Episode 6: sounding out the phonics screening check

2 September 2021

A conversation about the most effective strategies for using the phonics screening check results to drive literacy improvement and help students learn to read. Discover the training opportunities that are available to build your own skills.

Show Notes

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome back to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. It's been a little while as we've had a little kind of COVID related hiatus, which has prevented us from getting out to school. So we've slightly recalibrated the format.

We're talking to a few people from within the department, um, about some things that hopefully important to you and useful to you. Today, I'm in conversation with Claire Wood, who is the department's Manager of Literacy and Numeracy practice and we're talking about phonics. Now, the reason we're talking about phonics is that since 2018, we introduced a Phonics Screening Check in South Australia at Year 1 level. And we've done about 13 to 14,000 students per year for each of those last few years. The results have been pleasingly heading in the right direction, which Claire, you could probably take some credit and comfort in those [00:01:00] results as that's really good.

So phonics, let's talk a little bit about what it is. Now I am the father of a three-year-old daughter who has I think comfortably one of the most annoying educational toys imaginable, which was purchased for her by my mother, who is a teacher. And it is a soundboard, uh, with a number of noises, I think, designed to move her away from the Sesame Street style alphabet to perhaps a more sounds based program.

Now, presumably mum bought that for my daughter, for reasons beyond upsetting the tranquility of my domestic existence. What is the point of this thing? What is phonics? What are we trying to achieve with this?

Claire Wood: I think there are probably more annoying toys out there, but, and I think your mother probably did a really good job at choosing this toy.

Phonics is one of the six components of learning to read and to be a skilled reader you need all six of them and [00:02:00] oral language is the first one. So I'm sure you talk lots to your three-year-old and improve her oral language, then it's phonological awareness. Can they hear those sounds of languages are distinct you know distinctly.

Phonological awareness, I often describe it as that idea that, you know, when you're hearing somebody speak a different language you can kind of pick up the rhythm of that language without knowing where one word starts and ends. And of course we get we've improved children's phonological awareness as they go through kindy and school and they can actually distinguish the words from the, the sound.

And then phonics is the really important bit then. That we attach those sounds to letters because when you think about reading, what you're doing is you're just ciphering letters and letter strings from the book or the passage that you're reading and you're making it back into speech sounds. And so phonics is a really, really important part of learning to read, because if you don't know that those letters [00:03:00] represent a sound, you can't read. And so we called it a foundational skill. And of course, with phonic knowledge, you can lift the meaning off the page. So you can build your vocabulary. You can comprehend what you're reading and you can become more and more fluent because you can automatically read them.

Dale Atkinson: All right, with that in mind. What is the phonics screening check? What are we looking for?

Claire Wood: The phonics screening check we brought in three or four years ago. And, um, we brought it in because it's a really important screener, because if we're saying that phonics is a foundational skill and everything else really builds off and if you have phonics, you have freed up your brain space to learn lots of other things across the curriculum.

So when you think about how are children going with phonics. We usn't to be able to know. And so in 2018, we decided to do a trial on how our children are going with phonics. And we implemented the check to see, could we improve the learning for the children at [00:04:00] the level that they're at? So it does exactly what the name says.

You know, the phonics screening check screens children, for their ability to decode. That means read phonics in mind. So it's a very short check. It takes five to seven minutes it's done by the child's teacher. And the results are the most important thing, because what we want teachers to do is to act on the results that they get from the phonics screening check.

We have those, as you said, 20 real words. And you know, sometimes the children may have just memorised those words, they've heard them before and that doesn't really check their phonic knowledge. If it's just something that they memorise that word and they just say it, but the pseudo words or the nonsense words, you know, the non words that we have in the check, the 20 words, they really are purely checking their phonics.

And if you think about those pseudo words are really a great leveler because you don't have to have a huge vocabulary. You couldn't come from a literacy poor background, or you could have be a learner of English and everybody's on the same playing field because nobody's seen this word before and you're using your skills that you've learnt, the decoding skill, you've learnt [00:05:00] to read that word off the page.

Dale Atkinson: And so from that, the teacher gets an understanding. Gets a small set of data about that specific student. And what are they looking for in those numbers and how are they responding to what they see?

Claire Wood: Well, with teaching the Australian Curriculum, the students should be able to easily and comfortably read 28 out of 40 of those words and they possibly know more. And those that are struggling will know less. The first thing that you get is information about the pattern of your class. If you think about it that way, you've got a group of students who are probably fluent decoders, and they're the ones that are going really well. You've got a group of students that are developing decoders and so they're going at the pace that you've set for them, but you may have one or two that are struggling and they're the ones we're screening for. We're going to give them extra support if they need it. We want all children to be fluent decoders obviously. So that's the direction we want to head. So the teachers can have an opportunity to see the pattern of their class. And from that pattern, they can decide where the teaching needs to go.

Dale Atkinson: And what are the interventions that you're [00:06:00] looking at for those students who aren't quite at that standard that you would hope they would be?

Claire Wood: So the very first thing we ask teachers to look at is, is their teaching program, hitting the mark.

And we'd like them to think about what happens in their daily routine. Should they be doing more of something or should they be doing less of something? Or should they change something all together? We know that phonics is, is most effective when you do it frequently and often interleaved with other things, not just once a week or once every couple of days, but every day and maybe even more than once a day.

And so we often advise teachers to do more and we have a kind of a, a mantra that is don't teach until they get it right, teach until they can't get it wrong because we're looking for automaticity. We want to really free up brain space for children so that they can learn right across the curriculum.

Dale Atkinson: That's an incredibly powerful sentiment, I think, um, teach until they can't get it wrong. So what about for those students who, who are in that space where they can't get it wrong? Who are performing [00:07:00] really well. What's the, what are the interventions in terms of stretching them to go even better? What are we looking at?

Claire Wood: Yes. Some of the teachers have been very pleasantly surprised to see that their children can do more than the expectation of the Australian Curriculum, because once you get to a certain level of decoding, you're kind of self-teaching. So of those children can be stretched with a whole range of new reading. They can be given materials in their, what we call the zone of proximal development. So those kind of materials that will stretch them just a little bit more and keep them up with their learning, and we know that the phonics knowledge that you gain helps with your spelling and your writing. So all of those things can help with those children who are already doing well at decoding.

Dale Atkinson: Part of your work of you and your team has been to provide a lot of training to the Year 1 teachers and I think you've got about 1400 or so, who have gone through some level of training over the last few years, which is, uh, which is a really good achievement, but for those who are outside of that year 1 area. This is obviously still something that's incredibly important for students to learn. What's [00:08:00] available to teachers in other year levels?

Claire Wood: We have a whole series of best advice, papers for the big six and phonics being one there's a whole best advice paper on phonics, eh, it's also throughout all of our guidebooks. So it doesn't matter whether you're starting to build foundations or you're right up there at stretch. There's going to be something of that phonics in the guidebooks.

We have a whole series on plink. That's available for teachers of all levels and leaders as well to understand how phonics fits. So I would always say to people who are interested in this area, the first thing you should do is the plink course called literacy from the experts and Maryanne Wolf's particular uh, module is fantastic for, uh, giving you the idea of the neuroscience behind why we've chosen this direction. We know that the brain has to be rewired to learn, to read, and Maryanne is a very, very good presenter and she lead people through that understanding of why explicit teaching of phonics is [00:09:00] so important.

Dale Atkinson: That's awesome. And I would recommend that for everyone.

Claire Wood: I didn't even mention that of course we have two other plink courses directly for the phonics screening check as well. And as you already said for the year 1 teachers, we have those three differentiated courses. Those courses, although they are funded for year 1s we invite anyone who's interested to come to those courses.

And most of the leaders across the state have attended. We've also had, uh, teachers, uh, for reception and year two and a lot of high school literacy leaders who have had children coming through who clearly missed out on the stages of the phonics.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So it can really be picked up in and is useful at, uh, at any level.

The final question is obviously risks, uh, moving into slightly culture wars areas, because phonics sometimes is something that is used as a, as a bat to beat the teaching profession with a little bit on some of the pages of the Australian and, uh, and other newspapers. Um, so what are the misconceptions that exist around phonics and the teaching of it?

Well, I'd like to say we don't [00:10:00] have them anymore. I mean, you know, honestly, we've moved so far away from those misconceptions here in South Australia, and we've got, as you pointed out a thousand, I think it was 1,600 teachers every year, come to the phonics screening check, professional learning. And so that information has now disseminated across the state and we really have addressed all those misconceptions and teachers themselves can see the progress of the children.

And so they know that this is, um, it's just a furphy, it's just a distraction. Um, listening to anybody, learning to read or learning to do anything, first of all, can be, can sound laborious. You know, children sounding things out and then blending them together, can sound laborious. And during the training, we actually introduce our teachers to that feeling of learning a new code, you know, cause the alphabet is a code and you know the code so you can't unlearn reading once you know it. So we put them through a whole process of learning dingbats, you know, dingbats. So we [00:11:00] introduced them to a new code and we get them to learn it and it's quite funny to listen to them, very laboriously going, S ah, D sad. Sad. And they feel that challenge that the children feel, but they also feel the satisfaction of getting it right.

And I actually did that myself and that's, you know, that's the beauty of phonics. The children get very independent very quickly. And so a lot of those old ideas that phonics is slow and laboured they go out the window once people understand what it's doing for your brain, it's rewiring it and helping you to read better.

Dale Atkinson: And that reward that comes through for those kids and for the teachers, it sounds amazing

Claire Wood: Yeah. That's good. That's good.

Dale Atkinson: Well, that's fantastic. And thank you so much for your, for your time today. Um, we'll put the link to the resources, including the phonics screening check explainer documents, uh, and those plink phonics courses up in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening and thank you Claire very much for your time. That was amazing.

Claire Wood: Thank you.

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