The Teaching Improvement Project

Course Content
Module 1 Reading an Introduction – The Big Picture.
‘Reading has the power to change lives. It plays an essential role in learning, securing a job and being an active and engaged member of society. Reading provides us with information, knowledge, and makes us aware of people and places beyond our immediate circles. Learning foundational reading skills supports wellbeing and can translate to a love of reading and literature. As so much of our world rapidly changes around us, learning to read remains one of the most essential outcomes of schooling’. (Education Queensland, 2023. Reading Position Statement.) What Will You Learn? In this module you will explore how reading has been taught in the past and what research and evidence has informed current recommended teaching models. You will explore the complexities of learning to read. Why learning to read is difficult and the impact that low levels of literacy have on society. What the Big 6 or 5 Pillars (National Reading Panel) How the brain learns to read (Stanilas DeHaene) Ehri’s Stages of Reading Development and understand the process of Orthographic Mapping and the Alphabetic Principle. Self Teaching (David Share) Key Reading Frameworks – The Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tumner), Scarborough’s Reading Rope (Hollis Scarborough), and The Four Part Processing Model (Seidenberg and McClelland) The key components of Structured Literacy and how this differs from previous approaches to teaching reading. At the conclusion of this unit of work we will dive deep into the teaching of reading through the lens of the Simple View of Reading’.
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Reading
The State Of Reading Today
The Science of Reading (SoR)
The Big 6 or 5 Pillars of Reading
How the brain learns to read
Ehri’s Stages of Reading Development and understand the process of Orthographic Mapping and the Alphabetic Principle.
Key Reading Frameworks (Simple View of Reading & Scarborough’s Reading Rope)
The Key Components of Structured Literacy
Module 2 – The Foundational Skills: Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness & Phonics
In this module you will learn about the foundational word recognition skills of Scarborough’s Reading Rope and why their acquisition to a level of automaticity is essential to becoming a skilled reader. You will learn about the phonological and orthographical processing systems, how they develop and how they should be taught and assessed.
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Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness
Research – Why phonemic awareness is a critical component of instruction.
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Skills
The importance of clear and precise phoneme articulation
Lesson Planning and Structure
How Does Phonics Fit In?
The English Orthography, Australian English, Standard Australian English (SAE0.
The Alphabetic Principle, The Alphabetic Code, & Alphabetic Code Charts
4 types of phonics instruction – synthetic, analogy, embedded, analytic
Structured Synthetic Phonics – Teaching the word level reading through a systematic, explicit code-based instruction
Sight Word Lexicons, High Frequency Words and How to teach them!
The relationship of reading, spelling and writing
The characteristics of high-quality instructional materials
Decodable Texts and when to move on from decodables
How to assess, screen and use student data to inform teaching
Glossary of Terms
Module 3 – Reading Fluency
In this module you will explore the often overlooked but vital role that fluency plays in the development of a skilled reader.
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The Essential Components of Reading Fluency
Evidence based fluency instruction and strategies to support fluency acquisition
Assessing, Screening and Monitoring Fluency
Reading disfluency and struggling readers
Other Resources, Research and Further Professional Learning
Module 4 – Oral Language & Vocabulary
In this module you will learn how vocabulary develops, and how evidenced based vocabulary instruction can support language comprehension.
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How oral language development is the foundation of vocabulary development
Vocabulary Instruction: Why is it so important
Evidence Based Vocabulary Instruction – direct, explicit, effective
How to screen, monitor and assess oral language and vocabulary
How do we bet support our struggling readers – Vocabulary Instruction
Module 5 – Comprehension: The Skilled Reader
In this module you will explore the complex nature of the comprehension strand of Scarborough’s Reading Rope and build your understanding of the essential components required for skilled reading development.
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Meaning Creation, Mental models and Schemas
Layered Model of Effective Comprehension Instruction
Language Comprehension versus Reading Comprehension
The subskills of Language Comprehension
Process versus Product
What causes poor comprehension
Strategy Instruction Within Content Learning
Cognitive Overload and Instructional Considerations
Assessment and monitoring of Language and Reading Comprehension
Module 6 – Putting It Altogether: When Reading Science Meets Practice
In this module you will learn how a structured literacy approach to the teaching of reading can fit into a literacy block and how it can be supported across all Key Learning Areas (KLA’s). You will learn how and when different forms of assessment and screeners can be used to inform, monitor and measure student success.
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The reading and writing connection
Classroom routines
Lower and Upper Literacy Block examples
Multitiered Tiered Intervention/ Instruction
Identifying student needs and reading deficits
Monitoring Student Development and Measuring Success
How to Teach Reading
About Lesson

Reading disfluency and struggling readers 

What Does a fluency problem look like

A disfluent reader struggles may struggle with reading speed, accuracy, and expression. Students will often exhibit slow, laboured reading, frequent stopping at words, and a lack of natural phrasing or expression. They may also read too quickly, without paying attention to punctuation, expression and meaning.

A struggling readers may display some of the following characteristics when reading:

Speed and Accuracy – If a student has a problem with decoding this will be demonstrated through the speed and accuracy at which they read. They may demonstrate:

  • Slow and Laboured Reading: Disfluent readers often read at a significantly slower pace than their peers, and their reading may sound disjointed as they pause to decode words. This would suggest that student does not have fluency of the foundational decoding skills.
  • Frequent Stopping and Starting: Students may pause frequently to sound out words, reread sections and struggle to progress through the text.
  • Decoding Errors: Students may mispronounce a word, they may guess a word from the initial, substitute words, and have difficulty decoding unfamiliar words. 
  • Difficulty with Phrasing: Students may read in a disjointed manner as they struggle to group words into natural phrases, resulting in a choppy or robotic reading style.  

 

Expression and Prosody- If a student is unable to chunk words into meaningful phrases, reads without expression or attention to punctuation, this may indicate that the student is struggling to decode automatically and is consequently unable to attend to meaning as they read. They may demonstrate:

  • Lack of Expression: Disfluent readers may read in a flat, monotone, robotic voice, without any inflection or emphasis on important words or phrases. 
  • Ignoring Punctuation: Students may not pause at commas, full stops, or question marks. They may not adjust their reading to demonstrate appropriate intonation and expression. Students may read in a way that sounds unnatural, lacking the smooth and effortless flow of a fluent reader.  

Other Signs: 

  • Avoidance of Reading: A struggling readers may avoid reading aloud, may disengage from the lesson, disrupt others and find excuses to not read i.e. bathroom breaks, feeling unwell etc.   
  • Difficulty with Comprehension: A disfluent reader may read the text; however, they may have difficulty understanding what they read, even after reading it multiple times. This indicates that they are unable to attend to meaning and may have a vocabulary problem.
  • Struggles with Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: 75% of reading deficits are phonologically based. This impacts on a student’s ability to decode automatically, and the ability to shift words into their long-term memory (orthographic lexicon) for easy instantaneous access (orthographic mapping). If a student struggles to decode, then they may have difficulty hearing the smallest units of sound (phonemes). They may not be able to isolate, blend, segment and manipulate sounds in words, and consequently are unable to build strong neural pathways, between the phonological processor and orthographic processer which are required for decoding and encoding purposes. Students may also have difficulty rhyming or segmenting and blending syllables & compound words.  
  • Difficulty with Following Directions: Students may struggle to understand and follow written instructions. They may often be asking their peers for help.
  • Difficulty Retelling Stories: After reading a story, a student may have difficulty retelling or summarising the main events, our answering questions about the story.

There are many reasons a teacher my suspect that a student has a fluency deficit. The most reliable indicator of the student being ‘at risk’ would be them performing below grade level or the targeted benchmark in a words-correct-per-minute (WCPM) assessment, and disjointed, diffluent oral reading.  However, observation of a student’s behaviours during reading is often the first clue to the struggles that they are facing. The student is easily frustrated when reading aloud, either because of speed or accuracy.

Developing Fluent Readers | Reading Rockets

Target the Problem: Fluency | Reading Rockets

Common Types of Reading Problems and How to Help Children Who Have Them | Reading Rockets

 

What are the implications of disfluent reading?

Research has found that the rate required for basic comprehension is around 90–100 words per minute. This rate is usually achieved by the end of Year 2. (              )

At this stage, children should be able to read and understand simple text (Armbruster et al, 2001). If children are not reading at the required rate, with accuracy and prosody, higher order comprehension cannot occur. Having a large sight vocabulary and not needing to consciously attend to decoding the text, frees up a child’s cognitive resources to understand what they are reading.

 

 

 

 

How to support the disfluent reader.

Children who are not progressing with rate and accuracy should be assessed for letter/sound knowledge and phonemic proficiency. A useful assessment which can be used to assess phonemic proficiency is the PAST, by Dr David Kilpatrick https://www.thepasttest.com/.

Children with poor phonemic proficiency lack the ability to orthographically map words into their sight word vocabulary. Training phonemic proficiency to the advanced level, combined with improving letter/sound automaticity and repeated opportunities for reading connected text is the fastest way to improve oral reading fluency.

The research literature provides some clear directions on what to do with struggling readers: Interventions must combine the modeling, repeated reading, and feedback that research has demonstrated effective

Multilingual Learners/ EALD/ ELL

 

 

 

 Programs – Equipped for Reading Success & Bridging the Gap 

https://equippedforreadingsuccess.com/ and Bridging the Gap

https://heggerty.org/product/bridge-the-gap/ bolster phonemic awareness and fluent word recognition in order to promote orthographic mapping and fluent word level reading.                      

What commercial assessments are available for fluency?  

DIBELS 8th Edition: Australasian Version Materials | DIBELS®

MultiLit – Wheldall Assessment of Reading Lists https://multilit.com/programs/warl/

MultiLit – Wheldall Assessment of Reading Passages https://multilit.com/programs/warp/

Acadience Reading K-6 (formerly DIBELS Next) https://acadiencelearning.org/acadience-reading/k-grade6/

 

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