources can instead be channelled into comprehending text.

The bottom line with orthographic mapping, as noted earlier in this post, is that words become sight-words for individuals. “Sightwordedness” (my neologism for our purposes here) is not a feature of a word. It is a feature of what Charles Perfetti described as the “lexical quality” of a word – for an individual learner. High quality mental representations of a word in a child’s longterm memory (its spelling, pronunciation and meaning) promote reading comprehension, and the inverse is also true – weak representations slow down and compromise reading comprehension.

9.      Set for variability and mispronunciation correction are encouraging lines of research and practice with respect to promoting orthographic mapping (i.e. strong lexical representations of words). The term  “set for variability” seems to have been introduced by Richard Venezky in 1999, but I am happy to be corrected on that. It is related, to my mind, to David Share’s self-teaching hypothesis. The argument behind this construct is the idea that most children do not need to be taught every single grapheme-phoneme correspondence in English. Nothing succeeds like success, and once the decoding train pulls out of the station, it gathers speed, as children use (implicit) statistical reasoning to form and test hypotheses about what an unfamiliar written word might sound like when spoken aloud. The emergent reader who encounters the word “lodge” in a text and pronounces it as “lod – ge” can be praised for their effort, asked if they know such a word, and then either arrive at, or be assisted to find, alternative ways of decoding the word that lead to its correct pronunciation and meaning. 

      You can listen to a brief (five and a half minutes) overview of "set for variability" by Dr Stephanie Stollar at this Facebook link.

Importantly, as Dr Danielle Colenbrander emphasises in this recent Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast interview (in which she is in conversation with Dr Katie Pace-Miles), mispronunciation correction is completely different from the three-cuing approach that is popular in BL classrooms. Mispronunciation starts with the child’s focus on sound-letter correspondences and lifting these off the page, using the information contained in the text. It encourages narrow experimentation with different pronunciation options, not superficial attention to the word, followed by a focus on pictures and/or other so-called meaning “cues”.

Mispronunciation correction can also be harnessed alongside what Australian linguist Lyn Stone refers to as our “spelling voice” – the strategy we apply when we are spelling words that might for us, as an individual, be “tricky”. The word Wednesday is often used as an example here. If we pronounce it in our heads as “Wed – nes – day” we have more than a fighting chance of writing it correctly. Having it orthographically mapped also means that we will not persist in pronouncing it that way when we read it aloud, as we know that this is one of many words in English whose spelling and pronunciation have wandered off in different directions.

Lyn has produced a helpful brief video on orthographic mapping and how to turn words into sight-words. It also covers the folly of three-cueing as a teaching approach to support this. It is well worth 8 minutes of your time.

Turning words into sight words is a process of untangling one of the knottier aspects of contemporary reading science and is a major source of confusion for teachers and literacy leaders. Doing this with maximal efficiency (by systematically teaching code knowledge) is the most reliable path to reading proficiency and enjoyment, and ultimately to academic success, for our novice readers. 

An understanding of orthographic mapping means that the phonological, orthographic, and semantic features of words can be knitted together into longterm memory to support reading and writing, as well as strengthening spoken language. 

The role of parents in this equation is to listen to and delight in, their child's blossoming reading skills, rather than providing an after-hours rote-learning service that is poor use of everyone's time.

(C) Pamela Snow (2024)