TEACHING READING BASED ON EVIDENCE
Children aren’t born with natural skills in reading, like they are for walking and talking. They must develop new pathways in their brain to master this skill.
National and international research shows that the process of learning to read can be broken down into lots of individual skills.
Cognitive scientists can clearly see that teaching all these individual skills systematically and explicitly, sets up the pathways in our brain for reading.
This approach is effective for beginning, struggling and advanced readers. Importantly, it is an engaging and fun way for all students to learn.
This is what informs and underpins Tasmania’s new approach to reading.
The foundational elements of reading can be broken down into six skills – often referred to as:
The Big Six
- Oral language – Talking and listening provides a foundation for learning to read
- Phonological awareness – Being able to recognise the individual sounds in speech
- Phonics – Being able to recognise the relationship between letters and sounds
- Vocabulary – Knowing the meaning of a word makes you more likely to be able to read it.
- Fluency– This is not just about being able to read quickly, it’s about reading in a way that shows you understand the meaning.
- Comprehension – understanding what you read.
Source:
Literacy - Department for Education, Children and Young People
Current recommendations from support specialists such as school psychologists and speech pathologists are all evidence based strategies and include the above approaches as well as include the use of technology to assist students with reading difficulties.
This includes software that we have access to at Molesworth such as Read Write which can read the onscreen text to students or use speech to text functions to assist the student record their thinking.
