17 October 2023

Join us as Dr Jennifer Buckingham discusses the how and why of teaching synthetic phonics. Dr Jennifer Buckingham OAM is Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow at MultiLit, and Director of the Five from Five Project. She explains some of the strategies educators can take to develop efficient reading for all students.

Show Notes

• 2023 Literacy Summit presentations
• Literacy teaching and learning resources
• Understanding the Big 6 components of reading
• Dr Jennifer Buckingham – MultiLit

Transcript

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education and today we're joined by Dr Jennifer Buckingham who is the Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow at MultiLit. Jennifer, thanks for joining us.

Jennifer Buckingham: You're very welcome. Thanks for inviting me.

Dale Atkinson: Well, it's good to have you here because you are involved in discussing the research base behind the teaching of synthetic phonics at our Literacy Summit. And the title of your presentation is From Sounding Out to Sight Words, the Teaching of Synthetic Phonics. And it's looking at the large evidence base describing how children learn to read words and the tools and strategies that primary leaders and teachers can use to develop efficient reading for all students.

Can we just start by talking a little bit about what the reading brain is?

Jennifer Buckingham: Sure. It's a really important concept for teachers to understand, and it's really just a shorthand term for the neurological network that is created when we learn to read. So children are not born with that network in place, it has to be created through teaching and learning.

And we need to make connections between parts of the brain that aren't connected in a way that it needs to be, in order for children to make the connection between print, speech and meaning. So, we do that through repeated exposure and practice with connecting letters to sounds, with decoding words, and then over time those words become stored in memory as letter strings, and those letter strings, which we otherwise call words, then become connected to meaning.

With lots of practice, that process becomes really fast and we start to recognise familiar words on sight. So, it feels effortless, but that has to happen in a really intentional way, there's no alternative to that. It has to happen in every student's brain, it just will happen at a different rate for different children.

So we create the reading brain through teaching and learning and there are types of instruction that make that more likely to happen, and to happen quickly, and to be successful.

Dale Atkinson: What are those types of instruction that make it more likely to happen?

Jennifer Buckingham: The instruction that is most effective is explicit and systematic.

And systematic synthetic phonics is a very explicit and systematic way of teaching children to decode words to read. So it is the method that is most aligned with the reading research on the reading brain and on cognitive processes and on successful reading acquisition.

Dale Atkinson: What is it that teachers need to be focusing on in the classroom when they're engaging with children on this stuff?

Jennifer Buckingham: Teachers need to focus on the connecting of the letter sounds in those very early stages of reading. So, um, getting children familiar with the alphabet and teaching in a very systematic way how the letters in written language, connect to the sounds that they hear in spoken language. And that's sort of something that we do really without thinking about it too much, but it's a brand new idea for a lot of kids.

So, beginning readers need to have that explained to them very carefully and taken through that alphabetic code in a really methodical way, but at the same time, making sure that they are developing their vocabulary because that's the other very important aspect of it. There's the code and the written word and then there's the language, and we need to connect those two together for children in order for them to be able to read.

Dale Atkinson: What does that experience look like for the child that you're teaching? What are you trying to kind of instil in them over a period of time?

Jennifer Buckingham: Yeah, so from the beginning stages we're connecting the alphabet to the sounds in speech and we're building up their understanding of how those sounds come together to make words. And those represent words that they know the meaning of, that they've learned, and also new words that we're teaching through vocabulary.

And it's a very systematic process starting with a few letters and sounds to begin with and adding some more. So over the first year of school, it's amazing, you know, how much code students can learn and how much language they can learn at the same time. A systematic and an accumulative process.

They're not teaching, you know, one set of content and then forgetting that before they move on to the next one. It's picking up the previous content and integrating that with the new content that they're learning. By the end of about the second year of school, you'd hope that children were pretty familiar with all of the alphabetic code and they're decoding fairly well, and they've got a really good developing vocabulary.

So then by the time they then get into the third year of school, you're starting to work on things like fluency and reading comprehension. But laying that foundational groundwork of being able to read words accurately and with some automaticity is essential for that next process to take place.

Dale Atkinson: Now the teaching of reading and language seems to be a strangely contested place at times.

What do you say to teachers who, and leaders, who might say, you know, look, our children don't learn like that. We tend to approach it more through, say, levelled readers or other approaches. What's the message there?

Jennifer Buckingham: Well, levelled readers use an approach that's less effective because they're based on a disproven theory of reading, which is the three cueing method.

And the three cueing method encourages children to use context cues to try and work out what an unfamiliar word might be. So it might be the overall meaning of the sentence or it might be whether, you know, it sort of makes sense in terms of the syntax. And they're taught to do that before they attempt to decode it using phonics. So using that, that three cueing approach has been shown to be inefficient and has a really high error rate. And it's much higher than the error rate than when students use decoding as their first strategy if they've been taught a systematic phonics approach. So when children are learning to read using levelled readers, that can give the impression that they're reading, but what looks like successful reading is often just good memory for whole words.

It's not building that neurological network that I mentioned earlier and that skilled readers need. So, our brains have a limited capacity for remembering whole words, and so a student who can't decode will hit a level that they can't get past at some point. As I mentioned, some children will learn to read no matter what the teacher does, but because there are individual differences that arise from having an advantaged tone background or just a stronger predisposition to learn.

And so those students who do eventually manage to learn to read using these less effective methods, such as levelled text, often have poor spelling because they haven't learnt that code. Um, and also they would have learned to read more quickly if they'd had that really effective explicit instruction.

So there's, there is an opportunity cost for those students who would have been learning to read earlier and could have been really building up their vocabulary and those other great things that we want.

Dale Atkinson: That is so insightful and incredible. I'm the father of a nearly six-year-old and one of the things that is very apparent about her and some of her little friends is just how incredibly powerful their memory is.

But while you're talking, it just makes me think about the superficial learning of memory and the difference between that and actually understanding the sub layer of what you're trying to engage with, which is what we're trying to achieve with this, isn't it?

Jennifer Buckingham: Absolutely, because knowing the code and how it works can be generalised then to every word that they read.

And we still use that even if we don't necessarily know we're doing it. So we as skilled readers most of the time are just reading words on sight because they're words we've seen a thousand times. And so we just, we're familiar with them. But if we see a word that we're less familiar with, or it's a brand new word, we will go back to using that decoding strategy.

And we have that. And you don't lose it. But for children, it really has to be painstakingly built and so that they will always have that and take it through their life.

Dale Atkinson: And where can people, obviously, you know, the research base that you've engaged with at a really deep level is available, I think, on your website, five from five.

What sort of resources and other activities and support is available on that website?

Jennifer Buckingham: The five from five website is a really great starting point for teachers who want to know more about scientific reading research and it provides it in a really accessible way. But it also is a great resource for teachers who are looking for ways to upskill their practice or to look for references and up to date research.

So it's got a really wide range of uses for teachers wherever they're up to in terms of their understanding of the science of reading and of systematic synthetic phonics instruction. So there's information on there for parents as well. That has been developed so that there can be a better partnership between teachers and parents, and all have a good understanding of what's going on when children are learning to read.

Dale Atkinson: As a parent myself of a child who's nearly six, what are the types of things that the parents should be doing in terms of supporting the classroom teaching that's going on?

Jennifer Buckingham: One of the best things that parents can do with children is read with them and whether that's their home reading books, which in the early years of school will hopefully be decodable books until they have become proficient in that particular skill.

But also, you're reading a wide range of great children's literature and having fantastic conversations about language, about the alphabet, about words and really building up their vocabulary. It's such an important thing for parents to do because there's only a limited time as we know in school. So, teachers are using that time in the most effective way possible, but there's a lot of time outside of school where children can be really engaging with literature and learning lots of words and word meanings and background knowledge and that's a really fun thing for parents to do with children as well.

Dale Atkinson: So really the parental role is less explicit instruction and more just helping to engage enthusiasm for reading and reading practice.

Jennifer Buckingham: Yeah, absolutely. So, supporting what's going on in school in terms of reading instruction and if there is some homework, if there's some practice to be done around tricky words and things like that, then yeah, definitely following the guidance of the classroom teacher.

But really, it's, you know, a great role of parents to be developing vocabulary and knowledge about the world. And all of those things contribute to children's reading comprehension.

Dale Atkinson: So with the five from five website, how does that fit in with the best advice papers and the big six components of reading that have been produced here in South Australia?

Jennifer Buckingham: Well, they're very closely aligned in terms of content, which is not surprising given that they draw on the same evidence base. So sometimes there's little, slight differences in terminology, but the language is largely really consistent and certainly the recommendations are as well.

Dale Atkinson: Now, SA's Literacy Guarantee with the Phonics Screening Check, the coaching, the professional learning that that sits there is obviously, you know, heavily engaged with phonetical awareness and synthetic phonics and evidence-based reading instruction.

What do you think our next steps as a department and as a public education system should be?

Jennifer Buckingham: Well, South Australia's been a national leader in terms of literacy policy around the early reading instruction in schools, and the Literacy Guarantee and the Literacy Guarantee Unit have definitely been at the centre of that. I know that teachers around the state really value the support that's provided through the unit.

So my advice would be to not lose that momentum around exemplary phonics instruction. It's really easy to sort of feel as though, okay, we understand this now, we don't need to focus on it as much, but results in the year one phonics check have improved since it started, but they could and they really should be a lot higher.

Those results show that the work isn't finished yet. There's a lot of great achievement, but we still have some work to do there. And I'd also advise that not taking your foot off the pedal around phonics instruction, but also paying attention to vocabulary and building knowledge through primary school.

They contribute to reading comprehension. So when you have a state full of fabulous little skilled decoders, they will then also be able to read for comprehension and enjoyment.

Dale Atkinson: The escalator we want all those little kids to be on, really.

Dr. Jennifer Buckingham, Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow at MultiLit. Thank you very much for your time.

Jennifer Buckingham: My pleasure. All the best.

Dale Atkinson: Dr. Buckingham's presentation is available on plink. That presentation's name is From Sounding Out to Sight Words, the Teaching of Synthetic Phonics.

And there are another 9 presentations from experts available there. The Literacy Summit presentations are all on plink. There's 10 in total. They provide educators with the opportunity to strengthen their knowledge about literacy improvement in preschools and schools. They're all aligned to department policy and that includes the literacy guidebooks and best advice papers.

So thanks very much for listening. Looking forward to your company next time.