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

Correct Pronunciation of Phonemes is Critical…Why?

“Awareness of articulatory gestures facilitates the activation of graphophonemic connections that helps children identify written words and secure them in memory.” (Ehri)

As you have learnt, beginning readers acquire letter sound knowledge by matching their visual memory of letters with their phonological memory (sound).  All beginning readers need to know how to produce speech sounds (phonemes) in isolation, and how to pronounce these phonemes correctly. When teaching and modelling the sounds of language (phonemes), it is critically important that teachers articulate the phonemes of speech accurately.

A common mistake that teachers make is distorting the phoneme by adding a “schwa…uh”, sound to unvoiced consonants e.g. PUH for /p/, TUH for /t/, and even SUH for /s/ (a continuant phoneme). Teachers often do this without realising, it can originate from a regional accent /habit, and it can be a byproduct of how they learnt to articulate sounds. When an additional sound is added to the pure sound, this makes it difficult to synthesise (blend) individual sounds when decoding. This is also reflected when students are encoding (spelling) words. E.g. cat (3 phonemes /c/ /a/ /t/) = catuh (/c/ /a/ /t/  + /u/ = 4 phonemes).

Teachers need to be aware of how sounds are made and articulated.  An awareness of stop sounds, continuants, voiced and unvoiced sounds will help teachers navigate how to teach, guide and support speech sound development. Explicitly teaching voiced and unvoiced phonemes help to facilitate reading and spelling acquisition. Your school speech pathologist can guide you in the right direction if you wish to learn more.

Stop sounds – These are phonemes that are said for a very brief time. The airflow is stopped completely for a short time. These are more difficult for children to hear than continuant sounds.

Continuants – These are phonemes that can be held for several seconds without distortion. 

Voiced and unvoiced consonant sounds.  https://youtu.be/495LciokKag?si=obxnGGJob1i2aHsk

Implications for English Language Learners

Things to consider when you are working with English language Learners:

  • Phonemic awareness skills travel across languages,
  • Word reading develops similarly to native speakers however there is a brief time lag, which is dependent upon age, previous reading acquisition, similarities across languages.
  • Comprehension lag of up to 5 -6 years due to language development (Kilpatrick, 2019).

Reading Development and Difficulties: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice | SpringerLink

English language learners exhibit three main difficulties:

  • Substitution – students will substitute sounds not present in their first language with the closest equivalent from their 1st
  • Discrimination – students may have difficulty hearing, detecting and distinguishing between sounds in their new language,
  • Pronunciation – students may have difficulty pronouncing new sounds because of unfamiliar tongue position and mouth position required in their new language (Berry & Hudson, 1987).
  • Students will require explicit instruction of sound articulation.

Suggestions of how to support English Language Learners (ELL) in your classroom:

  • Small group instruction to build vocabulary. ELL students can be introduced to new words that they will be working with the following day,
  • Practice sound articulation and mouth position,
  • Provide extra opportunity to practice.

Links to supporting resources

Helpful Resources & Further Links to Learning

Speech pathologist Alison Clarke from Spelfabet has made this series of videos demonstrating voiced and unvoiced phonemes and more.   » Phonemes are sounds AND articulatory gestures   (Spelfabet)

Sounds for Literacy – research  (Cued Articulation)

Phonemic Awareness Instruction: Contribution of Articulatory Segmentation to Novice Beginners’ Reading and Spelling: Scientific Studies of Reading: Vol 7, No 1

Teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences – Five from Five

Voiced vs. Unvoiced Sounds – What’s the Difference? |

» Phonemes are sounds AND articulatory gestures

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