Early Literacy Strategies

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Early Literacy Strategies

• Bev Flückiger
• Griffith University

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Targeted Intervention
Few children
Point-in-time Support
Some children
Quality Teaching
All children
School Literacy Strategy
All staff
Shared Philosophy
Whole school community
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• We must avoid the push-down of teaching methods
  into Prep.
• We must ensure rigour across the Early Years.

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View of Children

• Have a kitbag of resources
• Learn by acting and doing
• Strive to make meaning and be
• successful
• Use strategies and tactics
• Enact agency and voice

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• Scaffolder of Learning
• listens and responds
• builds understandings
• makes learning explicit and relevant
• builds connections
• investigates alternative ways
• discusses outcomes of choices
• challenges thinking
• reduces support as independence grows

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Pathways to Prevention

• Strong correlation between childrens language
  development, their behaviour and success in
  school.
• 38 receptive vocabulary difficulties
• 19 expressive vocabulary difficulties
• 44 language complexity difficulties

Homel et al. (2006).
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Features of Conversation

• Two (or more) speakers cooperate.
• The speakers draw upon their knowledge of the
  world and their ability to use language.
• Each speaker is supported by the listener through
  eye contact, attention and encouraging, affirming
  utterances of yes! absolutely! Uh-huh and
  so on.
• A speaker ensures that the listener has
  understood and adapts the message accordingly.
• The co-constructed message is genuinely
  negotiated.
• There is interest and engagement from both
  parties.
• In the best of conversations, the interaction
  occurs over a minimum of five exchanges, from
  which both parties benefit, learn, and gain
  enjoyment.
• Riley, J. (2006).

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Implications

• The most important aspect of childrens language
  experience is its amount.
• The most important aspect in early years
  classrooms is the amount of talk actually going
  on, moment by moment, between children and their
  teachers.

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Phonological awareness skills

• Word Level
• - recognize how many words are in a sentence
• Syllable Level
• -segment and blend words of at least 3
  syllables
• Rhyme Level
• - understand the concept of rhyming
• - recognize and generate rhyming words
• Sound Level
• - isolate the beginning or ending sound in
  words
• - segment and blend sounds in a word with
  three sounds
• - change a sound in a word to make a new word
  in familiar
• games and songs

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Without direct instructional support, almost one
quarter of all children are unaware of phonemes
..which impacts on learning to read. (Adams,
Foorman, Lundberg Beeler,1998). 
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Fourth Grade Slump

• Lack comprehension strategies
• Lack of fluency and automaticity
• (Chall, 1983, 1996 Stanovich, 1986)
• Language gap
• (Hirsch, 2003)

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• Because of the developmental nature of
  reading, the later one waits to strengthen
  weaknesses, the more difficult it is for the
  children to cope with the increasing literacy
  demands in the later grades.
• Chall Jacobs, 2003.

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Active comprehension strategies
Predicting
Questioning the text
Monitoring comprehension

• Making
• connections
• Text-to-text
• Text-to-self

Visualizing
Comprehension Strategies at work
Summarizing
Finding important information
Inferring
QUT Literacy Secretariat, 2009.
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Building Comprehension Skills

• Read Alouds
• Page peeping
• Asking Questions
• Elbow partners -The Big Idea
• Concept mapping, story mapping
• Accountable talk
• Comic strips and picture strips
• Telling a friend inside outside circles
• Pictures in the mind drawing
• Did that make sense to me?

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Principles that underpin comprehension

• Fluency allows the mind to concentrate on
  comprehension
• Breadth of vocabulary increases comprehension
  and facilitates further learning and
• Domain knowledge increases fluency, broadens
  vocabulary and enables deeper comprehension.
• Hirsch, 2003

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Fluency
Expressive interpretation
automaticity
accuracy
Word decoding
Comprehension
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To read fluently children require

• Accurate decoding of words in text
• Automaticity, or decoding words with
• minimal use of attentional resources and
• Appropriate use of phrasing and
• expression to convey meaning.

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Strategies to develop fluency

• Repeated oral reading practice
• Echo reading
• Choral reading
• Readers Theatre
• Paired reading
• Recorded reading
• Computer assisted reading
• Buddy reading (peer tutoring)

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• The Three Billy Goats Gruff Reader's Theatre
• Seven Characters Narrator1, Narrator 2, Narrator
  3, Troll, Little Billy Goat, Middle-Sized Billy
  Goat, and Big Billy Goat
• NARRATOR 1 Once upon a time there were three
  billy goat brothers named Gruff.
• NARRATOR 2 The three billy goats lived by a
  river.
• NARRATOR 3 Across the river was a meadow with
  tall green grass.
• NARRATOR 1 One day, the billy goats wanted to
  cross the river to eat the grass.
• NARRATOR 2 But there was only one bridge across
  the river.
• NARRATOR 3 And under that bridge lived a mean,
  hungry troll.
• NARRATOR 1 The troll had eyes as big as saucers
  and a nose as long as a poker.

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Knowledge of Words and the World

• Emphasize oral comprehension
• Larger focus on expository text
• Systematically build word and world knowledge

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In the early years we need to

• teach decoding skills
• develop fluency
• develop automaticity
• teach vocabulary
• build word knowledge
• teach children to use active
• comprehension strategies
• encourage students to monitor their
• own comprehension

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Primary Classroom teaching

• 76 teacher centred (didactic)
• 16 subject centred
• 6 child centred
• Limited student engagement
• Borman (2005)

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Teaching with rigour in the early years
classroomWhat does that look like?
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Fullan, Hill Crevola, 2006.
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Personalization

• Puts each and every child at the centre and
  provides an education that is tailored to the
  students learning and motivational needs at any
  given time
• Fullan, Hill, Crevola, 2006.

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Precision

• To get something right.
• Precision is in the service of personalization
  because it means to be uniquely accurate, that is
  precise to the learning needs of individuals.
• Fullan, Hill, Crevola, 2006

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Reading Assessment

• Oral language development
• Comprehension of texts
• Fluency
• Concepts about print
• Phonemic awareness
• Letter identification
• Phonics
• Word knowledge
• Vocabulary

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Professional Learning

• Focused on-going learning for
• each and every teacher
• Daily learning is needed
• individually and collectively
• Schools need to work from the
• classroom outward - not
• centrally developed PD
• Professional development works when it is
  school-based and embedded in the daily work of
  teachers
• Fullan, Hill, Crevola, 2006

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Targeted Intervention
Few children
Point-in-time Support
Some children
Quality Teaching
All children
School Literacy Strategy
All staff
Shared Philosophy
Whole school community
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System
District
school and community
Teacher Child
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References

• Adams, M., Foorman, B., Lundberg, L. Beeler, T.
  (1998). The elusive phoneme Why phonemic
  awareness is so important and how to help
  children develop it. American Educator, 22,
  18-29).
• Baumann, J. Ware, D. Carr Edwards, E. (2007).
  Bumping into spicy, tasty words that catch your
  tongue A formative experiment on vocabulary
  instruction. The Reading Teacher, 61(2),
  pp.108-122.
• Borman, K. Associates. (2005). Meaningful
  urban education reform. Albany State University
  of New York Press.
• Chall, J. (1983). Stages of reading development.
  New York McGraw-Hill.
• Chall, J. (1996). Learning to read The great
  debate (Third Edition). New York McGraw-Hill.
• Chall, J.S., Jacobs, V.A. (2003). Poor
  childrens fourth-grade slump. American Educator,
  27(1), 1415, 44.
• Fullan, M. Hill, P. Crevola, C. (2006).
  Breakthrough. Thousand Oaks, CA Corwin Press.
• Gambrell, L. (2005). Reading literature,
  reading text, reading the internet The times
  they are achanging. The Reading Teacher 58(6),
  588-591.
• Hirsch, E.D. (2003). Reading comprehension
  requires knowledge of words and the world.
  American Educator retrieved online 20.03.09.
• Homel et al. (2006). The Pathways to Prevention
  Project The First Five Years, 1099-2004. Sydney
  Mission Australia and the Key Centre for ethics,
  Law Justice Governance.
• Hart, E. Risley, T. (2003). The Early
  Catastrophe. American Educator. Retrieved
  online 20.03.09.
• QUT Literacy Secretariat, (2009). Effective
  instruction in reading comprehension.
  Professional learning series for classroom
  teachers. Queensland University of Technology.
• Rasinski, T. V. (2003). The fluent reader Oral
  reading strategies for building word recognition,
  fluency and comprehension. New York Scholastic.
• Riley, J. (2006). Language and Literacy 3-7.
  London Sage Publications.
• Stanovich, K.E. (1986). Matthew effects in
  reading Some consequences of individual
  differences in the acquisition of literacy.
  Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360 -407.