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Navigating early literacy: The research behind effective instruction in Foundation

Sound Waves Literacy 30/10/24

The first year of school is a big deal for students. It’s full of excitement, change, and new and complex challenges, such as learning to read and spell. While children have a natural capacity to acquire oral language, they must be explicitly taught how to read and spell, which makes it a big deal for teachers too.

Fortunately, there is an extensive body of research to guide educators in providing the best possible foundations for students’ long-term literacy success. And the research has consistently identified phonemic awareness and phonics as essential components of early years reading and spelling instruction.

Understanding phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognise and manipulate phonemes in spoken words. It can be broken down into a number of sub-skills, including identifying phonemes (initial, final and medial), blending, segmenting and manipulating.

Phonemic awareness is recognised as a strong and reliable predictor of later reading and spelling success. ^5,7,10,15 It’s also well established that phonemic awareness skills need to be explicitly taught – they do not come naturally as part of oral language development. ^14,15

In the first year of school, phonemic awareness can be taught as oral-only phonemic awareness, or as part of phonics teaching where phonemic skills and graphemes are introduced at the same time. Research generally recommends phonemic awareness be combined with phonics as soon as possible because pairing phonemic awareness with the introduction of graphemes has the biggest impact on reading and spelling outcomes. ⁹ However, some basic instruction in oral-only phonemic awareness prior to phonics is often recommended to avoid overloading young children. For example, Brady ^{1 (p2)} states:


Fostering phoneme awareness before introducing letters is advised because it allows focus on the spoken form of phonemes, avoiding confusion with visual letters or letter names.

And Clemens ^{4 (p24)} states:

Pre-readers may benefit from phonemic awareness instruction independent of print, because these activities are designed to foster the understanding that words have sublexical features – a fact that is neither intuitive nor necessary for using spoken language.

An initial period of oral-only phonemic awareness instruction should simply aim to introduce phonemic awareness skills in the first few weeks of Foundation when children are also taking in many new expectations and routines of formal schooling. Children should not be expected to master phonemic awareness skills in these introductory lessons and mastery should not be seen as prerequisite to starting phonics. In fact, there is a reciprocal relationship between reading, spelling and phonemic awareness where development of skills in one area supports the development of skill in another, and vice versa. ¹⁴ So, beginning to learn phonics will enhance students’ phonemic awareness.

Understanding phonics

Phonics is the teaching of phoneme–grapheme relationships for reading and spelling. An example of a phonics lesson is teaching children to use k to represent the phoneme /k/ as in kite. Phonics also refers to the body of knowledge children have relating to phoneme-grapheme relationships, and how they apply this knowledge to read and spell words. An example of phonic knowledge is a child knowing when to write c, k and ck to represent /k/ in words and knowing how to read words with these graphemes.

Research evidence for the effectiveness of phonics instruction is extensive. Phonics instruction has repeatedly been shown to improve word recognition, spelling and comprehension, and to be an effective intervention for students struggling with reading and spelling. ^2,9,12,13 There is widespread consensus on the benefits of phonics instruction which is why phonics (or skills built upon phonics such as word recognition and fluency) appears in all well-established theoretical models of reading such as The Simple View of Reading, The Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read Framework and Scarborough’s Reading Rope.

The link between phonics, reading and spelling makes sense given the alphabetic nature of our writing system where graphemes are used to represent the phonemes of spoken language. In order to read, children must be able to link the graphemes they see to the phonemes those graphemes represent in speech. Conversely, to spell, children must be able to identify the phonemes in a word then select the correct graphemes to represent those phonemes. This all becomes incredibly difficult if you cannot identify and work with phonemes and graphemes.

Various approaches to teaching phonics have been debated over the last few decades. Available studies comparing different approaches have found that students taught using systematic synthetic phonics outperform those taught using other phonic approaches on measures of both reading and spelling. ^3,8,11 As a result, systematic synthetic phonics has been consistently recommended in significant literacy reports released in Australia and the UK over the last two decades ^12,13 and is the most commonly recommended approach by education departments across Australia.

Systematic synthetic phonics involves explicitly and systematically teaching the relationship between phonemes and graphemes. Instruction focuses on developing students’ ability to segment words into phonemes to spell (encode) and synthesise, or blend, sounds to read (decode). Lessons are systematically sequenced so students progress from learning simple, broadly applicable phoneme–grapheme relationships to studying more complex and unusual ones.

Systematic synthetic phonics instruction incorporates decodable readers to teach reading. These short texts only contain the phoneme–grapheme relationships students have been explicitly taught. These books give students specific opportunities to apply their phonemic awareness and knowledge of phoneme–grapheme relationships, which over time develops students’ word recognition skills and fluency.

How does Sound Waves Literacy teach phonemic awareness and phonics in the Foundation year?

Phonemic awareness and systematic synthetic phonics are explicitly taught throughout the Sound Waves Literacy Foundation program. Students receive an initial introduction to basic phonemic awareness in lessons during Weeks 1–5 of Term 1. Systematic synthetic phonics lessons begin in Week 6 with phonemic awareness continuing to be taught, revised and extended alongside phonics for the remainder of the year.

All teaching is explicit and includes reviews of previously learned content. Students practise reading with the Sound Waves Decodable Readers that are perfectly matched to the systematic synthetic phonics teaching sequence. Regular assessments are provided to monitor student progress with all content taught.

Find out more by taking a look at the Sound Waves Literacy Scope and Sequence or contacting your local Education Consultant to book your school in for a free professional learning workshop.

References

1. Brady, S 2020, ‘A 2020 perspective on research findings on alphabetics (phoneme awareness and phonics): Implications for instruction’ The Reading League Journal, 1(3), 20-28, http://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Brady-Expanded-Version-of-Alphabetics-TRLJ.pdf↩

2. Castles, A, Rastle, K, & Nation, K 2018, ‘Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert’ Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(2), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100618772271↩

3. Christensen, CA & Bowey, JA 2005, ‘The efficacy of orthographic rime, grapheme–phoneme correspondence, and implicit phonics approaches to teaching decoding skills’, Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(4), 327-349, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43472817_The_Efficacy_of_Orthographic_Rime_Grapheme-Phoneme_Correspondence_and_Implicit_Phonics_Approaches_to_Teaching_Decoding_Skills↩

4. Clemens, N, Solari, E, Kearns, DM, Fien, H, Nelson, NJ, Stelega, M, Burns, M, St. Martin, K & Hoeft, F 2021, ‘They say you can do phonemic awareness instruction ‘in the dark’, but should you? A critical evaluation of the trend toward advanced phonemic awareness training’, PsyArXiv Preprints, https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ajxbv↩

5. Erbeli, F, Rice, M, Xu, Y, Bishop, ME, & Goodrich, JM 2024. ‘A Meta-Analysis on the Optimal Cumulative Dosage of Early Phonemic Awareness Instruction’ Scientific Studies of Reading, 28(4), 345-370, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2024.2309386↩

6. Galuschka K, Ise E, Krick K & Schulte-Korne G 2014, ‘Effectiveness of treatment approaches for children and adolescents with reading disabilities: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials’, PLOS ONE, 9(2), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0089900↩

7. Guerin, JM, Droder, S, Turkelson, L, & Mano, QR 2024, ‘Mediators of working memory and reading in a sample of children with reading difficulty: The roles of phonemic awareness and rapid automatized naming’ Dyslexia (Chichester, England), 30(3), e1774, https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1774↩

8. Johnston, RS, McGeown, S & Watson, JE 2012, ‘Long-term effects of synthetic versus analytic phonics teaching on the reading and spelling ability of 10 year old boys and girls,’ Reading and Writing, 25(6), 1365-1384, viewed 29 April 2024, https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/long-term-effects-of-synthetic-versus-analytic-phonics-teaching-o↩

9. National Reading Panel (US) 2000, Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf↩

10. Rice, M, Erbeli, F, & Wijekumar, K 2024, ‘Phonemic Awareness: Evidence-Based Instruction for Students in Need of Intervention’, Intervention in School and Clinic, 59(4), 269-273, https://doi.org/10.1177/10534512231156881↩

11. Roberts, TA & Meiring, A 2006, ‘Teaching phonics in the context of children’s literature or spelling: Influences on first-grade reading, spelling, and writing and fifth-grade comprehension’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(4), 690-713, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228621281_Teaching_phonics_in_the_context_of_children’s_literature_or_spelling_Influences_on_first-grade_reading_spelling_and_writing_and_fifth-grade_comprehension↩

12. Rose, J 2006, Independent review of the teaching of early reading, UK Department for Education and Skills, viewed 29 April 2024, https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5551/2/report.pdf↩

13. Rowe, KJ 2005, Teaching reading: Report and recommendations, Department of Education, Science and Training: National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, viewed 29 April 2024, https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=tll_misc↩

14. Tunmer, W & Hoover, W 2020, ‘The cognitive foundations of reading and its acquisition’, Springer Nature, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340491904_The_Cognitive_Foundations_of_Reading_and_Its_Acquisition_A_Framework_with_Applications_Connecting_Teaching_and_Learning↩

15. Rice, M, Erbeli, F, Thompson, CG, & Fogarty, M 2022, ‘Phonemic Awareness: A Meta-Analysis for Planning Effective Instruction’, Reading Research Quarterly, 57(4), 1259-1289, https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.473↩

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