What does the Science of Reading actually look like in the classroom?

Contents

1. How to teach Primary English
2. Why is this the way to teach Primary English?
3. When should each concept be taught?
4. What does this actually look like in the classroom?
5. Primary English Resources

In this section I have collated a bunch of resources to help implement the Science of Reading in the classroom with examples of what it can actually look like. There are also recommended programs and assessments for each aspect of teaching English.

** PLEASE FEEL FREE TO MAKE ANY SUGGESTIONS FOR CHANGES OR INCLUSIONS. **

MUST WATCH – If you are still unsure on what this actually looks like in the classroom and why- WATCH THIS 👇. Features prominent voices such as Lorraine Hammond, Anne Castles and Jennifer Buckingham and demonstrations from the enthusiastic Brooke Wardana!

“Prominent educators showcase scientifically researched evidence-based methods including explicit instruction and the ‘Big 6’ of Reading. Research indicates that a building a bridge between oral language and written language facilitates reading acquisition.“

Example Scope and sequences and programs

So, how do we actually fit all of this into our day? In this section, there are a number of examples of how some teachers are currently implementing it all:

Reading Science in Schools (a community of educators offering advice, support and resources to support the implementation of the Science of Reading in Schools):

Mosman Park Primary School Phonics Scope and Sequence

PhOrMeS – The Free Primary Word Reading, Spelling and Learning Curriculum. A ready-to-teach, comprehensive, core literacy skills curriculum which covers the key language and literacy skills of:

  • Phonology
  • Orthography
  • Morphology and Etymology
  • Semantics

Grace Mary Primary School – Curriculum

Core Knowledge Language Arts: I’d have to do a whole separate post on how great this resource is from E.D. Hirsch’s team. Full of rich texts, implementations guides and set out in a highly structured and sequenced manner. I’d love to see how Australian schools are using this! This article from Greg Ashman gives a great overview of why the systematic approach of building background knowledge works.

UFLI Foundations Toolbox: The Toolbox contains resources to support your implementation of UFLI Foundations lessons.  These include lesson slide decks, decodable passages, and more!

Reading Rockets – Phonics: In Practice

Five from Five – Scope and Sequence

SPELD NSW – Phonics and Morphology Scope and Sequence

SPELD – Vocabulary Scope and Sequence

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Amplify Reading: Scope & Sequence

Emina McLean – Working the clock and “the literacy block”. Emina also presented Designing an ambitious and rigorous primary English curriculum where she outlines Dockland PS curriculum design process and what it looks like. She uses 5 “Big Idea’s” as a guide:

  1. Be Ambitious: “Students are capable of far more than we give them credit for. We should aim high(er).”
  2. Be rigorous: “Teaching is hard. Learning is hard. We plan supports for staff and students accordingly”
  3. Expertise, equity, workload v. autonomy: Develop teacher expertise, low variance curriculum, mapped and aligned curriculum, clear scope and sequence documents, high quality materials.
  4. Viewing English and Literacy as synonymous can be unhelpful: Literacy is seen as being taught in a block then it’s done. It is never done.
  5. Integrated instruction > isolated instruction: Focused attention on building foundational (core) literacy skills without the distraction of content is a useful approach initially.
Emina McLean: Designing an ambitious and rigorous primary English curriculum

Dr. Anita Archer – The pioneer of “I do, we do, you do,” Anita is like a walking billboard! Check out this series of videos of her demonstrating explicit instructional lessons. There’s an excellent ERRR podcast with Anita here where you will hear about the following phrases:

  • “Teach the stuff and cut the fluff”
  • “Learning is the outcome, teaching is the pathway”
  • “If you expect it, pre-correct it”
  • “Avoid the void, for they will fill it”
  • “Predictability, predicts ability”
Kelly Buxton from Courthouse Juniour (UK)- Reading strategy updated

Suggested structures for your literacy block

As you will see in the examples below, there is no one way to structure your literacy block. However, having structure is important. I took about it in previous posts on How should we actually teach Primary English? and Why should we follow the Science of Reading?

Tim Shanahan – How Would You Schedule the Reading Instruction? Recommends 2-3 hours/day of reading/writing instruction. “Need instruction in multiple areas: word knowledge, oral reading fluency, writing, and reading comprehension.” Also, he writes about how it doesn’t all have to be in the one block.

Jocelyn Seamer – The What, Why and How Long of the Literacy Block:

  • Daily Review – approximately 15 minutes
  • Explicit Teaching of graphemes and word level skills (25 min)
  • Sentence Level Transcription (15 min)
  • Decoding and Reading (20 min)
  • Shared Writing (15-20 min)
  • Language and Literature Based Lesson (30-40 min)

Nathaniel Swain: Teaching all the facets of reading and writing – Prep/Kindy

  1. Oral Language and Comprehension – 20min
  2. Decoding & Encoding
  • Phonemic Awareness – 3 min
  • Decoding & Spelling review – 10 min
  • NEW Decoding & Spelling – 17min
  • Additional component Reading Fluency – 10min

3. Handwriting – 10min

4. Vocabulary & Morphology – 10min

Clayton South Primary School – You can read about their structured literacy program

Stephanie Le Lievre & Natalie Campbell from Reading Science in Schools presentation on Re-thinking guided reading

Steph Le Lievre – Guided Reading: an alternative approach.

  • Literacy daily review – 20min
  • Whole class phonics/spelling lesson – 20min
  • Fluency pairs – 10min
  • Comprehension – 30min
  • Writing – 30min
  • Handwriting – 10min
Natalie Campbell goes through how she sets up some of her literacy routines.

Daily Review – Retrieval Practice

Retrieval practice boosts learning by pulling information out of students’ heads, rather than trying to cram information in. We want to decrease the extraneous load on our students working memory by embedding knowledge into their long term memory. If we can increase how often the learner has to retrieve information, “every time that information is retrieved, or an answer is generated, it changes that original memory to make it stronger” (Jones, 2020).

Check out Lorraine Hammond’s full presentation on How daily review supports literacy development

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

Oral language

While oral language development is a biological skill, it doesn’t mean that we all develop at the same rate. There is still a wide gap in the quality of language development and this has huge implications on children when they arrive at school with long-term correlations with reading.

Kathryn Thorburn (Think Forward Educators Webinar) spoke about how children with weak language skills may be misperceived as shy, inattentive or uninterested.

Deslea Konza suggested the following strategies in her paper Research into practice – Understanding the reading process:

  • Teach active listening
  • Build on student language
  • Build oral language development into daily routines and classroom activity
  • Provide opportunities for social interaction
  • Explore story books together
  • Model thinking processes through “Think alouds”
  • Consider the language demands of each lesson
  • Don’t be afraid to “correct” children’s communication

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

There are a number of Barrier Games that can be found:

Assessment

In Teaching and Learning Primary English, Pauline Jones and Damon Thomas tell us that oral language can be assessed using methods such as checklists, samples of children’s language use and rubrics. However, we need to understand that oral language development is not linear and anecdotal notes will be just as important.

Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness is an understanding of the different sound elements in words. It includes phonemic awareness, onset and rime, syllables and whole word awareness. If students cannot hear the sounds in a word, they cannot link them to the written letters (graphemes).

This is why phonemic awareness (ability to break up the smallest sounds or phonemes of a word) is vital. It includes:

  • Isolation
  • Blending
  • Segmentation
  • Manipulation
NSW Department of Education

Reading Rockets: Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

Evidence-aligned programs

Heggerty: “Daily phonemic awareness lessons designed with teachers in mind.”

Assessment

Print conventions/Phonic knowledge/Spelling

I have spelling with phonics because a spelling program should link with phonics. Phonics refers to the sound-spelling relationship.

Click on the image to see a prezi that compares what a SoR classroom looks like and a Balanced Literacy one.

The phonics program needs to be explicit and systematic. In “Reading for Life” Lyn Stone writes, “this means that the teacher carefully explains the relationships between the sounds and symbols, paces those explanations well and checks for understanding.” Systematic means that it follows a specific sequence e.g. Systematic Synthetic Phonics programs teach the symbols and sounds in order of commonality in the first 200 words in most elementary word lists.

Dr Lorraine Beveridge and Jane Lieschke wrote in an article Let’s look at spelling: Spelling is a tool for writing, and when we spell words, we draw on the four forms of spelling knowledge, these being:

Phonology – how words sound
Visual – how words look
Morphology – parts within words that signify meaning, grammar
Etymology – the historical, cultural origin of words.

Louisa Moats: Close Encounters with Students’ Spelling: What They Tell Us About Language Learning. She describes phonemes as the “anchors” or “parking spots” for graphemes. If the anchor points are incomplete they cannot hold down the graphemes.

“Phonology, although important for all aspects of literacy learning is even more critical in learning to spell than in learning to read. Orthographic knowledge is laid over a phonological foundation. If that phonological foundation is weak, orthographic skills cannot develop sufficiently to support good spelling and compensate for the underdeveloped phonological skills.”

Cassar, Treiman, Moats, and Pollo (2005)

In Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science, 2020, Moats gives us these tips:

  • Instead of asking “What sound does each letter make?,” use accurate language and focus on a specific sound, asking, “What letter(s) represent /er/ in first?”
  • Help children focus on sounds by saying things like, “/m/, /n/, and /ng/ are the three ‘nosey’ sounds in English; hold your nose to feel how these sounds go through the nose.”
Morphology: Important from the Beginning: Structured Literacy has always included instruction in morphology. It has been particularly valued for its power in developing vocabulary and unlocking complex words.

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

Evidence-aligned programs

Assessment

Fluency

Fluency is when we can read with accuracy, automaticity (above 110 WCPM) and prosody (intonation). Without fluency, students have to spend all of their attention on working out what words say. By the time they get to the end of a sentence or paragraph they aren’t able to remember it, let alone comprehend it!

In Teaching and Learning Primary English, Timothy Rasinski and Chase Young recommend five teacher practices:

  1. Model fluent reading: Reading aloud to model fluent reading
  2. Assisted reading: Listening to a fluent reader then reading independently
  3. Wide reading: Reading from many sources
  4. Deep (repeated) reading: Rereading texts multiple times with a focus on achieving fluency
  5. Phrasing: Marking phrase boundaries in texts to promote effective phrasing
  • Synergy: When these fluency tools are used together, they work even better.
Step Le Lievre presentation of Paired Fluency for Reading Science in Schools

Shanahan: “Supervised paired-reading practice. That means the whole class would be divided into pairs, they’d be taking turns reading pages to each other and giving feedback to each other, and I’d be moving from pair to pair to help with the feedback, to collect data on student performance, and to keep kids on task.”

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

  1. Choose a passage that students can read with very few errors.
  2. The passage should be readable in 1-2 minutes (50-200 words).
  3. Model fluent reading of the passage.
  4. Listen to the student/s read the passage and provide unknown words after three seconds.
  5. Provide specific positive or corrective feedback to the student/s after each reading, mentioning accuracy, rate or expression.
  6. Have the student/s read the passage at least four times.
  7. Plan for 10 to 15 minutes per fluency lesson, ideally three times a week.
Institute of Education Sciences: Repeated Reading

Assessment

  • Acadience Reading K–6: helps teachers identify children at risk for reading difficulties and determine the skills to target for instructional support.
  • CUBED: “is a family of screening and progress monitoring tools that accurately, reliably, and efficiently measure decoding, language comprehension, and their product, reading.”
  • Reading Rockets: Fluency Norms Chart (2017 Update)
  • DIBELS 8th Phoneme Segmentation Fluency

Vocabulary

While vocabulary is separate here (it could be put with spelling), it is purposefully put before comprehension to remind us that we need to teach knowledge and vocabulary in order to improve comprehension. 

The Matthew Effect in education refers to the “snowball” effect that occurs when those who learn to read (usually from affluent backgrounds) become fluent readers and are then able to gain more knowledge. While those who struggle to read (usually from disadvantaged backgrounds) fall further behind. Their vocabulary can be a big predictor of this outcome.

Beck, McKeown and Kucan 2002 classified vocabulary into three tiers. Teaching Tier 2 words gives children knowledge of words that they are likely to come across, but not pick up in everyday conversations. In The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, Christopher Such provides a Scope and Sequence of Tier 2 words for Yr 3-6 students.

Alex Quigley in his blog post ONE WORD AT A TIME – TEACHING VOCABULARY offers the following strategies for teaching vocabulary:

  • Pick words apart: Most of our academic words are from Latin and Greek derivations. With an understanding of some common prefixes and suffixes, like ‘de’ or ‘anti’, for example students have the tools to unlock comprehension of a wealth of words.
  • Make meaning maps: If you are teaching a tricky new word like ‘photosynthesis’ then you can make a ‘meaning map’ – unpicking the word, explaining its origins, and linking it to similar scientific words.
  • Working subject glossaries: A word list can prove inert, but by beginning a topic or course with a blank slate of key words and encouraging students to enquire around their meanings, you can invoke curiosity and deeper understanding.
  • Alphaboxes: Simply create an alphabetical list, organised into boxes, and encourage students to populate the ‘alphaboxes’ with essential subject vocabulary.
  • Word of the week: Every subject can promote a habitual interest in words by sharing their ‘word of the week’ or having ‘word walls’ that create an omnipresent interest in academic vocabulary.

Quigley also provides some more great tips in this post THREE PILLARS OF VOCABULARY TEACHING in which he talks about

  1. Explicit vocabulary teaching
  2. Incidental vocabulary learning
  3. Cultivating ‘word consciousness’
A demonstration of List-Group-Label from Reading Rockets

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

  1. Word
  2. Grade range
  3. Part of speech
  4. Meaning
  5. Example Sentence

Assessment

Reading Rockets: Classroom Vocabulary Assessment for Content Areas

Informal Vocabulary Assessment (IVI) (Rasinski et al., 2020) – Damon Thomas, Angela Thomas: Teaching and Learning Primary English

Comprehension

In many classrooms, comprehension skills have been taught independently. However, if we don’t have the vocabulary and background knowledge base, we won’t understand the text. This is further emphasised if we ask students to read individually when they are yet to master reading fluently. The more we know, the more we get to know because we’re able to make more connections to existing knowledge.  

Another thing to remember is that language comprehension and reading comprehension are not the same thing due to the differences between spoken and written text. Such, 2021 points out that how written text is generally more formal and so we need to explicitly teach those intricacies. However, understanding those aspects will not necessarily mean a student will be good at comprehension, rather they will have a better chance at understanding the text.

Proficient readers deliberately apply strategies such as predicting, questioning, making connections, inferencing and visualising. BUT, they are not transferrable skills because it still depends on the readers understanding of what they are actually reading. For example, a student might have a really good understanding on what inferencing is, but have absolutely know understanding of the text they have just read due to their poor vocabulary.

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

Robust Comprehension Instruction with Questioning the Author by Beck, McKeown and Sandora (there’s an ERRR podcast with Ollie Lovell as well) is a text that many teachers have gone to over the years. 

To prepare for a Questioning the Author lesson, the teacher should do the following:

  1. Read through the text a first time and identify pause points.
  2. After this, write down (from memory) the main ideas of the text.
  3. Read through a second time and mark any words, phrases, or concepts that you think will particularly trip students up.
  4. Finally, design queries to go at each pause point. For example:
    1. ‘What’s going on now?’
    2. ‘What has just happened’ 
    3. ‘What did we learn in that section?

Shanahan: Split into two groups with activities such as: Directed Reading Activity, Directed-Reading Thinking Activity, Close Reading, strategy lesson) simultaneously, with me rotating myself across the groups.

Assessment

Writing

Writing is a complex skill that requires the writer to have:

  • Knowledge on what they are writing about
  • Knowledge on how to say it and an understanding on how to transfer it into appropriate written language
  • Knowledge on how to structure it. What makes up a sentence/paragraph/story
  • Knowledge on how to spell (encode) those words
  • Knowledge on how to write/type those words

Yes, a writer needs to know a lot!

When possible link writing to what they have been reading/learning about. This way they can use their field knowledge and solidify this knowledge through writing it down. 

The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) recently put out Writing and writing instruction – An overview of the literature by Emina McLean. In Why should we follow the Science of Reading? I highlighted what the review stated as why writing is important.

I found that the key findings relevant to primary teachers were:

  • Increase the amount of time students spend writing (composing) and receiving writing instruction (at least one hour per day)
  • Foundational skills: Effective handwriting instruction is explicit and frequent, with students from Foundation through to mid-primary benefiting from approximately 15 minutes of daily instruction, practice and feedback in handwriting (Santangelo and Graham 2016).
  • Sentence-level instruction: students need to understand the definition of a sentence (a complete idea marked by capitalisation and punctuation), sentence functions (declarative, imperative, exclamatory, interrogatory) and sentence forms (simple, compound, complex and compound-complex). Teachers also need to give attention to how to create increasingly complex, interesting and varied sentences, through sentence combining and expansion tasks.
  • Grammar and punctuation: Grammar and punctuation instruction appear to be more effective and meaningful when taught in the context of sentences and compositions, with research suggesting they should be embedded, rather than isolated tasks (Andrews 2006; Fogel and Ehri 2000; Graham and Perin 2007a; Graham and Perin 2007b)
  • Planning, drafting, evaluating and revising: Explicit and systematic strategy instruction in planning, drafting, evaluating and revising, with modelling, guided practice and feedback, has a significant positive effect on student writing quality in primary (Graham et al. 2012b; Kim et al. 2021) and secondary (Graham and Perin 2007a), including for students with learning disabilities (Gillespie and Graham 2014).
  • Explicitly teach genre macrostructure and microstructure through modelling, guided practice and exemplars, providing subject specific instruction as required
  • Ensure students write frequently for a range of meaningful audiences and purposes
  • Build knowledge for writing such as rich content knowledge, knowledge of linguistic and rhetorical features, and vocabulary
  • Integrate instruction across the curriculum by using writing to support reading and learning
  • Embed frequent formative assessment and provide explicit feedback to move students forward
  • Align writing goals, curriculum, instructional methods and assessment practices
  • Teach typing skills and provide students with opportunities to compose using digital writing tools
  • Create motivating and supporting writing environments where writing is valued, routine and collaborative
  • Provide additional scaffolding and instruction for students with learning difficulties and disabilities

The Six Principles of The Hochman Method

  1. Students need explicit instruction in writing, beginning in the early elementary grades.
  2. Sentences are the building blocks of all writing.
  3. When embedded in the content of the curriculum, writing instruction is a powerful teaching tool.
  4. The content of the curriculum drives the rigor of the writing activities.
  5. Grammar is best taught in the context of student writing.
  6. The two most important phases of the writing process are planning and revising.

Natalie Wexler and Judith Hochman’s The Writing Revolution has certainly had a revolution on the way many teachers teach writing. Reid Smith has written about his school’s experience following the techniques and principles – The Writing Revolution lessons.

Jocelyn Seamer has also put together these steps (below) that can be followed using the gradual release model. 

Learning Difficulties Australia – Writing Instruction

Lyn Stone – The Simple View of Writing

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

Syntax is the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences. We need vocabulary to discuss syntax. In other words, we use terminology to facilitate our work in writing and reading.

The late William Van Cleave, 2020
  • The Syntax Project: These resources are available for free to promote a culture of sharing and collaboration amongst schools. The lessons can be edited and adapted to reflect the topics & curriculum content taught in your classroom. The Syntax Project draws upon strategies from both The Writing Revolution (Hochman & Wexler, 2017) and Writing Matters: Developing Sentence Skills in Students of All Ages (Van Cleave, 2012).

The Writing Revolution in an Australian context by Jeanette Breen:

  • Using Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) that included retrievals, sequencing learning into small steps, continual checking for understanding
  • Implementation of learning slides
  • Templestowe Heights PS

5 Pillars of Writing – these weave in TWR thinking within our context.

  1. The sentence is the building block.
  2. Embed writing in curriculum content as a tool for learning.
    (Tiered vocab is important here and I highly recommend Emina McLean’s thinking here)
  3. Teach grammar and punctuation in context.
  4. Teach handwriting.
    (fluency leads to confident and willing writers and releases cognitive load so students can think with their words)
  5. Scaffold planning, note taking, editing, revising and deliberately practice for proficiency.
    (Not necessarily mastery, proficiency refers to above the standard in this context)
  • Always anticipate student responses in lesson design
  • Ensure when asking students to share their writing, that they do not get away with ad-libbing!
  • Use sentence starters with students before gradual release.
  • Assessment: Using the comparative judgement (CJ) tool from No More Marking (NMM).

Evidence-aligned programs

The Writing Revolution

Assessment

No more marking: Comparative judgement

Handwriting

“When formal handwriting instruction begins in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten, it can be easier for children to learn capital letters first (Case-Smith, 2002). However, both capital and lowercase letters are taught in formation families, or letters grouped together because of the similar motions or strokes needed to write them. For example, formation families distinguish the letters  that require returning to the top of the first vertical line to form the next stroke (e.g., F, E, D, M) versus those that require moving to a new starting point (e.g., H, K, X), or those that require clockwise (e.g., b, h, r) versus counter-clockwise curves (e.g., c, d, q). “

Iowa Reading Research – The Continued Importance of Handwriting Instruction

“Learning how to form letters correctly is essential for writing success as it will lead to this automaticity and teaching children incorrect patterns can be very detrimental.  The Peggy Lego program is a great place to start for this.”

https://www.lil-peeps.com.au/handwriting

Bec West – How To Teach Handwriting | Tips & Resources

More information and suggested activities for the classroom

Emina McLean: Handwriting instruction: What’s the evidence? –

  • Model how letters are formed when teaching them.
  • Use visual cues (e.g. numbered arrows) to guide letter formation.
  • Provide a lot of practice in tracing, copying, and writing letters from memory.
  • Encourage students to evaluate/correct letter production during practice.
  • Give students many, many opportunities to write to increase fluency.
  • Get students to set goals for improving their handwriting.
  • Implement appropriate learning processes for left-handed students.
  • Teach students how to position a piece of paper or a writing book as well as how to hold a pencil/pen in a comfortable and efficient manner and practice this multiple times.
  • Reinforce/praise students’ successful letter production.
  • Provide regular and explicit corrective feedback.
  • Provide additional handwriting instruction to students who struggle.
  • Allocate up to 75–100 minutes of handwriting instruction per week from Foundation through to mid-primary school. This is about 15-20 minutes per day.”

Assessment

NSW DoE – Handwriting Assessment Form

Assessment

From Bentleigh West PS 

Alison Clarke from SPELFABET: Assessments

Lyn Stone from Lifelong Literacy: Literacy Assessment and Screening Tools

Each of the DIBELS 8th Edition measures are described. This includes a brief overview, what is assessed and the time to administer each measure.

Where to next?

1. How to teach Primary English
2. Why is this the way to teach Primary English?
3. When should each concept be taught?
4. What does this actually look like in the classroom?
5. Primary English Resources