In Term 2, I began the Structured Literacy training. I had 3 full days and 2 community of practise days. I have decided to blog these to help me reinforce my understanding of the tasks and what Structured Literacy is about.
Day 1. The Literate Brain
The Science of Reading is about how we learn to retain and quickly retrieve information in this context. Starting with Cognitive Psychology which is the best method of delivery, Neuro-Science - what is happening in the brain, Linquistics - the scope and sequence of the English language code, and for us teachers; the components of the language and the order to teach from simple to complex and lastly, Education - classroom delivery.
The left hemisphere is the language processing centre of the brain. A reading network must be developed for skilled reading to happen. Reading Comprehension needs word level decoding skills and language comprehension. Phonemic awareness is one of the biggest factors for literacy success. The brain processes at sound level, not word level.
The Reading Brain has 4 areas, - the Broca - phonological awareness, Angular Gyrus - sound to symbol, Wernickes - comprehension and Visual Word Form Area (letterbox) - orthographic mapping. The retrieval from the Letterbox needs to be effortless. You can't write, what you can't retrieve.
Sounding - DECODE, ENCODE, DECODE. I do, we do, you do.
Orthographic Mapping - retrieval when reading
- Semantic (vocab knowledge) - understanding it
- Orthographic lexicon - sound to symbol skills - spell it
- Phonological Lexicon - phonemic awareness - hear it
- Orthographically mapped to letterbox.
13 Elements of Explicit Instruction which can be used for all curriculum areas.
Content 1. Critical Content 2. Broken down into obtainable chunks.
Design 3. Organised and focused. 4. Lesson Goals 5. Review (talk with a buddy) 6. I Do, 7. We Do, 8. You do.
Delivery 9. Frequent responses from students 10. Monitor, 11. Provide Feedback 12. Perky Pace
Praciice 13. Judicious practice - deliberate practice, retrieval practice included, spaced and cumulating.
All this explicit instruction leads towards gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to the students.
This was a very full day of theory. It makes sense as it is a very scaffolded way learning for students.
Day 2 - 3 Areas
1. Oral Language and Language Processing
Oral language comes first, followed by formal literacy acquisition with code based instruction in phonemic awareness and alphabetic principles knowledge which leads on to encoding and decoding.
Receptive Language is listening and reading, Expressive Language is speaking and writing.
The importance of oral language and knowing vocabulary impacts literacy acquisition. I see this with my students especially those who are ESOL. This section of the day was very junior based in some aspects.
A suggested activity is read alouds to develop oral language. 1. to read a story, and ask questions, ensuring wait time for thinking, sharing with a buddy and checking. 2 at a higher year level, to be given 4 key words and students to read out the words, and then read with teacher the words of the text to find the word, add suffix or change tense.
Language Processing - Phonological, Orthographic, Morphological, Semantic, Syntactic, Discourse/Pragmatics
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness - to manipulate souns, and to identify sounds into their individual units. The Ideal Platform has the scope and sequence to follow for levels 1,2,3.
Orthographic Process - ie grapheme ch can have 3 phonemes /ch/, /k/, /sh/. lunch, school, machine. No wonder English is tricky. The phoneme /ā/ (long a) has 8 graphemes.
Morphological Processing - adding suffixes, and prefixes and changing the verb tenses. How does changing the morphemes contribute to our understanding of the words? My answer would be to use them correctly in a sentence either spoken or written and to understand when something happens in time.
Semantics - the meaning of words. Teaching synonyms and antonyms to improve vocabulary and so we are more expressive. This also includes grammar rules and the purpose and and function of a sentence.
Pragmatics and Discourse - use language in context - How does our language change ie in formal and informal setting whether spoken or written.
There are screening tools like Hegarty for Oral Language and support. We need to look for indicators of weak oral language.
2. Phonological Awareness - the ability to hear, perceive, isolate and manipulate the smallest units of spoken sound. The foundation of literacy. This includes rhyme, alliteration and syllable level and occurs away from print.
Phonemic awareness (subset of Phonological awareness) needs auditory discrimination of sounds, phoneme isolating, blending and manipulating and onset & rime of deleting and substituting.
Syllable blending, Seqgmenting and Deletion is important as it helps with decoding reading and a strategy when spelling. It was stated it must be automatic and effortless.
Rhyming is needs to transfer known spelling patterns. Initial sound awareness is the first step in identify all sounds and without this, automaticity doesn't happen. Blending is to blend the sounds to make a word. Multimodel - speaking, fingers for sound, and hearing to help learn. If sounds cannot be isolated, then encoding is incorrect. Phoneme manipulation is to change sounds within spoken words ie cat -cut. Encoding of words is again incorrect when the sound change is not noticed.
Syllable Types - This was interesting as I was unable to list them. I recognised them when shown.
There are 7 syllable types and are taught at every stage with higher levels of difficulty or sophistication.
The recommendations for great practise are to keep lessons to a maximum of 20 minutes and a perky pace, use decode, encode and decode, dictation supports learning, and view the videos in Ideal for instruction.
Day 3. Assessment and Types. Setting up the Environment and Literacy Block.
Assessment should always answer a question about the student, inform class instruction, and should be done quickly and efficiently. There are 4 types of assessment - screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring and outcome. All assessments must be valid and reliable. Screen tools in particular must be quick and prior to instruction and will identify at risk students. Use diagnostic strengths and weakness to determine what should I do next for this student. Progress monitoring is quick check ins and assess the skill that has been just taught.
There are 6 assessments in Ideal - FLSA - foundation literacy skills assessment, PAST - phonolgoical awareness screening test, ORF - oral reading fluency, DIBELS - dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills, IRSR IDeaL Reading Skills Record and NWF - Nonsense-word fluency.
FLSA (relevant for Tier 2/3 intervention)is recommended for Year 4+ at risk students for phonological awareness and letter sound check. iDeaL spelling for Year 4 and up. DIBELS and IRSR also for Year 4 -8
I did the spelling assessment on the class so I could begin Term 3 from the correct start. I tested my students who didn't pass the Stage Two and then tested them on Stage 1. This I wasn't supposed to do but I think by inputing the information after I make them zero on Stage 2, I will get some targeted group instruction as they are outliers/different class. Stage 1 is considered to be inappropriate for older students, however, if they are missing this they need it).
One of the best pieces of advice given was to teach the spelling over 2 weeks. 1 week the lower level and the second week the higher level. Differentiate with home learning and independent activities.
An important statement - differentiation does not mean grouping
DIBELS - This assessment is for reading fluency and its importance was covered on Day 1. We then had to test our students on this and input into iDeaL for the MOE. Those under 50 percentile are at risk. It was interesting to do and sort of matched what I knew about my students.
Other assessments covered briefly as they are covered in full on COP days.
Literacy Block
Recommendations to start with spelling as it helps reading. Potential timings given. Handwriting also covered as when automatic there is more space in working memory to focus on spelling etc.
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