A teacher, a speech and language therapist, an educational psychologist, and an occupational therapist went into a bar…
This is not the start of a joke but something that really happened. In that bar, we were wrestling with two problems that beset many a primary school.
Why, despite excellent, evidence-based, initial instruction, do some learners still not make the hoped-for progress? They might get the basic phonics, but struggle with a blend; grip a pencil but have no grasp of what to write.
And why do others make great initial progress, only to fade in later years, struggling with comprehension, or finding it hard to write more than a few sentences?
The reason for the team effort, apart from a shared love of macaroni cheese, was that we had realised we all had different parts of the same puzzle. Rebecca (speech and language) had two pieces.
Key 1: Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is often bundled up with phonics, but it is not the same thing. It is all about the sounds in spoken language. Just as you can play football without being consciously aware of all your muscle movements, you can speak a language perfectly well without a lot of awareness of the sounds in it and how they relate.
But if you want to improve your football, this involves paying attention to some of those movements that you have never previously noticed. People like me, who struggle to remember which foot is which, will make less progress.
The same applies for conscious knowledge about speech sounds, as well as where the word boundaries are in a phrase. The more that children can detect and manipulate these – the more easily they learn to read.
Conversely, the less fluently and automatically they can process word boundaries in the years ahead the greater the drag on other learning such as comprehending or enjoying the text.
Techniques such as finger spaces rely on our detection of word boundaries. Reading for pleasure is reduced by the effort in decoding resulting from a wobbly phonological foundation.
So, one key to unlock attainment – early on or later – is to become aware of children’s phonological awareness and take steps to address any gaps.
Key 2: Oral language
The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) has oral language as one of its elements. It is obvious that it is harder to read or write a sentence if one does not know the vocabulary it contains. More than that, it is hard to wonder and create without the words to do so. But oral language is about so much more than vocabulary. It’s also more than grammar.
I might have all the ingredients and the recipe to make a delicious cake, but you wouldn’t want me to wake you at 2am to enjoy it.
Similarly there are a host of skills about what to do with language and how to use it to get things done. Without these, text comprehension starts to dry up.
Also, unless I do the recipe in the right order, I will end up with a less appetising cake, or even a hot flour and egg soup. So without strong sequencing skills, children will struggle to create interesting stories, develop arguments or piece together inferences as they read.
What is the key to unlock this learning? Well, there are effective ways to assess and teach sequence and narrative, as well as pragmatics, but they all depend on having lots of two-way conversations about interesting things that matter to the children. This time is more than repaid in learning as sequence underpins not just literacy but maths too, as well as our ability to produce expected behaviours.
Key 3: Pencil control concepts
Jen (occupational therapist) surprised us by saying: “It’s the brain that learns to write, not the hand.”
We had asked her about fine motor skills to support writing, and it turns out this is only part of the picture. For example, children have to develop independent fingers – it is really hard to grasp a pencil if all your fingers are trying to help.
So some have to learn to be “busy” and some have to learn to be “sleepy”. Putting it like that shows that what drives learning to write is not motion but thinking skills. We need a mental classification of different kinds of finger. Handwriting is a cognitive process. You can see this if you imagine telling a Chinese friend how to write the European letter “g” over the phone. This would have many “bits” of information, most of these involving spatial concepts such as up and down, left and right, short and long, curve and straight.
This is not just knowing the words, but a whole chain of cognitive connection between concept and controlled movement. If we reflect on the amount of information processing involved in writing a single unfamiliar letter, it is a marvel that anyone learns to write. And we can easily see why some might find it harder, or why some might start to struggle as other demands increase in later learning. Hence the third key – assessing and promoting not just fine skills but also spatial and motor concepts in action.
Key 4: Concepts of print
Over coffee, I got a word into the conversation. Expert groups such as the National Literacy Panel in the US highlight a fourth area, a rather ragbag collection called “concepts of print”.
These include all the conventions (left to write, top to bottom) of setting out print, and at a higher level of understanding, such as the point of reading, the purpose of authors or considering the audience for which one is writing. Of course those basic elements have been part of early instruction for years.
But here’s a fourth key – are we always getting the balance right between the mechanics of literacy (decoding, letter formation, paragraphs) and its purposes? Between being able to write and having people to write for who care about what we are writing?
Key 5: Making it doable
James (teacher) had the fifth key, though at first it was a question. “That’s all fine, but how do you teach it?”
Any group of children starting school will have up to a year’s worth of individual differences in development, just through natural biology. And across five different areas with different patterns for each child. And different from year group to year group. So one-size-fits-all will only fit some – but how can a teacher sustainably assess and teach individually all these skills?
We spent the next 10 years developing and testing assessments, trackers and methods alongside hundreds of teachers and thousands of children, but it is essentially quite simple.
While some skills, such as phonological awareness, need structured assessment, most of the others can be observed in play and learning as long as we know what we are looking for. Intervention is often no more complex than allowing short times in the day for purposive and structured play.
Final thoughts
So whether you want to boost literacy learning in the early stages or the later stages, finding out what gaps children have in phonological awareness, oral language, motor cognition and concepts of print is always a good place to start and often as far as we need to go.
- James McTaggart has been an educational psychologist since 2006, with specialisms in early childhood and also in psychological trauma. He has worked with many children, teachers, practitioners, and families facing literacy challenges, as well as health visitors and midwives promoting very early development and mental health. He is also the author of Emerging Literacy: Unlocking instruction for every child alongside James Cook, Rebecca Castelo and Jennifer Pickering (Routledge, 2024). In the book, James and his colleagues present in-depth theory and downloadable resources. Find the book here.
Further information & resources
- Gough & Tunmer: Decoding, reading, and reading disability, Remedial and Special Education (7,1), 1986: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/074193258600700104
More from Headteacher Update
Our Best Practice Focus downloads are free for all primary education professionals and offer in-depth seven-page pdfs focused on key areas of practice. Recent editions have included:
- A framework for the teaching of reading: Click here.
- How to teach writing: Click here.
- Whole-school reading strategies. Click here.