The title of this post may be surprising to some, and your first instinct may be to disagree, but stay with me and I’ll (try to) explain. It's a post I've been meaning to pull together for some time, and the relative quiet of this time of year has finally enabled me to do so.
The term “Big Five” arose from the US National Reading Panel (NRP) Report in 2000, in which the following were identified as the “five pillars of reading”:
Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.
Phonics: Both children’s knowledge of the relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) to decode / recognise words AND a method of instruction. In my view, the term “phonics” is best used as an adjective, with either “knowledge” or “instruction” as the noun that follows.
Fluency: Reading text accurately, at a good rate (not “fast”), and with appropriate expression (prosody) to reflect the writer’s meaning.
Vocabulary: One’s mental store of words and their meanings, which can vary as a function of sentence context. Often described in terms of tiers
Comprehension: Understanding the meaning of the text being read, at both literal and inferential levels. Draws on decoding/word recognition skills, vocabulary knowledge, awareness of sentence structure, and background knowledge.
It’s important to remember that this report and its recommendations are now over a quarter of a century old, and other terms such as orthographic mapping have gained prominence in both research and teaching circles in the ensuing years. There’s also been some vigorous debate about how classroom instructional time should be used to develop each of these domains, in particular phonemic awareness. See here for cognitive scientist Professor Mark Seidenberg’s analysis of this debate and implications for classroom practice. Science is ultimately self-correcting over time, so these debates are important and mean we need to refresh our conceptual frameworks and everyday practice.
What has been particularly pleasing in the last quarter of a century, has been the greater emphasis on children’s oral language in the reading instruction context.
Regular readers of this blog and people who have heard me speak, will know that I (and many others, on whose shoulders I stand) position oral language as a biologically primary skill, in keeping with the work of University of Missouri evolutionary psychologist Professor David Geary. Geary and colleagues differentiate between biologically primary and biologically secondary skills and describe the importance of this distinction for education policy makers and practitioners. You can read a synthesis of this theory by the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) at this link.
In a nutshell, Geary's argument can be summarised as follows (excerpt below is from this open-access paper by Snow et al., 2023).
In a 2024 blogpost called Refocusing the biologically primary Vs biologically secondary distinction: Oral language can be vulnerable, and reading can be resourceful I argued that Geary’s work is sometimes oversimplified in its classroom translation. My point in this post was that yes, oral language is biologically primary, but it is not set-and-forget. It requires considerable input from parents and teachers, over many years (into late adolescence at least). Under typical circumstances, children acquire enough oral language skills to navigate the business of everyday life in their “village”, but this will not be enough to meet the demands of modern education. This idea is something I developed further in an open-access 2020 paper: SOLAR. The Science of Language and Reading.
Where does the idea of the "Big Six" come from?
To the best of my knowledge, the notion of the Big Six in reading instruction comes from the work of Dr Deslea Konza per her 2014 publication, Teaching reading: Why the "Fab five" should be the "Big six". It has been used in at least two state-level education jurisdictions in Australia, to underpin their guidance to classroom teachers on reading instruction.
I think it’s time this was re-considered.
In fleshing out the oral language foundations of each of the NRP “Big Five”, Konza argued (2014, p.164) that
…. the five elements identified by the NRP would be strengthened by the recognition that oral language and early literacy experiences are the foundation of all literacy achievement. An understanding of the contribution of early oral language development to longer-term literacy outcomes is important if teachers are to maximise their students’ opportunities to develop independent reading skills and enjoy the many advantages that flow from that achievement.
In fact, in the abstract of the paper (p.154), Konza states: “This paper presents a case for the inclusion of oral language and early literacy experiences as an additional and foundational element”.
What’s the problem with the Big Six idea?
I have a great deal of respect for Dr Konza, her work, and her contributions to reading instruction in recent decades, but I think she made a category mistake in arguing that oral language needs to be considered as an additional element alongside the Big Five. Her argument is akin to saying that we must add “vegetables” to our list of ingredients when we’re shopping to make minestrone soup, though we already have carrots, tomatoes, onions, and celery listed.
I have written previously about the fact that “language is literacy is language” (open access), which does not mean they are one and the same and that written language is simply speech written down. It clearly is not. There is a paradox that needs to be understood here, as I noted in the above paper (p. 220):
One requires much exposure, immersion and real-time experience in the interpersonal space, while the other requires specific instruction and repeated practice. A failure to understand and accommodate this apparent paradox seems to underlie much of the persistent influence of Whole Language instruction and its descendant educational ideologies and pedagogies, e.g. Reading Recovery and so-called “Balanced Literacy”.
The biologically primary Vs biologically secondary distinction is important but must not be allowed to obscure the fact that reading and writing, like speaking and listening, are language-based tasks. Oral language comes first, both phylogenetically (in terms of human evolution) and ontogenetically (in terms of individual development). But language knowledge and capacity is the underlying basis for communicative success in both the spoken and written modalities. It looks something like this:
We know from the work of La Trobe University SOLAR Lab academic, Dr Tessa Weadman, that even pre-school teachers, whose focus is arguably oral rather than written language, do not feel well-prepared with respect to oral language teaching. Hence, I can see that it has arguably been helpful as a short-term scaffold over the last decade, for teachers to be thinking of oral language as an “extra element” in the reading process, so they give it more deliberate focus in classroom instruction, in the literacy block and across the day. As we move towards deeper, more theoretically robust frameworks for classroom practice though, I think this way of conceptualising reading will be more of a hindrance than a help to teachers, because of the category error identified above.
Human language effectively “shakes hands with itself” when we read and write, so we can seamlessly migrate language knowledge from one modality (speaking and listening) across to another (reading and writing) to both understand and produce written text.
I have illustrated this in a modified and more contemporary representation of the Big Five, to show how these elements work synergistically in both the spoken and written modalities. This re-conceptualisation draws on the 1978 developmental language work of Bloom and Lahey (see further below). The unifying feature in both modalities? Language.
Image source: P. Snow (2026)
We could argue interminably about how many language elements there are and how they should be labelled. Why stop at the Big Six? Why not the Big Seven, Eight or even Ten? The issue is that we don't necessarily add clarity when we add categories. In fact, the opposite can be the case
In 2026, however, I think we should be providing teachers with theoretically sound models that articulate with strong pedagogical practices and minimise the number of children left behind, regardless of factors that may compromise oral language and/or reading success.
Language (oral and/or written) encompasses all of the so-called “Big Five” (and many more elements that were not included in the NRP). Regardless of how these elements are named, oral language must not be a conceptual “add-on” that we ask teachers to retro-fit to their instruction on top of the NRP pillars. This makes language just another a minestrone vegetable, rather than the main player unifying the elements underneath it.
Here's Bloom and Lahey's 1978 framework for considering the elements of oral language from a developmental perspective (noting that the sunburst in the centre is my addition, to highlight the fact that all three elements must work synergistically for communication competence to occur):
Let's correct this Big Six category mistake in 2026, for teachers' improved conceptual clarity and instructional ease.
(C) Pamela Snow (2026)
Further reading:
Serry, T., & Snow, P. (2023). Oral language. In K. Wheldall, R. Wheldall, & J. Buckingham (Eds.), Effective instruction in reading and spelling (pp. 72-97). MRU Press.
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. https://doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2015.1112837.
Snow, P.C. (2020). SOLAR: The Science of Language and Reading. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 37(3), 222–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265659020947817.
Snow, P., Weadman, T., & Serry, T. (2023). Hastening slowly on classroom-based conversational skills teaching: a commentary on Abbot-Smith et al., 2023. First Language, 43(6) 655–659 https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237231200443
Weadman, T., Serry, T. & Snow, P. (2022). The oral language and emergent literacy skills of preschoolers: Early childhood teachers’ self-reported role, knowledge and confidence. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, Published online August 31. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12777
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