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Instructional strategies are the tools of effective practice. They are the deliberate acts of teaching that focus learning in order to meet a particular purpose. Instructional strategies are effective only when they impact positively on students’ learning.
Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8, p. 78
Teachers need to be able to use a range of deliberate acts of teaching in flexible and integrated ways within literacy-learning activities to meet the diverse literacy learning needs of our students.
These deliberate acts include modelling, prompting, questioning, giving feedback, telling, explaining, and directing.
Modelling, or “showing how”, is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive form of instruction. Almost everything the teacher does and says in the course of the school day provides a potential model to the students in the classroom. Much of this modelling is implicit and occurs without either teacher or students being conscious of it. However, deliberate, goal-directed modelling is an essential teaching tool.
By articulating how they arrived at a solution – thinking aloud as they go through the process – the teacher provides a model of how a good reader or writer works. This sort of modelling makes the thinking “visible”. It is a strategy used to great effect in shared reading and writing, where students are learning to use the sources of information in print along with their own prior knowledge. Modelling often involves providing the language that the learner needs. This may be language for encoding or decoding text, for making meaning, or for discussing texts and thinking analytically about them.
In these examples, teachers are modelling how good readers and writers work (and are also using strategies such as questioning, prompting, and giving feedback).
“This is a new sentence. I start with a … yes, a capital letter. My first word is ‘on’. What sounds can you hear? What is the first letter I write? … Let’s read this sentence. Is it finished – does it make sense? Can I put in the full stop?”
“Is this how we thought Mum would feel? I’m going to read the first paragraph again. Let’s list on the chart some words that might describe how Mum is feeling.”
“We need some help here. We can look at the list on the wall … let’s look down this list. Yes, here it tells you what to do when …”
“What word would make sense here? In the picture, we can see … Let’s look at the word. It begins with a … yes, a ‘t’. And I can see a chunk in it …”
“That’s a new word for us! We can add it to our word tree. Let’s read the sentence again to see if we can find out what it means.”
Sometimes modelling alone is not enough. A combination of modelling and directing (or explaining) may be necessary at times. Using modelling along with other instructional strategies to convey a teaching point is especially useful for those students who are not yet fully familiar with the literacy practices of the school and for any who are experiencing difficulties in reading or writing.
Prompting means encouraging the learner to use what they already know and can do. It is an effective strategy to focus students’ attention and to build their metacognitive awareness and their confidence. In order to prompt effectively, the teacher needs a detailed knowledge of the learner. Prompting may take the form of a strong hint, a clue, or a gentle “nudge” to help students use their existing knowledge and literacy strategies to make connections and reach a solution. A prompt often takes the form of a question and involves allowing “wait time” to give students the opportunity to develop and express their own ideas.
These are examples of teachers using prompting strategically. Other deliberate acts of teaching can easily be identified.
Teacher I think you could work out how to write the word “tooth”.
Student I could write down all the sounds I can hear.
Teacher Good! Then how could you check whether you were right?
“You might need to check your conclusion again – if you look at the success criteria you may see that there’s something more you need to do.”
“Josh, you said ‘shop’, then you changed it to ‘stop’. You knew something was wrong …”
“I know you know the sound for ___. Let me see you write it.”
“I wonder why Dad thought Jack wasn’t telling the truth. There could be a clue on this page that you just read.”
“You could make those words stand out. Remember the story in guided reading yesterday. What did the words look like in the part where the farmer shouted?”
Questioning is perhaps the instructional tool used most commonly by teachers. Strategic and purposeful questioning is crucial to students’ literacy learning.
Questions may be directed towards building a particular aspect of students’ knowledge, such as a strategy for encoding or decoding. At a metacognitive level, questions can help to build students’ awareness. Questioning can be an ideal way to generate thoughtful discussion and help students to develop the habit of being critically reflective, for example, “How do you think …?” “I wonder why …?” “What have you noticed …?” “How will your audience feel …?” One or two well-thoughtout questions can be powerful in helping students to get beyond the surface features of a text they are reading or writing. It is important that teachers ask a range of questions and know why they are asking them.
Questions become effective teaching tools when:
Such questions are a highly productive way of bringing out what students know and can do, so that they can apply their expertise to their tasks. Effective teachers extend questioning well beyond the kinds of questions that only require students to feed back factual content or to make predictions that are purely speculative.
Patterns of “teacher question, student answer, and teacher reaction” can inhibit learning. For example, if the students become more occupied with finding out what is in the teacher’s head than with their own learning, they are much less likely to show creativity in composing texts or to explore deeper features of texts.
Attending to the answers that students give is as important as planning and asking the questions. Students’ responses yield valuable information that can be used to evaluate their learning and to identify their next learning steps.
Teachers often categorise the kinds of questions to be used. For example, they describe questions as literal, inferential, or interpretive, as open or closed, or as questions for clarification, justification, and so on. The kinds of question and the forms they take will depend on the teacher’s objective and the learning goal of the task. Sometimes closed questions will achieve the purpose, for example, when the goal is to measure students’ ability to recall facts in a text, describe a process in the correct sequence, or identify a letter of the alphabet. It’s not necessary or even useful to plan activities based on categories of questions. The aim is to ask questions that reveal the students’ thinking, including any misconceptions or inappropriate assumptions that they may have.
Like prompting, questioning may unlock the understanding of a student who is struggling with an aspect of their reading or writing by giving them clear guidance towards what they need to do.
A teacher who uses questions effectively provides a good model to students and shows them how to develop their own questioning strategies. This helps them to bring a critical perspective to texts by asking purposeful questions of themselves as they engage with a reading or writing task. In a classroom environment of critical reflection, thought-provoking questions are not seen as threatening, they are welcomed as a highly valued part of learning.
This example shows strategic questioning to support a year 4 student in meeting the goal of a task. The context is an activity after a year 4 guided reading session using Whale Tales, by Kim Westerskov. The shared goals are (1) to locate specific information and (2) to infer from the text and write their conclusions in their own words.
Teacher What information have you located?
Student (reads) “Humpbacks swim slowly, and they are the most interesting of all whales to watch.”
Teacher OK. Do we need to take any notes there? Did you learn anything about the population or the habitat?
Student Yeah. They have huge flippers.
Teacher OK. So will that help us with our question?
Student Yeah … (uncertainly) maybe.
Teacher (drawing student’s attention to questions on whiteboard) Will that information help you to answer the question about where humpback whales live or the question on why there are only a few thousand humpbacks now?
Student No …
Teacher Well, let’s read the text in this box. You read it.
Student (reading from the text) “Once, there were over 100 000 humpbacks in the southern seas alone. But the humpback was a favourite of the whalers – now there are only a few thousand humpbacks left.” … Oh. I’ve learned something. It says “But the humpback was a favourite of the whalers”. That means that they, like, killed them, and … that’s why there aren’t many living any more.
Teacher OK. So do you think that’s important information?
Student Yes.
Teacher Now are you going to copy that straight from the book? What are you going to do?
Student Um, I’m going to put it in my own words.
Teacher Good! Let me see you begin.
The impact of effective feedback on student outcomes has been established through a number of studies (for example, Hattie, 1999, and Crooks, 1988). Hattie, on the basis of extensive research, describes feedback as the most powerful single factor that enhances achievement. Like modelling, feedback pervades the school day: most interactions between teachers and students involve some element of feedback.
The purposes of feedback are:
Feedback can be defined as “… providing information how and why the child understands and misunderstands, and what directions the student must take to improve” (Hattie, 1999, page 9). Like all the teaching strategies, feedback is most effective when it relates to specific learning goals and to the ultimate goal of enabling students to monitor and regulate their own learning.
Effective feedback motivates students to learn. The way that students feel about and perceive themselves affects their expectations and consequently their performance. A simple comment can have a major impact – positive or negative – on a student’s motivation. It is important to consider cultural appropriateness when giving feedback (and when using any other teaching strategy).
Feedback may be thought of as either evaluative or descriptive. Evaluative feedback involves making a judgment about what the learner is doing or has done and carries the idea of approval or disapproval. Descriptive feedback means describing or explaining what has or has not been achieved and why. It also involves giving information on how to learn further or what to do next in order to succeed. Interactions involving feedback can yield valuable knowledge of learners as well as enabling them to move forward.
The primary purpose of feedback is not to indicate whether learners are right or wrong but to enable them to reflect on their use of strategies for reading and writing and on their learning. Feedback involves conveying information to learners about where and when to use their knowledge and strategies. Effective feedback can provide a model of how good readers and writers think. Feedback should be honest and specific so that learners know how they are doing. An important message for teachers to convey to students is that using effective strategies in their reading and writing is what caused their success; this is crucial to building students’ metacognition. It’s especially useful to encourage students themselves to suggest what they could do. This is a great way to build their awareness of how they can take control of their learning.
Feedback may be verbal or non-verbal, spoken or written. The quality of the teacher’s written feedback on a student’s writing is especially important, both for providing further guidance and for the student’s confidence.
The teacher should not allow their feedback to take over the ownership of the learning task. For example, a teacher may be tempted to “improve” a student’s piece of writing, with the result that the student’s voice or sense of ownership may be lost (even though the teacher may feel that the work is better crafted).
Success criteria that arise from shared goals give valuable focus to teachers’ conversations with students and to the feedback that they provide. It is essential to ensure that the students understand the information conveyed through feedback and to provide time and opportunity for them to act on it.
These examples show effective use of feedback in several literacy contexts. In giving such feedback, teachers are also providing good models to the students.
“Well done. You have seen that from another point of view. What reasons can you give to back up your opinion?”
“I like the way you’ve started your sentences in different ways – it makes it more interesting for the reader. I can imagine what your grandma is like by reading your story.”
“That was good thinking. I could see you used the pictures and the title to help you make that prediction.”
“I noticed that you went to our reference texts to help you find the information. That’s good use of research skills. Next time, you could try the websites listed for our topic study.”
“You looked at the end of the word carefully – you fixed it yourself.”
Teacher What else could you tell us about the big storm? You’ve told us where you were and how you felt.
Jane I could say how it sounded.
Teacher That’s a great idea – storms are always noisy. What words can you think of?
Jane Roaring … howling …?
Teacher Oh, I can hear it! You need to think about where to put this new information in.
At its simplest level, telling means supplying what the student needs, such as an unknown word or a topic for a literacy-learning task. The idea is to fill a gap at that moment to enable the student to move on.
A strategic use of telling may involve providing the language needed to participate in an activity. The teacher tells the students how to spell the word they need for a piece of writing or, at the beginning of a reading task, tells them the theme of the text. This may be the most effective way to work with some students who do not have the background knowledge on which to base productive prediction. Simply providing a label or definition may be the most efficient way to move a student’s learning on.
Telling can also mean providing information about when to use a particular literacy strategy in a given task – making explicit the fact that the students can apply their existing knowledge at this point and so building their awareness of when to apply that knowledge in future situations. Telling students when to apply their expertise is particularly useful for students who are experiencing difficulties in reading or writing.
Examples of a teacher making a strategic decision to supply what the students need atthat moment may be:
“Today we’re going to focus on …”
“That word is________. It means_______. Now read on.”
“This book that we are going to read tells us about all the ...”
“When you write ‘stopping’, you need two p’s.”
“This is a new idea. You need to start a new paragraph.”
Explaining can be thought of as an extension of telling. Teachers may explain the task itself, or they may explain the content of a text or learning activity. For example, the teacher may explain:
Teachers also use explanations in the context of classroom management (for example, when they explain what is involved in an activity such as paired reading) so that all the students can participate confidently.
The following examples show explanation in relation to text content and a text feature.
In a shared reading session, the teacher and children read together until the word “thistles”, which the teacher reads.
Ethan What are thistles?
Sally Flowers?
Teacher Thistles are like prickles. They have a pretty flower on the top, but if you touch thistles, they feel like prickles. They are a problem for farmers. But goats are great on farms because goats will eat anything. Even prickles.
“Look at the text in the blue box. It tells you what equipment the men needed to help move the building. This information is not part of the main story, so it is shown in a different way so that the reader can see that it’s something separate.”
A characteristic of explanations is that they are verbally explicit. Careful explanations enable students to develop their own understandings. Throughout the many interactions that occur during the school day, the teacher needs to be alert and ready to explain things, picking up cues from the students and adapting their use of this teaching strategy to supply what each learner needs. Sometimes a direct approach is best (“Let me explain this to you”), especially for students who are not yet familiar with the established classroom literacy activities.
Directing is simply giving a specific instruction. Like all these instructional strategies, it is used deliberately, for a purpose.
Everyday classroom examples of directing are:
“Put your finger on …”
“Write the letter for that sound.”
“Find the part in your piece of writing that …”
“Turn to your buddy and discuss why …”
“Look at the checklist on the wall if you’re stuck.”
Helping students to make connections between what they know and what they are reading improves their comprehension. Teachers can model making such connections, and prompt students to make links with their own knowledge and experience, when they are introducing and discussing texts for reading and in writing and oral-language activities. When activating students’ prior knowledge for a particular purpose, teachers can help the students to predict, infer, and build their own interpretations as they read.
A hypothesis about a text is an expectation or opinion that the reader forms about the text before reading it. The reader then tests and revises this as they encounter and act upon new information. Hypotheses are formed on the basis of what can be discovered about the text before the content reading begins: this may include the cover, the title, the opening section, and the illustrations, and it also includes what the reader brings to the text. Depending on the goal for the task, a hypothesis may relate to the plot or character development (in a narrative) or to the conclusion of an argument. The hypothesis often takes the form of a question. The teacher can usefully model hypothesising when introducing a text and can encourage the students to seek and give feedback about their own hypotheses.
As in any activity, formulating questions should be directed towards a goal or intended outcome. In comprehension development, questioning helps to reinforce the habit of reading for a purpose. The teacher needs to help the students to formulate appropriate questions, for example, by modelling such questions during shared reading or writing. Asking questions helps readers to engage with the ideas in the text and with the author and gives focus to the reading task. After their reading, it’s useful to help the students to evaluate the effectiveness of the questions they posed for themselves and to give them feedback for further learning.
The ability to visualise or picture what is happening within a text draws readers into the text and helps them to achieve greater understanding. Studies have indicated that creating an image in the memory helps the reader to retain what is read and use it later on.
Readers experiencing difficulties often need help with creating mental images and may not realise how this can help their comprehension. Asking questions such as ”What picture do you see in your head?” and sharing responses will support students. It sometimes helps to have students make a sketch.
Inferring means using content in a text, together with existing knowledge, to come to a personal conclusion about something that is not stated explicitly in the text. When the author provides clues but not all the information, we read “between the lines” to make predictions, revise these, understand underlying themes, hypothesise, make critical judgments, and draw conclusions. Inferring involves synthesising information, sometimes quite simply and sometimes at complex levels.
Teachers can help students to make inferences by asking inferential questions during shared reading or during discussion in guided reading. Or teachers may pause, when reading a text with students, to draw out clues from the text and prompt the students to make connections between different parts of the text in order to reach a conclusion.
It is important for readers to recognise that behind every text is an author, that the author has a reason for writing, and that the reader has a reason for reading.
The purpose of the author may be to:
By supporting students in discussing the purpose and point of view of a text, teachers can help them to recognise that writers bring their own experiences and concerns to their writing. Such activities contribute richly to students’ awareness of the functions of texts and of how authors position readers; they also help students to build the habit of responding thoughtfully to what they read. Students then carry their new awareness to their own writing and learn to plan and articulate their specific purposes for writing as they consider purpose and point of view.
Identifying and summarising main ideas can help students build knowledge and awareness of how texts are structured and how ideas within a text are related. Identifying the main idea or ideas in a text can present a challenge for readers. Not every text provides a neat hierarchy or clear sequence of ideas. To identify a text’s most significant points, students often need to retrieve information and summarise it. They may also need to use other strategies, such as inferring the text’s purpose. Teachers can show students how to identify and clarify the main points in a text by modelling how to formulate questions – for example, during in-depth discussion of a text in guided reading or when helping students to form intentions in their writing.
When students take apart a text they have read, examine it from their own viewpoint, and put it back together again, they make it their own. This helps them to remember what they have read and transfer what they have learned. They may feel empathy towards a character, be excited by events or information, or enjoy the style of the writing. They integrate or synthesise their newly acquired understandings and attitudes with their existing view of the world to make a new and slightly different world picture. The ways in which a reader analyses and interprets text and synthesises ideas are affected by that reader’s prior knowledge, experiences, and cultural values.
Good readers make a personal, informed response to a text. They not only understand the information in the text but can also generalise from it and make judgments about it in the light of what they already know. They examine and evaluate the ideas in the text and may consequently go on to confirm, extend, or change their personal views; or they may disagree with the content of a text or find an argument unconvincing.
I was discussing “Swallowed by the Sea” with a group of students. We had read and discussed it for meaning the previous day – now we were reading and discussing it for the impact of its language. I wanted to link it closely to the students’ own pieces of mood writing. I posed the question: “How does the author convey the atmosphere of the storm to the reader?”
Teacher: Read the first section of the story again, to see if you can create an image of the storm in your mind. What does the storm look and sound like?
Andrew: (after reading) I think it’s really rough and nasty and cold.
Teacher: I agree. Let’s see if we can all work out why Andrew thinks this. What clues does the author give us?
Amanda: She uses strong words in the paragraph – like “creaks” and “slap” and “pelting”. They’re exactly the sounds I can hear when I’m snuggled up in my bed, listening to the wind and rain outside.
Teacher: Good. Just like the main character in this story lies snuggled up in her bed. I’m pleased you’ve picked up on strong verbs because we’ve noticed them in other stories, haven’t we?
Andrew: I think the author is conveying the atmosphere earlier than that. I think the first clue is when it says that the girl’s breath makes a ghost on the window. I get a really cold picture in my mind from that.
Teacher: What gives you that?
Andrew: Because ghosts are all white and that makes me think of freezing cold.
Teacher: I can see some strong clues in the second paragraph as well. I can feel the wind really strongly in that paragraph. What part do you think gives me this feeling?
Hana: “The house is being sucked up and spat out.”
Teacher: You’re right. But what picture does that sentence create?
Hana: The wind is so strong that it can suck up something as big as a house.
Amanda: And it spits it out, just like really heavy rain spits out water all over the place.
Teacher: Great. I hope you’re picking up lots of ideas for your own writing.
Teacher, year 4 class
With a group of six children, I read Island to Island as a shared text. I wanted the children to think more deeply about their responses to text, and so the focus was higher-order thinking – hypothesising, inferring, synthesising, evaluating. I posed this question: “What are the good points and bad points about travelling to school by bus and boat?” After initially thinking this would be a fun thing to do, the children engaged in a focused discussion about some of the possible issues. The children set and maintained the initiative in the following discussion.
Emeli: What would happen if James was sick at school and wanted to go home?
Tayla: His dad might have to take the boat all the way around the other island. You couldn’t just sail over unless you had a car somewhere on the other side.
Grayson: You couldn’t be late in the morning. The bus has to go a long way. It’s much too far to walk. If your dad dropped you off in the boat and thought the bus was coming but it had gone, you’d have to wait all day. I can’t see any other cars or buses or houses or people by the wharf.
Jack: What if a storm came and the dad couldn’t get the boat across the channel – where would James go then?
Emma: He might be able to go to those people where he waits each day, but what if they were away?
Emeli: You couldn’t take other kids home to play or go to other kids’ houses after school. It might be lonely.
Tayla: And you couldn’t ring your mum if you forgot your lunch or your gym money – because they couldn’t come.
Grayson: It would be good if they had a special machine that could go in the sea and on the road too. One that had wheels that would come down out of the water – then the dad could come any time.
Jack: We could design one!
Teacher: What an interesting idea! You could do this as a language response. You could sketch one and describe to the class how it would work.
Teacher, years 1 to 2
When we read, we construct meaning by making connections between the text we read and what we already know and can do. Proficient readers at any stage operate in this way. They bring to their reading their knowledge of language and of the world and their knowledge of how to use sources of information in text, and they make sense of the ideas and information in the text accordingly.
Competent readers develop knowledge, a repertoire of strategies, and awareness that enable them to:
The terms reading strategies and processing strategies are often used interchangeably in the context of learning to read. However, in this book, the term reading strategies has been extended to cover comprehension strategies and the term processing strategies is consistently used to describe the in-the-head ways by which readers make use of the sources of information in text.
Reading for meaning is paramount in school literacy programmes. In order to be able to read for meaning, students need to become accurate and efficient decoders. Through instruction in word identification, teachers ensure that their students become proficient in using visual and grapho-phonic sources of information (see page 30) so that when they encounter an unfamiliar word, they attend to the word itself as a primary source of information. It is important to be explicit when teaching students how to make links between letters (or letter clusters) and their sounds.
Students need to become increasingly fast, automatic decoders of unfamiliar words. In reading, efficient decoding is not an end in itself; it is a means to constructing meaning. Rapid, accurate word recognition frees up the reader’s cognitive resources to focus on meaning – not only on surface meanings but also on the deeper messages of a text. The reader then approaches the reading task in a more thoughtful and analytical way and can be encouraged to make their own personal response to the text.
As learners spend more time reading, they encounter commonly used words more often, and these words become familiar to them. Increasingly rapid word recognition has a direct and cumulative effect on a learner’s progress. Effective teachers, therefore, provide many, many opportunities for their students to read and write.
Very often, the reader decodes and constructs meaning by drawing on only some of the available information. Children learn to select the best source or sources to focus on. For example, in the sentence “The ducks are going to the river”, certain words allow the reader to pay less attention to others. The fact that “ducks” is plural dictates “are”. The structure of the English sentence determines the use of “going” and requires a noun at the end of the sentence. These sorts of factors make a text predictable. Children may not be able to explain such rules, but their experience with spoken language means that they come to know them and apply them in their reading and writing. A key role of the teacher is to develop their students’ awareness of how to apply and control the rules. (See Developing awareness as a reader and writer, on pages 43–45.)
Strategies for reading include comprehension strategies as well as processing strategies (which are the in-the-head ways by which readers make use of the sources of information described on pages 28–31). Readers apply the processing strategies in combination with strategies for comprehending and thinking critically about what they read.
All readers use processing strategies, but they do so at different levels, depending on factors such as the reader’s proficiency, the difficulty of the text, and the purpose for reading.
The processing strategies that readers use are:
Reading can be thought of as a constantly repeated process of attending and searching, predicting, crosschecking, and confirming or self-correcting. These strategies are not discrete stages; they constantly interact and support one another. They are used in complex combinations, and experienced readers usually apply them automatically. See pages 127–131 in chapter 5 for further detail about teaching students to use processing strategies in the context of text-based experiences.
The ways in which children learn and apply the processing strategies illustrate the importance of metacognition in literacy learning. Beginning readers need to be taught to recognise when to use each strategy; they need to be shown how to apply them deliberately and how to integrate them. Children whose control of the strategies is limited may process text in inappropriate ways – for example, by relying on their memory, by trying to sound out every single word, or by making guesses without appropriate use of the sources of information in the text or their own prior knowledge. Chapter 5 provides examples of how teachers can encourage students to develop metacognition so that they become increasingly able to choose reading strategies for themselves.
Comprehension is both a pathway to reading and its end product. Whether we are reading aloud, reading silently, writing, or listening to someone talk, we enter into a mental dialogue with the author, audience, or speaker and explore their ideas or our own in order to make connections. Children begin these explorations when they first set out on their literacy journey, and they continue with further explorations in the instructional settings of classrooms.
Comprehension strategies cannot be separated from processing strategies; the teacher’s instruction should ensure that their students develop both. Comprehension strategies enable students not only to make sense of the text but also to think about what they are reading. Effective teachers encourage their students to develop strategies that lead to deeper understandings of text.
Comprehension involves:
Learners’ comprehension is promoted by:
Writing helps to develop comprehension. The discussion involved in, say, shared writing builds students’ listening vocabulary and helps them to clarify their ideas. Writers need to attend to the making of meaning – to consider their purpose for writing and how their audience will comprehend what they are writing. Applying this learning helps to develop awareness of how to use comprehension strategies.
Comprehension teaching includes both implicit and explicit instruction. In shared reading, for example, the teacher conveys many messages about literacy implicitly as they lead the reading and model what good readers do. Explicit instruction in the context of shared reading often focuses on a particular text feature, such as the use of adjectives to convey a viewpoint. The teacher creates the instructional contexts; the learning may be embedded (implicit), directed (explicit), or both.
Comprehension strategies, like the processing strategies described on pages 38–39, are tools that the reader uses with a purpose in view.
Comprehension strategies may be described as:
Like the strategies for processing text, comprehension strategies are not discrete processes to be used one at a time. They are used together: for example, hypothesising involves making connections. They are employed in complex combinations, according to the text itself, the purpose for reading, and the individual learner’s pathway of development.
Comprehension strategies are necessary and useful tools for all students – including students who are making rapid progress and need to be extended, those who are struggling to master aspects of literacy learning, and those whose home and community literacy practices differ from the conventional practices in schools. Chapter 4 outlines a number of strategies that teachers can use to help their students to develop these important tools for literacy learning. Chapter 5 describes the comprehension strategies and gives examples of how to engage learners with texts to build their comprehension strategies (see pages 131–135).
Learners need to attend to details of text in order to decode and determine meaning. The learner looks purposefully for particular information, for known letters, clusters, or words, for familiar text features and patterns of syntax, and for information in pictures and diagrams.
For beginning readers, this usually involves attending closely to every word (especially to the initial letters of words) and to the illustrations.
For fluent readers, this usually involves taking in larger chunks of text (phrases rather than words) and slowing down to identify and focus on specific words or features only when necessary to clarify meaning.
With instruction from the teacher, learners begin to acquire a sight vocabulary and to develop understandings about text. They learn to focus more effectively, attending to what is relevant at the time in order to get the message. Teachers provide specific instruction to help them to draw on what they know and can do. Attending and searching may involve the learner in doing some or all of the following.
Predicting is a strategy that readers use not only to identify words but also to anticipate what might come next. It involves forming an expectation on the basis of the information acquired so far, so it is strongly related to meaning and is more than speculation. Predictions draw on readers’ prior knowledge and their use of syntactic, semantic, and visual and grapho-phonic information in the text.
For beginning readers, predicting is usually at the level of individual words. For example, learners use their knowledge of letter-sound relationships to identify the initial sound of a word, or they draw on the pattern of a repetitive text to support them in working out what might happen next. Beginning readers often rely a great deal on the illustrations.
For fluent readers, predicting involves using prior knowledge and information in the text quickly, and usually automatically, to decide (at least initially) on the meaning of unknown words or difficult passages or to anticipate, for example, the next event in a narrative or the next step in an argument.
As learners become familiar with patterns of sentences, book language, and basic text structures, they build their ability to use prediction.
Teachers need to explicitly teach beginning readers to predict unknown words and show them exactly how to predict what will come next in a text. Predicting may involve the learner in doing some or all of the following.
Teachers need to show beginning readers how to monitor their own reading. The reader needs to cross-check predictions to ensure that they make sense and fit with other information already processed. When children detect or suspect an error, they need to have strategies to fix it. For example, a beginning reader may notice that there is a mismatch between what they have read and what is in the picture or in the print. Noticing the problem is the first step; knowing what to do to fix it is the next. Readers cross-check by drawing on their prior knowledge and on the syntactic, semantic, and visual and grapho-phonic information in the text. Cross-checking often involves turning a partially correct response into a correct one.
For beginning readers, cross-checking usually involves checking that their prediction of an individual word fits and makes sense. Their checking and confirming often take time and are quite deliberate.
For fluent readers, cross-checking usually involves further searching for information to confirm their initial understanding. In skilled reading, predictions are usually checked swiftly and automatically.
As readers progress, they learn that cross-checking, confirming, and self-correcting are among the habits of a good reader and take responsibility for using these strategies. Cross-checking, confirming, and self-correcting may involve the learner in doing some or all of the following.
This example features Let’s Go by Feana Tu’akoi, photographs by Mark Round, Ready to Read series, Learning Media, 2001.
This example features The Praying Mantis by Pauline Cartwright, photographs by Nic Bishop, Ready to Read series, Learning Media, 1993.
This example features The Hole in the King’s Sock by Dot Meharry, illustrated by Philip Webb, Ready to Read series, Learning Media, 2001.
Becoming a strategic writer
Like reading, writing involves creating meaning through text. The reader integrates prior knowledge with sources of information in the text to decode and to gain meaning. The writer starts with meaning and integrates prior knowledge and an understanding of how language works to encode and create a text.
Learners need to develop knowledge and a repertoire of strategies for writing across the three aspects of the framework so that they can:
The first of these points can be described as attending to surface features of written text and the second and third as attending to its deeper features.
The sources of information in text that are used for reading are also used when writing. Like readers, writers use semantic, syntactic, and visual and grapho-phonic sources and integrate these with their own prior knowledge and experience to create meaningful text (see pages 30–31).
Just as young readers need to become efficient in decoding, so young writers need to learn to encode effectively – to match sounds to letters in the actual business of writing words. Students need explicit instruction to ensure that they learn to form as well as recognise letters and words rapidly and accurately. They need to master phonological processing strategies, such as distinguishing the phonemes within words and making accurate links between sounds and letters, and to develop a visual memory for printed words (see pages 32–37).
Students need to build an ever-increasing writing vocabulary (that is, a bank of words that they can write automatically). This frees up the writer’s resources to focus on meaning and on other aspects of writing, such as developing an author’s perspective and planning the impact on the intended audience. It enables writers to experiment with language and to analyse their work and review it critically.
Students also need to become familiar with the rules of syntax that apply to written English.
Many of the reading comprehension strategies can be related to writing. Good writers, like good readers, synthesise ideas and information. They bring together previous learning and experiences, make connections, visualise, and go on to create imaginative pieces or clear descriptive accounts. They also analyse and evaluate ideas and information as they clarify their intentions, choose vocabulary, begin to compose, and revise their work.
The four main stages common to most writing are:
It’s important to recognise that these four stages are not discrete but are closely interrelated. The writer does not necessarily move through them in a simple sequence. The writer’s movement from one step to the next is influenced by what has gone before and what is anticipated. For example:
The aim of writing instruction is to build students’ accuracy, their fluency, and their ability to create meaningful text. The instructional strategies teachers can use to help students achieve this aim are described in chapter 4. Chapter 5 describes the four stages of the writing process in more detail and discusses what it means to engage learners in rich writing experiences. Young writers need many opportunities to practise, to meet new challenges, and simply to enjoy being a writer.
At this stage, the writer gets an idea, thinks about it in terms of the purpose and audience, and gives it time to grow. As the teacher supports students in forming intentions for their writing, the students will become aware that writing, like reading, is for a purpose.
Depending on the children’s age and ability, forming intentions may take some time or may hardly feature at all. For example, beginning writers are usually not so concerned with a target audience and generally work from a model that the teacher provides. Forming intentions may involve the learner in doing some or all of the following.
Composing a text involves the writer in translating their thoughts, ideas, intentions, and understandings into a written form. This stage is often described as “getting something down on paper” (even when it involves using a computer). Depending on the focus or shared goal of the activity, the learner may do some or all of the following.
Beginning writers need lots of modelling and support from the teacher, for example, through shared writing. For them, composing may be painstaking and slow as they:
At the same time, teachers need to help these students to focus on meaning and think about what they are writing.Teachers should provide explicit instruction to ensure that their students develop the ability to form letters and words rapidly and accurately. Beginning writers need to:
For more fluent writers, words, phrases, and sentences may appear to flow almost automatically. But, as the text develops, the writer will reread it and may find that they need (with the teacher’s support) to modify their initial plan. Depending on the focus of the writing task, they may correct details of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. However, at this stage it is important that attention to surface features does not detract from the important focus of giving expression to the writer’s intentions.
Revising generally involves reordering, deleting, and adding text in order to represent an intended meaning more clearly. The writer may search for a more accurate word or expression to capture an idea. At the revising stage, students of all ages reflect critically on what they have written and think about how the audience may respond. At more advanced levels, revision often involves substantial changes to content and structure. Revising may involve the learner in doing some or all of the following.
Students often need encouragement to give careful attention to their writing and to spend time revising it, but it is important that they do so. Learning to revise their writing is essential if they are to become skilled, accurate writers, whether their writing is for personal use or is intended for publishing. The term “editing” is often used for this stage of writing.
Publishing or presenting means making a text available for others to read. This stage may involve completing a number of tasks in preparation for presenting, or it may mean simply sharing a piece with the class by reading it aloud. Publishing or presenting may involve the learner in doing some or all of the following.
Proof-reading and correcting are part of preparing an accurate text for others to read: they involve spelling, punctuation, grammar, and legibility. Beginning writers need lots of support from the teacher when proofreading. Often it’s best to identify just one or two features for them to check and correct. But all young writers should expect to check their work for accuracy.
By publishing or presenting, writers find out how well they have met their intentions for writing. Warm responses enhance the writer’s confidence, and informative feedback from the teacher and their peers gives them guidance for further writing.
Not all pieces of writing are developed to the stage of readiness for sharing with an audience. The purpose of the writing may be very personal, or it may be appropriate that the piece remains a rough draft.
Case study: How Tamyka wrote "My Mum Gives Me a Hug'
The teacher of this year 1 to 2 class worked with her students for three weeks on exploring characterisation in writing. She began by reading and discussing lots of picture books and talking about the concept of “characters” with them. Favourite books included My Dad by Anthony Browne, The Kuia and the Spider by Patricia Grace, and The Best-loved Bear by Diana Noonan. Eventually her students started to think about characters as people, animals, or objects.
The teacher particularly wanted her students to focus on real people in their writing, especially people who were close to them. She began to promote this focus by getting the students to talk about the mother in the picture book The Lion in the Meadow, by Margaret Mahy. They used both visual and text clues in the story to talk about what the mother looked like, what sort of person she was, and how she might have talked. As the students discussed their ideas, the teacher recorded them on the board.
The teacher then asked the students to focus on their own mothers. They had to visualise them in their minds and think about what they were like and what they did. She used the five senses to encourage this thinking – for example, “What does her hair look like?”, “How does her voice sound?”, and “How does she smell when she hugs you?”
After the discussion, the teacher wrote about her own mother as a model for the students. She particularly reminded them that she was trying to:
In addition, she reminded the students that she was trying to:
The students now understood what they needed to do. Tamyka, the writer of this text, had a clear purpose for writing: to tell what her mother did and show how she felt about her. She also knew that her teacher expected her to try some new words in her writing and to use capital letters, full stops, and finger spacing well.
She was excited about writing because she had now clearly visualised all the relevant things about her mother and knew what she wanted to say. Her teacher had helped her visualise these images through conversation: Teacher: I see your mum drop you off at school sometimes. What does she do when she says goodbye? Tamyka: She gives me a hug.Teacher: What a lovely mum. I like it when my mum hugs me.
Tamyka drafted her piece of writing. To begin with, she drew a picture of her mum. This helped her to focus on her main message: “My mum always gives me a hug when she drops me off at school.”
As Tamyka wrote, she used her prior knowledge of sound, letter, word, and sentence formation. In particular, she:
The teacher helped Tamyka to revise her story. While roving, she realised that Tamyka could add more to her story because she had not yet met the second purpose for writing (“Show how you feel about your mother”). So she asked Tamyka focused questions that led her to add a second sentence. Teacher: How do you feel when your mum hugs you? Tamyka: It feels warm. She goes like this (demonstrates by hugging herself).Teacher: Her arms wrap around you and make you feel warm. Can you write that?
Tamyka not only used the teacher’s modelled sentence structure and vocabulary to help her; she also used her own knowledge of key content and high-frequency words (“and”, “with”, “two”) and her sounding-out skills (“ams”, “wom”, “hods”). She read her story again and was pleased because she knew that she had now met the purposes for writing. This also gave her the confidence to feel that her audience – the teacher and the other students – would enjoy her writing and respond positively to it.
Tamyka wanted to present her writing in two ways.
Developing knowledge for literacy learning
The knowledge that students need to develop for literacy learning includes background knowledge and literacy-related knowledge.
Successful readers and writers do much more than process information. They bring their experience and existing knowledge, accumulated both in and out of school, to their reading and writing in order to construct meaning and develop new understandings.
As already discussed, children’s knowledge is built within social and cultural settings, and there are socially determined patterns of knowledge. However, each learner’s body of knowledge is unique; there are multiple pathways by which learners become literate.
The knowledge and experience that learners bring to their reading or writing, including the vocabulary they have developed, give them a starting point for connecting with a text or clarifying the ideas they seek to convey. Introducing a topic for shared writing or a text for guided reading by inviting conversation about the pictures and content, for example, helps young learners to make connections with what they already know.
The diversity among students in our schools presents a challenge for teachers – to identify and build upon the knowledge that all their students bring to the classroom. Teachers should always be aware that what the learner brings to the learning task is as important as what the teacher teaches.
From their earliest attempts at reading and writing, children develop their literacy related knowledge. As they begin formal instruction at school, they need to know how texts work (see below). They need to learn that spoken language is made up of sounds and words, to learn the spoken and written forms of the letters of the alphabet, and to understand that these relate to the sounds of spoken language (see pages 32–37). They also need to know about the visual features of print (see page 34).
When children have frequent experiences of reading and writing, they begin to realise that there is a relationship between what they hear and the written text they create or read. Through listening to and talking about stories or through creating them, children learn the importance of sounds, of particular words, and of the flow and rhythm of language and story structure. They learn that words and the ways people say them can evoke an emotional response. They learn that texts can delight and inform and that it is worthwhile to listen to, to read, to view, and to create them.
Children learn that:
This knowledge enables children to develop certain expectations and to make predictions about the form and structure of the text that they are going to read or write. Their knowledge of the purposes and structures of texts increases as they progress, enabling them to develop an analytical and thoughtful perspective as readers and writers.
Learners need to know how to use the sources of information in texts, along with their prior knowledge and experience, to decode and encode written English, make meaning, and think critically.
The three interrelated sources of information in written language that readers and writers use are:
These sources of information need to be considered in relation to one another.
Children build up knowledge of words and their meanings through their experiences of spoken language in everyday life. Words acquire meaning in relation to the child’s experience. Before they start school, children have absorbed the meanings of many words. They have learned the names of the people, objects, and events in their lives, and they have also learned to interpret subtle differences in meaning, for example, between “Sit up”, “Sit down”, and “Sit still”.
Most will have a sense of English idiom (if English is their first language) and will understand that “Hang on a minute” does not imply holding on to anything.
Children who experience rich conversations with adults, siblings, and peers and who hear lots of stories and rhymes meet a great number of words in different contexts and build up a store of words they can use fluently. Some children’s exposure to language may be more limited, and their vocabulary development may be slower. A child usually comes to understand what particular words mean through experience, but teachers can help to expand children’s awareness of how words work by discussing the precise meanings of words as they arise in classroom activities, by planning text-based experiences (see chapter 5), and by encouraging quality conversations (see pages 88–89). Such experiences enable children to build a growing range of words that they will recognise in their reading and use in their writing.
Using illustrations with text helps learners to build meaning. Children’s first writing is often captions for pictures; this develops their concepts about how pictures and words work together. The illustrations in a book may carry crucial information to help a young reader understand unfamiliar content and settings, or they may provide a subtext that offers a different perspective. In many factual texts, the photographs, illustrations, and diagrams are essential features for readers seeking a full understanding of the information.
Children learn and develop language patterns from infancy. Well before a baby can distinguish or articulate a word, its babble imitates the “tune” of the language it hears. Later, as children learn to talk, their grammatical structures are mostly correct. Sometimes when they apply rules to make their meaning clearer, the results don’t fit the irregularity of the English language but still demonstrate learning progress. For example, saying “Daddy rided”, rather than “Daddy rode”, shows an understanding of the standard form of the past tense in English.
Knowing the structure or syntax of a language helps readers to predict a word or the order of words in a sentence. A child who is using syntactic information knows what type of word is missing in the sentence “The dog ---------- over the wall.” The language of most five-year-olds enables them to use syntax well in predicting and checking the accuracy of words they read in their first language. Similarly, when children begin to write, they try to record what they might say. They are governed by syntax because the words we hear, speak, read, and write are organised into grammatical sequences. Children’s understandings of written language structure increase progressively through planned literacy activities.
Visual sources of information for readers are the visual features of the print itself. Visual information in a text includes letters, letter clusters, words, sentences, and the conventions of print, such as direction, spaces between words, the shapes of letters and words, and punctuation marks. It does not include illustrations.
The term “grapho-phonic information” encapsulates the idea that the information used to decode a printed word or to write a word is partly visual or graphic (the learner recognises the printed shape) and partly aural or phonic (the learner recreates the sounds of letters and words). The learner draws on prior knowledge to remember which visual configuration goes with which sound. Refer to page 32 for information about phonics and to pages 35–37 for information about letter-sound relationships.
When they write, students must attend to the detail of each word. They add to their store of knowledge about how certain visual shapes relate to certain sounds as they look closely at the features of letters and notice combinations of letters that occur often.
The term visual information refers to visual aspects of print, such as letters, words, spaces between words, and punctuation marks. The term visual language is used to describe signs, symbols, illustrations, gestures, and so on that are used to communicate meaning.
Fluent readers and writers draw on their prior knowledge and use all available sources of information simultaneously and usually unconsciously. Beginning readers and writers need to be taught to draw on these sources and to use them efficiently.
Hayley was reading the sentence “At last the wolf woke up”. She read fluently until the written word “woke”, which was unfamiliar. She recognised that the sentence structure required a verb and that the word began with “w”, so she tried “walked”. The next word, “up”, was familiar, and Hayley realised that “walked up” would not make sense in this context, so she self-corrected to “woke up”.
Students learn to use and integrate the sources of information effortlessly in their reading and writing when they have:
Further discussion and examples of effective instruction that enables learners to use and integrate the sources of information, along with their prior knowledge, may be found in chapter 4, Instructional Strategies, and chapter 5, Engaging Learners with Texts.
Note: Students learning English as a new language find it more difficult, initially, to use semantic and syntactic information in English. They are still developing their knowledge of the language that is associated with given contexts in written English and of the patterns of the English language. It is important that they are encouraged to develop such knowledge through oral language activities and supported in learning how to use visual and grapho-phonic information to decode and encode words so that they can read, write, and experience success.
The concept of awareness is central to understanding the nature of literacy learning. Students are not always aware of how to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in literacy activities. Sometimes they may have developed awareness but may not yet be able to put it into words.
Children enter school with varying degrees and kinds of awareness. Some children arrive with a high level of general awareness of written forms of language, some have awareness of certain forms of language, and some may have little awareness of the ways in which they themselves and other people use language. Teachers need to ensure that their instruction and their planning of activities build on the awareness that different children bring.
Children develop social understandings as part of their critical awareness. They need to become aware of the ways in which texts shape values and position audiences. Children can be helped, from the very early stages, to think about what they are reading or writing, for example, to consider an author’s choice of language and how it affects the reader.
In order to be able to read and write fluently, students need to develop awareness in each of the three aspects identified in the framework on page 24: learning the code, making meaning, and thinking critically. The kinds of awareness that literacy learners need to develop include:
As students develop their knowledge and strategies, they build awareness of the uses of written language for many purposes. They become aware, for example, that they can use writing to express emotion, to empathise, to argue or persuade – or simply for pleasure. Similarly, they learn that texts can have many purposes and forms and can give great satisfaction and enjoyment. All this enhances students’ ability to comprehend and to think critically.
Beginning readers and writers demonstrate their awareness of:
Students develop their awareness through many literacy activities and interactions with the teacher and their peers. Teachers should consciously build learners’ awareness by noticing what the learner is attending to and interacting with them to support their learning. An effective teacher knows how to “catch the child in action”, as Marie Clay has put it. Chapter 4 discusses some ways of doing this.
Teachers should help their students to identify the knowledge and strategies they use and to deliberately control their use of them. Students do not always develop such awareness automatically. For example, it’s necessary to teach students to crosscheck when they are reading or writing. Students also need help with what to do when they are “stuck”. Handing the responsibility back to the student obliges them to think about what they know and can use and helps them to take increasing responsibility for their own learning (see the examples on page 130 in chapter 5).
As they learn to decode and encode, to make meaning, and to think critically, learners develop knowledge, strategies, and awareness, which may be described as the core components of literacy development.
Learners need a continually increasing body of knowledge as they acquire literacy. This knowledge is of two kinds:
Learners need a repertoire of strategies for literacy. Readers and writers use various strategies in combination with their knowledge in order to decode and encode, make meaning, and think critically. For example, they use processing strategies, comprehension strategies, and the strategies that are part of the writing process.
Learners need to develop awareness of what they know and can do and how to deliberately apply and control their knowledge and strategies.
Closely related to the concept of awareness is that of metacognition. This term is often used to describe the processes of thinking and talking about one’s own learning. Being able to articulate what they know and can do helps students to set themselves new goals and meet new challenges.
Students develop knowledge, strategies, and awareness for literacy learning in an integrated way, not sequentially. For example, in order to attend to word-level information (a reading strategy), they draw on their knowledge of how print works and their awareness of phonics and letter forms. At the same time, working out words in these ways adds to their knowledge of how words are formed and to their awareness of effective strategies for solving words.
The development of learners’ knowledge, strategies, and awareness does not occur during literacy sessions only. Learning occurs, and should be planned for, across all areas of the curriculum.
It’s essential for young readers and writers to develop a sight vocabulary, that is, a store of words that they recognise automatically. At first, students will learn to recognise high-frequency words and personal-interest words.
The development of a sight vocabulary is a key factor in enabling beginning readers to move on. A store of sight words frees the reader from having to process every single word and allows them to work with phrases and sentences. When learners can recognise or write words immediately, they are free to concentrate on meaning as they read or write. Having a store of sight words also helps learners to acquire further sight words. (See the section on page 36 about relating parts of words to sounds.)
However, even the most experienced reader will need to use word-level information at times – for example, when meeting unfamiliar technical terms. And, for beginning readers, reading accurately takes priority over reading fluently. Gradually, with guided practice, they will learn to recognise most words in a text automatically. Learners acquire a vocabulary for reading and writing through:
All literacy learners need to: develop concepts about print, learn to read and write letters and words, learn about visual language in texts (including electronic texts), develop a sight vocabulary, learn to relate sounds to print and to relate parts of words to sounds, and apply their knowledge of letter-sound relationships to their reading and writing. All students need explicit instruction to ensure that they develop this essential learning. Those who start school with less experience of print than others in the class may need more intensive instruction.
Emergent readers and writers of English texts need to acquire a knowledge of the essential conventions of print (that is, the conventions of written text). They learn that:
As they learn about letters and words, students need to focus on such aspects as:
Although students may develop much of this knowledge through text-based experiences, teachers will need to teach and reinforce many aspects by explicit instruction. This may occur in a mini-lesson (see page 90) to meet an immediate need that has arisen, but learning should normally occur within a programme of planned reading and writing activities.
In the early stages of reading and writing, children tend to refer to letters in a variety of ways. To provide a consistent identifier, teachers should use the letter names when referring to letters.
As students learn to recognise various visual-language features of texts, they can apply this knowledge to constructing meaning in their reading and conveying meaning in their writing. Students need to know about:
Electronic forms of text have particular visual-language features. When we read or write electronic forms of text, we draw on our prior knowledge and on the same sources of information as in printed text: syntax, semantics, and grapho-phonic and visual information. However, some conventions and text features are specific to electronic presentation, especially menus, icons, visual symbols, and complex ways of integrating graphics and text. Students need guidance in how to navigate electronic text, just as they do for finding their way through tables of contents, indexes, and other print features when reading or for using them in writing.
Children’s conversations with adults and with one another are a critical component of literacy learning. Because oral language is such a powerful influence in early literacy development, teachers need to create purposeful opportunities for children to talk.
Emergent readers and writers need to recognise that the stream of sounds they hear in speech is made up of separate words. In written form, there are gaps between the words. Some children will begin to notice these separate words and gaps early, during storybook reading sessions at home or at school. When they see writing modelled at home or at school, and when they write themselves, they consolidate their understanding of words and how they are put together.
Teachers can develop children’s awareness of words, letters, and sounds by drawing attention to these features when reading to them and during shared reading and writing – for example, by focusing on words and phrases that rhyme or have the same first letter or sound. Young children are highly motivated by such activities because they are enjoyable and are often familiar from their early childhood experiences.
Useful activities include:
When competent readers meet an unknown word, they tend to break it into sound patterns or look within it for words or word parts that are familiar. Beginner readers usually focus on the initial letter of a word, but it’s often useful for them to try to identify parts of the word rather than concentrating on individual letters. Children are often able to work out unknown words by distinguishing between the first part of the word (the onset) and the rest of the word (the rime) as in b-oat, d-og, s-ocks. Once children gain a repertoire of known words, they are better able to recognise familiar patterns in words and can use these patterns to help them solve, pronounce, and write new words. For example, a writer who knows “lunch” is able to work out “munch” by using the spelling pattern that represents the rime “unch”. This chunking of information is generally much more successful than trying to sound out a word letter by letter or thinking of one letter at a time when writing. (See also the section on spelling, on pages 144–148.)
Children’s early writing requires them to consider both direction and the details of letters and words that they may not have noticed when they were “reading” texts. As children begin to write, they draw on everything they know about letters and sounds within words (their phonemic awareness and their knowledge of phonics) to match their written words with spoken words. Using approximations in spelling is an important feature of this process.
Children’s early writing provides invaluable opportunities for learning about relationships between letters and sounds (phonics). Beginning writers are constantly engaged with the problem of how to write down spoken language – how to represent its sounds and how to spell words. Clearly articulating each sound in a word helps children to make connections between the sounds, the letters, and their own knowledge of spelling patterns.
Children are likely to recognise whole words in speech and reading before they can write them. As they write, they use a variety of methods to attempt unknown words. These include employing phonics (using letters to represent the sounds they hear) and using features such as spelling patterns and regular endings, from words they already know, to help them spell unknown words. This growing knowledge of spelling (orthographic knowledge) contributes greatly to children’s fluency in writing.
As they become fluent and experienced readers and writers, children recognise an increasing range of patterns, and they become aware that different letters or letter clusters can represent the same sounds. More sophisticated word study further on involves exploring word families, prefixes, suffixes, and irregular spellings.
Expertise in spelling is essential to writing. Teachers need an understanding of the knowledge strategies and awareness students require to be come competent spellers. This involves knowledge of:
Writers need to develop the ability to use conventional spelling in order to write clearly, fluently, and accurately. This involves moving through a number of stages. To become a proficient speller, a writer has to develop various kinds of knowledge, strategies for spelling unknown words, and awareness of how to use their knowledge and strategies.
Learning to spell is a developmental process; it goes hand in hand with learning to write. Young learners normally begin with scribbles. Then, as they come to understand that writers use letters to write down the words used in spoken language, they may write strings of letters so that their writing contains “words”. As they develop further knowledge of how the alphabet is used, they learn that letters are used to write down the sounds that make up words and begin to use letter-sound correspondences in their writing. Beginning spellers usually learn to write the beginning or end sounds of words, which are often consonants, before they can isolate and write medial sounds, which are usually vowels (see Relating parts of words to sounds, on page 36). Reading and writing experiences provide young learners with knowledge about spelling patterns (orthography) and about the rulesand conventions that apply to words (morphology). They then use this knowledge in further learning.
Students are exposed to correct spellings through reading a wide range of texts. However, not all students develop the detailed knowledge that they need simply through exposure to print. Students need to be taught explicitly how to use the common orthographic and morphological structures of written English for spelling (encoding) words in English.
The teacher needs to support students to enable them to:
Students use their phonemic awareness in spelling to break words into phonemes. The child who is able to write every sound in an unknown word is demonstrating phonemic segmentation skills. For example, a child might spell “jump” (with four sounds) g, a, m, p (for the four sounds).
Students use their knowledge of letter-sound relationships, that is, of phonics, to write the letters for the sounds they have identified.
Students need a knowledge of orthographic patterns – that is, of the spelling patterns that represent sounds in words. The teacher can help the students to develop this knowledge by encouraging them to make analogies to known words that sound the same or look the same. Beginning spellers need to be exposed to ways of writing all sounds (not just those that are commonly associated with the alphabet letters) since they will be trying to write words such as look, out, now, house, toy, boot, train, and tree.
“I tuk my nyou t_ to the prk akros the rod from my hows.”
“I took my new toy to the park across the road from my house.”
The child does not know how to write the“oy” and “ar” sounds. They have used what they know from “put” to write “took” and from “you” to write “new”. Phonetically and orthographically, this is an excellent attempt, but it also tells the teacher that the child needs to learn that “ar” and “oy” are separate sounds that have particular ways of being written in words.
Students need a knowledge of the morphological structure of written English, that is, of the rules and conventions that underlie conventional spelling patterns. Teachers need to show their students how to transfer knowledge about conventions of print from one word that they have learned to spell by sight to other words that have a similar sound or use the same convention.
A child has learned to spell “played” and “jumped” using the “ed” ending. Although the “ed” ending sounds different in these two words (“playd”, “jumpt”), the child has worked out that the “ed” ending is added to words that mean something has already happened even though the words might sound different at the end (“t”, “d”, and “id” in “endid”). When they meet a new word that describes something they did yesterday, one that they do not recognise as a sight word, they can use the correct convention to spell the word ending (“Yesterday I hopped all the way down the path”).
Through engaging learners with texts, teachers can model and explain the use of such conventions as apostrophes in contractions, adding “s” for a plural, and putting two “p’s” in stopping (doing the same when they want to write “hopping” or “shopping”). Students who apply this knowledge demonstrate a developing awareness of morphological structure.
Teachers need to support their students in moving from producing strings of letters to spelling approximations and then to accurate conventional spelling. They can do so in the following ways.
Models of accurately spelled words can be recorded in individual spelling notebooks (personal dictionaries). New words should be added regularly for students to refer to and revise, as appropriate to their stage of spelling development. The student should understand the meanings of the words they are learning to spell, which should arise from their reading and writing experiences. Words from their personal writing have meaning for students and so are relevant for their spelling notebooks.
Most teachers make a range of high-frequency words readily accessible, for example, on a wallchart or on large cards. A class dictionary, in alphabetical order, is a valuable resource for the group to use during shared writing and for students to refer to when writing independently. Entries can be made after talking through the students’ approximations, and the dictionary should be constantly used and expanded.
An approximation is a word that a child writes using spelling that is not completely correct but is as close as they can manage to the word they want to spell. It is generally good practice to suggest that children “have a go” at writing a word by themselves before seeking help. This will encourage them to use the knowledge, awareness, and strategies that they have (see page 26).
Teachers should regularly model ways of attending to spelling. Because beginning spellers do not know how to spell many words, they need to use the sounds in unknown words to guide their spelling attempts. The ability to discriminate between and segment sounds in words is a critical skill and is based on phonemic awareness (see page 32). Teachers can model how to break words into sounds and then write these sounds using known letters and letter patterns. When there are two or more possibilities for spelling one sound, teachers should demonstrate or explain that for this word, this particular pattern is used to write the sounds. For example, when writing the word “they”, many students who can spell “play” and “day” will write it “thay”. The teacher should model the correct spelling – “they” – and explain that, in this word, the long “a” sound is written “ey”, not “ay”.
As students gain more knowledge of spelling, they can be shown how to use dictionaries, word lists, and electronic spellcheckers to ensure that conventionally correct spellings are resulting from their decisions.
Students need to become aware that they should spell the words they use in their writing correctly. However, spelling must also be kept in context.54 The writer’s main aim is to convey meaning. Too much concentration on accurate spelling, especially during draft writing, can reduce the focus on conveying a meaningful message and may make students tentative and unadventurous in their writing.
Analysing the nature of spelling attempts in children’s writing will show the teacher the skills and knowledge the child has and the gaps they need to fill.
Everything a teacher needs to know about children’s developing spelling knowledge is displayed in their writing. The best starting point is to look for what they are able to do when they write unknown words.
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