Phonics progressions and phonemic awareness: Q&A webinar questions transcript
Rebecca McEwan:
Q: Where do I start? There's lots of information about phonics out there and it feels a bit overwhelming.
I think that's something that lots of people are feeling at the moment.
Elaine Stanley:
There is so much information and it can really feel overwhelming and it's hard to know where to begin or to sort your way through all that information. I think if you are in a preschool setting, then the place to start is really with that phonological awareness, just that awareness for students that spoken language can be broken down into different-sized chunks. Working on the rhyming, being able to identify words that rhyme, and knowing how those patterns at the end of words sound the same and rhyme. Breaking words into syllables or beats in the word, and even beginning sounds in words, just entering into that phonemic awareness stage just all orally.
Rebecca McEwan:
That's so helpful at the start of school. If kids come in with that, that's amazing.
Elaine Stanley:
There's so many times I can think of where I've done a screener at the beginning of school, and you ask students some of those questions and if they haven't had that sort of input before they come to school, you are starting right at that beginning stage. It would be great if that was covered in preschool.
I'm thinking of some examples Bec, where you ask students, you are asking them for the first sound in a word and you say, ‘I'll tell you a word and can you tell me the first sound you can hear.’ And if you say word like cat, they say, the first sound they can hear is meow. If they haven't had all of that sort of input to think about words and the sounds they can hear.
Rebecca McEwan:
So much of it as well can be done through books and songs and games as well.
Elaine Stanley:
I always like to play ‘I hear with my little ear’, which is a version of ‘I spy with my little eye’, you can pick things around the room and listen for that first sound. It really sets them up for success at school and will really help those Foundation teachers if some of that work is done in a preschool. So, that would be the place to start in a preschool setting.
In their first year of school you cover that phonological awareness area as well, but moving reasonably quickly into phonemic awareness territory, because you start to introduce letters and sounds and those two go together really well. Moving into that area there. If your students are older than Foundation level, and they've already started reading and writing, then I'd say go straight to phonemic awareness and phonics.
Rebecca McEwan:
With the letters represented.
Elaine Stanley:
Because if they're already reading and writing, you want them to start listening to the sounds in words, and really using that information to help them.
Rebecca McEwan:
In fact, this question is exactly what our PL series is all about. Helping teachers and school leaders who want to start with phonics, with a systematic synthetic phonics approach, but aren’t quite sure where to start.
For the person who asked this question or anyone else feeling this way, if you haven't looked back at that coaching session 1 and Topic 1, that will fill in a lot of those gaps for you. We are saying, start by choosing a progression and starting with some phonological and phonemic awareness instruction. That's unpacked a lot more in that Topic 1 coaching session.
Elaine Stanley:
As the PL series progresses, we'll lead you through sort of step by step of then how to deliver that content through lessons, how to track students' progress along the way, all of those things. If it feels overwhelming at the beginning, we understand that.
That's what we're hoping to do is lead you through that step by step.
Rebecca McEwan:
And if you don't feel overwhelmed after a few of those sessions then we've done our job.
Elaine Stanley:
Q: What are the best phonological awareness screeners for classroom teachers or intervention teachers to use?
Rebecca McEwan:
There are quite a few out there, aren't there? Our top tip is the Quick Phonological Awareness Screening or QPAS. I'll see if Craig can put that link in the chat for you so you have it. We recommend it because it's free, it's accessible, it gives you a scoring table that you can fill out straight away. The scoring is really simple.
Then if you use that along with one of the resources we have in Topic 1, the phonological awareness staircase, then you can analyse the data really easily, which is why we do these assessments, to find out exactly where you need to pinpoint your instruction as well. QPAS is our tip, but then, Five from Five, the website, they have a whole list of other options that you might like to look at, as well.
https://www.uen.org/syc/downloads/Handout6_QPAS.pdf
Elaine Stanley:
Five from Five is a really good site to go to, to just get an overall picture of SSP instruction and all the background knowledge there as well, so it’s really useful.
Rebecca McEwan:
And then how it fits in with other areas of literacy.
Q: When you've taught a phase of sounds, should you wait for all students in the class to know the sounds before moving to the next stage? So, if you've taught s, a, t, p, I, n, do we wait for all students to know that or do we keep moving?
Elaine Stanley:
This is a really common question as well from teachers, because you’re thinking about what's the pace of instruction, and you don't want to move on too quickly, but also, not wait too long either to move on. I think it's really useful to think of following a Response to Intervention model here.
In that model, it talks about working towards 80% of your grade demonstrating understanding of whatever you've been teaching and being able to apply it. Once you reach that 80% have got there, got that understanding, then that's your point when you can move on. The thinking is that in a typical grade, there'll be approximately 10 to 15% who might need some extra guidance and support. They're in your Tier 2.
Rebecca McEwan:
That's where you're doing your small groups. It's a little bit of a rethink about how you use your small groups as well. We're trying to capture that 80% in whole class, and then it's those 10 to 15% that we're bringing into a small group for extra instruction.
Elaine Stanley:
In a typical grade, there will most often be about 5% of students who require even more intensive support. They're sort of your students that will need that ongoing long-term support, usually through one-to-one instruction.
Rebecca McEwan:
And maybe involving some of your allied health supports as well.
The message is, don't just keep moving on until you've got 80% of your students that are really fluent with that skill and knowledge that you're teaching in that phase. Then you do move on as a whole class, but you're giving that small group some extra instruction in that early phase so that they can continue to move along as well.
Elaine Stanley:
I suppose the other message is if you're not reaching that sort of 80% mark, then you need to look at your Tier 1 instruction, and see what's happening there that you're not capturing enough, because you don't want to have to do all the work through small groups. You want to make that Tier 1 as effective as possible. It might be that you're moving on too quickly, you need to slow down, make sure.
Rebecca McEwan:
Yes, the pace it could be, the number of repetitions you're giving the students, the structure of your lesson. There's lots that goes into that.
As well, we should say, when we talk about whole-class instruction, obviously there's differentiation within that as well. It's not just everybody's getting the same medicine. But, when you think about differentiation, rather than going into those lots of small groups, that can be the types of words that you're giving in your whole-class instruction. I often have, on the mat, so pockets of students where I know where their abilities are lying. Over here on the left, I might be giving CVC words. In the middle, they might have CVCC words. On the right-hand side some more complex words. You can use which word types, some might be doing words, some might be doing sentences. The other thing is the scaffolding, so how much am I supporting each pocket within that Tier 1 instruction.
Elaine Stanley:
I think a really important point is those students that need the greatest level of support are included in that whole-class instruction, which is really good for their self-esteem to still be involved in that whole-class teaching, even if they’re working at a sort of scaffolded level of word types, sometimes even for some students, it's just the letter and sound they're practising while others are working on the words, but they're included in that whole-class teaching.
Rebecca McEwan:
And then knowing that that's okay, that's what they're learning.
We're all about the reading and spelling side of things at the Literacy Hub. Making sure that when we talk about that group of students who were working with more complex words, making sure they can actually do both the reading and spelling with that as well. Not just shuffling them along in terms of their reading, but making sure the spelling is coming along at the same time.
Elaine Stanley:
The spelling helps the reading and the reading helps the spelling anyway. It's beneficial for both to do both in the same lesson. We're going to show you that actually in our next topic when we demonstrate a lesson with reading and spelling within a phonics lesson.
Q: Do blends need to be taught explicitly?
Rebecca McEwan:
I do like that question. And again, it comes up quite a bit. You're not the only one wondering. When we think about systematic synthetic phonics, we want to talk about blending, so the verb, the action of blending those sounds together, /p/-/i/-/t/, pit, rather than blends, which have traditionally been those sl, pl, dr. Those two letters that have been taught together as a unit, even though they're still making two sounds. I would say, please don't teach blends anymore. Your students don't actually need them if you are using SSP, because you are breaking words down to their single letter–sound correspondences. If we're teaching blends, such as dr saying /d/-/r/, dr, it's another unit that students need to learn and they don't need it. If they have d says /d/ and r says /r/, plus they're able to blend sounds together, they don't need to learn that extra unit. Am I making sense, Elaine?
Elaine Stanley:
I think traditionally people taught blends because they didn't always drill down to that individual phoneme level. They taught blends as a unit, so students would recognise that.
Rebecca McEwan:
They were on all the posters, weren't they?
Elaine Stanley:
But now, because we drill down to that phoneme level, you don't need to go that step before.
Rebecca McEwan:
Go with the skill of blending those sounds together, rather than teaching blends.
Q: Should blending and segmenting begin as soon as s a t p i n, that first phase of sounds, is taught, or after all 26 single graphemes are taught?
For those who might not be familiar with that language, graphemes are the letters or groups of letters that represent the sounds.
Elaine Stanley:
Ideally oral blending and segmenting, so lots of oral practice where you give students three sounds, for example, and they blend to arrive at a word. You might say, ‘I'm thinking of these three sounds /p/-/a/-/t/, what's my word?’ Giving them lots of practice doing that oral work should actually begin before you introduce letters, because when you think about reading a word, for example, what you have to do is identify the letters in that word, attach sounds to those letters, and then you still need to do that oral blending to lift that word off the page. So, before they even start working with letters, you've got to have that skill of oral blending happening first, which is going to speed up the process and help them. The same with spelling, so identifying the phonemes and then writing the letters. Lots of oral segmenting as well with sounds in words.
Rebecca McEwan:
Yes, oral before s a t p i n even. Then, once your students have the s, a, t, p, i, n and their associated sounds, absolutely, we're starting to use those to build words and read words, because that's what it's all about. The students have a reason to learn those letters.
Elaine Stanley:
You want to get them practising and building those skills with letters as soon as possible, to read and write words, because otherwise you'll get too many letter–sound correspondences. Then they have to try and remember and use them all at once. It's much easier as you go to build those skills at the same time as building the knowledge.
Q: How do you go about teaching a word you want students to know that they don't have the code for yet?
Rebecca McEwan:
That sounds like an irregular word. In our Literacy Hub phonics progression, we have a list of irregular words to teach students. Our definition for irregular words, because different people will talk about them a little bit differently, is that an irregular word is a word that the students don't have the phonics code for yet. They might not know the letter–sound correspondences yet, but it's a word that they will come across and they may need, for example, for sentence-level reading.
An example would be ‘was’, where the a is making the /o/ sound. They might not have learnt that yet, but they're going to be reading simple sentences with ‘was’ in it.
So, back to the question, teaching a word that you want students to know, don't teach it as a whole word would be the first piece of advice. We're not looking for kids to store photos of words or words as a unit. We would advise to teach it as an irregular word, which means you say the word, you show the word, you say it in a sentence. We're bringing that meaning along as well. But then we're also looking at the sounds in the word. We'll say the sounds in the word, give the spelling and practise that spelling with the student. So for ‘the’, for example, we would say t, h, e spells ‘the’, t, h, e spells ‘the’. They practise writing it, they practise reading it. It really is about breaking down the components of the word still, even if they don't have the phonics code. But then bringing it back to something simple to remember, like t, h, e says ‘the’.
Elaine Stanley:
I would also say it's good for people to know it's okay if it's a one-off word they need to know for a particular lesson or a particular topic you're doing, it's okay to just tell them the word or tell them what the word is. You don't have to teach every word that you think they need to know as an irregular word, but just don't overdo it with too many because you want them to really be using the phonics code.
Rebecca McEwan:
Yeah, we want them to trust the code.
Elaine Stanley:
But the odd word that you think they really need to know this, I'm just going to tell them what it is. That's fine.
Q: How do we select a phonics program that corresponds with the Version 9 Australian Curriculum?
Rebecca McEwan:
A topic on lots of people's minds, I think. We've actually just been through the process of aligning a progression, creating a progression that aligns with the curriculum. You'll find that progression in the handout, so check that out for sure. When you are looking to align one, perhaps you're looking at a different progression and you want to check whether it's lining up with the Version 9 of the curriculum. Have a look at the phonic and word knowledge content descriptors under reading and viewing literacy, but also phonic knowledge and word recognition general capabilities, so what some people might know as the Literacy Progressions. They are aligned with the curriculum, they're mapped according to the year levels in the curriculum, but they break things down really clearly. What are we going to see our students doing if they're at this point?
Elaine Stanley:
They're sort of the observable markers of students developing skills towards the content descriptor in the curriculum. They're like the markers towards achieving what's in it. I think if you're aligning any progression with the curriculum, it's a matter of lining up your progression that you're looking at with those Literacy Progressions, and just seeing that it matches up pretty well in terms of skill development and content knowledge along the way.
Rebecca McEwan:
Knowledge-wise, looking at, okay are they teaching single letter–sound correspondences first, before moving on to digraphs and vowel digraphs. Then skills-wise, is it introducing CVC words, consonant-vowel consonant words, before moving on to more complex word types as well. It's not an easy thing to do if you're still building your knowledge, but I guess as well, if you've got ours in the handout, which has curriculum alignment, so even comparing ours to another progression could be helpful.
Elaine Stanley:
We've done all that work already for you. If you look at the way ours is structured, it sort of gives you an idea of the progression there anyway.
Q: Is it worth working on phonological awareness–only activities at any point on school entry, and how much time should be dedicated to phonological awareness in Foundation?
I'm thinking if people would like to go back and view the coaching session, there's a lot of information in there that might actually answer those questions.
It would be worth for those people to go back and just have a look, but we'll be coming back to things as well as we progress through the PL.
Rebecca McEwan:
We're just about the end of our time, so I think we might need to wrap up. So many good questions coming through. I'm really impressed with how specific the questions were.
Elaine Stanley:
For sure. It makes our job easy when we've got such great questions to answer.
Rebecca McEwan:
We're both self-confessed phonics nerds, so we're glad to see others are interested as well.