The Early Literacy Foundations (ELF; UQ, 2006) program is produced by the Speech Pathology and Occupational Therapy faculties at the University of Queensland. It is designed for “boosting a range of literacy skills in year one students” (p. 8). The program uses the term ‘literacy’ in a broad sense to encompass the skills of reading (at the word-level), spelling and handwriting. It is designed as a withdrawal program for small groups. This feature will be sure to grab the attention of cash strapped learning support co-ordinators. The aim of the program is to “provide students with strategies to boost their literacy, including listening, spelling, reading, handwriting, and a range of the motor skills important for school participation” (p. 9).

The program consists of a resource manual and a theme book that provides instructions and student materials. The teacher instructions are clear and could be followed by a paraprofessional. Being largely developed by speech pathologists it is unsurprising that there is a strong emphasis on phonological awareness. There is also a strong emphasis on postural, sensory and motor skills and here’s where the first problem arises. It is true that motor coordination weaknesses co-exist with learning difficulties (e.g., Kaplan, Wilson, Dewey, & Crawford, 1998). However, far from 100% of students with reading difficulties have motor weaknesses and there is no evidence that motor weaknesses are causal in the reading difficulties. It is therefore strange that a literacy program would include a motor component. In this author’s opinion, motor activities have no place in a reading program and it would be far better to select the students who have motor disorders for a separate program. The rest of this review will ignore the motor component of the program and focus on the ‘literacy’.

Teaching is preceded by a screening test that consists of various phonological awareness activities, a spelling task and a nonword spelling task from the SPAT. I like the author’s suggestion to rank order scores and select all students who score below the mean for intervention. This is unlikely to occur in the real-world but it shows the right intent.

The program has 12 “themes”. Each theme consists of a number of activities. Together, the activities in each theme take approximately 1-1.5 hours to administer.  If true, this means that students will receive a maximum of 18 hours of instruction. In reality, the amount of reading instruction will be even less as a large part of the program involves motor skill activities. This seems light for an intervention program.

The phonological awareness part of ELF progresses through the developmental stages of this metalinguistic skill (e.g., Adams, 1990; Yopp, 1992). Themes 1 and 2 consist of rhyming, segmenting sentences into words and syllabification activities. Themes 3 and 4 focuses on onset-rime activities while later themes focus on phoneme-level activities. Here’s the next problem.

There is certainly evidence suggesting that phonological awareness is correlated with reading and many draw the inference that it is involved in learning to read (e.g, Foorman, Francis, Novy & Liberman, 1991; Hatcher, Hulme & Ellis, 1994; see Snowling, 2000 for review) but the case is far from proven (see Castles & Coltheart, 2004 for review). There are cases of reading difficulties in which no phonological problems are present (Castles, 1996; Zoccolotti & Friedmann, 2010) and, despite popular belief, there is actually limited evidence showing that teaching phonological awareness has any additional benefit above and beyond teaching letter-sound conversion rules.

Even if one accepts that phonological awareness is a skill required for learning to read, the question becomes how much phonological awareness is required? Many people agree that being able to segment and blend words of 4-5 phonemes is sufficient. This makes the phoneme manipulation, deletion and substitution activities in the later Themes of ELF somewhat redundant. It should be noted that the major concern is not that these activities are bad, but that they are unnecessary. Reading programs need to target reading and spelling skills, not distal factors like phonological awareness. Students need as many repetitions of letter-sound conversion rules and decoding and spelling attempts using the letter-sound rules as teachers can possibly give them; excessive teaching of phonological awareness distracts from this essential requirement.

A positive is that ELF teaches letter sounds. The letter sequence is t, f, j, g, m, n, h, v, w, y, sh, th, ch, k, p, b, d, i, a, u, o, e, r, l, s and z. However, the sequence is somewhat odd with easily confused letters (e.g., p, d and b) taught together and low-frequency letter-sounds (e.g., v, w, y and z) taught before more frequently occurring letter-sound conversion rules.

It is not until Theme 5 that students begin spelling nonsense words using the letter-sound conversion rules. It is worth noting that the reading and spelling activities provide a limited number of repetitions compared to other intervention programs (e.g., Understanding Words and Minilit).

So I have a few problems with the program, but does it work? The answer is that we don’t know. There are no published peer-reviewed studies on effectiveness.

Finally, I was surprised to read that the authors recommended using the program in semester 2 of Grade 1 or even in Grade 2. They claim that this will give students the opportunity for 6-months of classroom instruction and gain some exposure to both phonics (a dangerous assumption) and handwriting. They provide no evidence for this suggestion and it seems an odd one. They are almost recommending a wait-and-see-who-fails approach.  Surely an early literacy foundations program should target Prep/Kinder students or at least from the very start of Grade 1?

Conflict of Interest:

Craig Wright is the author of the Understanding Words reading intervention program.

Models of reading: The dual-route approach

There are a number of different models of how we read, the most appealing of which is Max Colheart’s Dual-Route Approach. 

This approach uses the terms “lexical” and “non-lexical” to describe two ways in which words can be read aloud. “Lexical” refers to a route where the word is familiar and recognition prompts direct access to a pre-existing representation of the word name that is then produced as speech. “Non-lexical” refers to a route used for novel or unfamiliar words. As unfamiliar words are, by definition, unrepresented in the brain’s lexicon, they cannot be read directly. They have to be decoded using knowledge of grapheme-phoneme (or “letter-sound”) conversion rules (GPCs).

Figure 1 shows the Dual-Route model. The visual features and the global form of the printed word shelf are recognised as a familiar word, which activates the orthographic representation of shelf in the Orthographic Lexicon, in turn activating the word’s name in the Phonological Lexicon, before activating the word’s meaning in the Semantic Lexicon. The 4 Sub-Lexical Phonological Representations (speech sounds) (i.e., /sh/ /e/ /l/ /f/) are then activated and produced as the spoken word shelf.

In contrast, gallimaufry will not be read directly by anyone other than those with exceptional large vocabularies, because most mere mortals will have no pre-existing Orthographic or Phonological representations for this very low-frequency word. Instead, the individual letters are analysed using knowledge of GPCs (e.g., g = /g/), the appropriate Sub-Lexical Phonological Representations are accessed, before finally, the sub-lexical units are reassembled as a word and translated to speech. There is a feedback system in operation in this process that allows access to the word’s meaning and learning of new words to take place.

Figure 1. An adapted Dual-Route model of reading showing the different pathways by which the know word shelf and the unknown word gallimaufry may be read aloud. Source http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~ssaunder/DRC/.

Skilled readers mostly use the Lexical route. They retain the ability to use the Sub-Lexical route (consider how you read gallimaufry and bioluminescence), it is just that they don’t need to – they have had enough experience with reading to have developed sufficient lexical knowledge. In contrast, young readers, and individuals struggling with reading , do not possess word-specific lexical knowledge in sufficient quantities. How then, do we teach this skill?

The goal of all word-reading instruction should be to assist students to read most words fluently, using the lexical route. But how do we do this? The answer lies in the development of the sub-lexical route.

The development of Sub-Lexical Reading

The following describes what we think might happen in learning to read. However, readers should note that we have a good idea of how skilled reading occurs but we actually don’t yet know how we learn to read.

Imagine that the young student destined to become a skilled reader has, by virtue of genetic fortune, all of the skills required to read. Then imagine that the following words are the first they ever attempt to read:

sit

pat

The skilled-reader-to-be has some recognition that words can be segmented into speech sounds (e.g., sit has three: /s/ /i/ /t/). This helps them map the written letters s, i t, p, a onto a speech sound (e.g., s = /s/). Acquiring these “letter-sound mappings” gives the student access to the Sub-Lexical reading route. They can read any word that has any combination of those five letters without the help of an adult (i.e., they can independently read words like tap, tip, sap, spit).

Research has shown us that we have to accurately identity a word between 4-12 times before it becomes what teachers refer to as a “sight word”. That is, before a strong enough representation of the visual form of the word and its name is formed to allow reading using the Lexical route. At this point, reading begins to speed up. The student no longer has to laboriously decode every word; fluent recognition frees up cognitive space and energy which can be used for other functions, such as comprehension and learning unusual spelling patterns.

The process seems to be different for the unskilled reader. For whatever reason, when they see the first words sit and pat they have difficulty recognising the relationship between the speech sounds in the words and the written letters used to represent them. Acquisition of “letter-sound mappings” is therefore delayed, preventing access to the Sub-Lexical reading route. When the young, or unskilled reader sees the words below, how then do they read them?

sap tip

at pit

They can’t accurately decode them using the Sub-Lexical route. Instead, they guess. In some cases the guess may be ‘educated’, but a guess all the same. Sometimes they will try to predict the word from the meaning or structure of the sentence. Often they will look at a picture to help with the printed words. They may also rely upon salient visual cues within the words, such as the initial letter, word length, or other obvious letters. It is possible that an unskilled reader will read “A fat cat sat on the mat” as “A big kitten was sitting on the floor”.

Despite common belief in education circles, using contextual cues is not only inaccurate, but damaging to students’ reading. Research has shown that contextual cues only provide 5-25% accuracy rates; and for the important content words in sentences the accuracy rate is towards the bottom of that range. In addition, because prediction from context avoids use of both the Lexical and Sub-lexical routes, even if the student guesses correctly, it does not count towards the 4-12 successful decoding attempts required to learn a word “by sight”. Using contextual cues is therefore self-defeating.

Teaching students to read

Reading is a complicated process that requires instruction in, among other things, phonological awareness, letter-knowledge, phonics, spelling, strategy development, vocabulary, grammatical awareness, and comprehension strategies. The Understanding Words programme is a good example of an evidence-based reading intervention.

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What are Executive Functions?

The Executive Functions (EF) are a set of cognitive functions that provide the infrastructure for acquiring skills and knowledge and that coordinate the production and organisation of that knowledge. They include the ability to inhibit motor responses and other actions, to initiate effort, to sustain attention and effort, to shift attention or strategy, the controls of memory, and the ability to plan and organise for task performance.

Teachers may be more familiar with the term metacognition. This term may be misleading because it creates a false impression of a little meta-person running all cognition or thinking. In fact, the EF are no more or no less important than other cognitive operations and academic skills. The latter can be thought of as the ingredients for a task while the EF provide the recipe. One cannot prepare a meal without the ingredients and the recipe.

Dysfunction in the core EF of behavioural inhibition (the ability to inhibit or stop behavioural responses to stimuli) is now considered to be the a major deficit in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Executive dysfunction in various forms is also present in a number of other disorders including learning disabilities, Autistic Spectrum Disorders, anxiety disorders and depression.

The adverse effects of executive dysfunction

The EF exist within the brain at a cognitive level and therefore cannot be directly observed. The behaviours that EF dysfunction creates can, however, be observed and include:

• Having difficulty inhibiting behaviour (i.e., stopping and thinking).
• Being impulsive, rushing work, and blurting out answers.
• Failing to pay close attention to details.
• Having difficulty sustaining mental effort and avoiding tasks that require sustained effort.
• Being easily distracted and switching from one task to something less important.

• Difficulty with organisation and planning.
• Appearing to make the same mistakes repeatedly despite seeming to understand rules and the use of appropriate discipline.
• Parents and teachers having to continually repeat rules.
• Some students may manifest hyperactivity verbally (i.e., talk excessively).
• Becoming fixated on particular things (e.g., television or computer).
• Failing to learn from previous behaviour and consequences.
• Only being motivated to perform when there is something in it for them (i.e., they need external motivation).
• Having poor perception of time and poor ability to use time to plan behaviour.
• Appearing sluggish and taking a long time to process information.
• Needing constant assistance in solving problems.
• Poor short-term memory and general forgetfulness; including forgetting things they need for school or forgetting to hand things in at school.
• General difficulties with regulating emotion. Emotional responses to situations may appear extreme. It can be difficult for them to remain calm and think things through. They can become overexcited and ‘throw tantrums’ more regularly than their peers.
• Becoming overwhelmed by tasks that should be manageable.
• Talking a lot, but not really saying anything.
• Disorganised speech/language and poor grammar (i.e., their sentences are poorly constructed).
• These kids have been described as carrying around an excitement meter that they use to evaluate every stimulus in their immediate environment. Essentially, the thing with the highest reading wins (i.e., gets their attention).

Consider the child in a classroom who is faced with both a page of maths problems and his peers talking about BMX bikes. Which stimulus is he to choose? For most kids with EF dysfunction there is no option – they go for the more exciting discussion about BMX. And what happens? They are seen as ‘inattentive’ and in some cases ‘disruptive’. In actual fact, they are being quite attentive to the BMX conversation; it’s just that it may be inappropriate to do so in the classroom.

Once attention has been allocated to an exciting and rewarding stimulus, it can also be hard to get the child to inhibit that response and return to the original task. 

Inconsistency

An individual with EF dysfunction is likely to be inconsistent in academic performance and behaviour; some days they will and some days they won’t, rather than simply not being able to do something at all. They will often have the skills necessary for a task (i.e., the ingredients), but fail to produce adequate performance or output because the EF controls (the  recipe) do not provide the necessary regulation on performance.

Managing Executive Dysfunction

If a child displays some of the symptoms described above and those symptoms are causing them a problem it is appropriate to have them assessed. The psychologist will need to determine what is causing the problems, make the appropriate diagnosis(es) and design a specific treatment plan.

Some individuals, particularly those with a diagnosis of ADHD, may benefit from a stimulant medication or non-stimulant such as atomoxetine. It is important to recognise that medications do not teach skills. They can, however, give the child a greater ability to stop, think, and to perform what they know. Medication does not work for every child but if you consider it worth a trial you should discuss the matter with a medical specialist.

Management of EF should always include a behavioural component and requires a team-based approach. Ideally, the school counsellor and learning support team can assist with management. However, it may be wise to arrange a meeting of all stakeholders at the school to discuss the case. These meetings should be used to further define the problem behaviours within the classroom and to develop methods for improving attention to detail and task and for increasing consistency and output.

More information on EF

lanlfoundation

Lynn Meltzer

National Resource Center on ADHD

Russ Barkley

Russ Barkley 2

Teachers often ask me what it means when a student scores poorly on the Verbal Comprehension Index of the WISC-IV (or a similar scale on another IQ test). The simple answer is that the scores don’t tell anything specific about how a student will perform in the classroom. However, classic intelligence theory claims that low Verbal Comprehension Index scores are an indication of poor crystallised knowledge.

Crystallised knowledge can be thought of as the information one acquires from one’s cultural and educational environment. There is an overlap between crystallised knowledge and semantic language skills. It develops largely as a result of formal and informal educational experiences and acquisition of this knowledge is heavily influenced by oral language skills and reading ability (Horn, 1994).

When students have a lot of crystallised information in their ‘mental hard-drive’, they not only make a good quiz teammate, but they are at an advantage when required to learn new information. This is because new learning is usually facilitated by prior knowledge (Engle, 1994). For example, it is much easier to learn about the concept of division when one already knows about multiplication. Likewise, it is easier to learn how to use an Apple computer if one is already skilled at operating a PC.

The student with a lot of crystallised information is also at an advantage when they have to perform higher-order reasoning functions. For example, it is hard to decipher the meaning of the first sentence below if one does not have prior knowledge of the Greek legend of Dionysius and the Sword of Damocles.

(a)   The threat hung over his head like the Sword of Damocles.

Likewise, one would have dififuclty understanding the second sentence below if one was not previously aware of the fact that La Paz is situated at high altitude and that flying into an area of high altitude without acclimatising is likely to lead to a mild bout of altitude sickness, a symptom of which is often a massive headache.

(b)   Tom spent two days in bed after flying into La Paz eating Aspirin like Jelly Beans.  

Prior knowledge is vital for classroom learning. For example, a student may not be able to understand a lesson on Hannibal’s role in the fall of Rome without prior knowledge of Hannibal, his elephants, and the Roman Empire. Lack of vocabulary (lexical knowledge) or in the depth and breadth of content (general knowledge) will also adversely affect written expression.

Other difficulties experienced by students who lack crystallised knowledge include reading comprehension problems despite having adequate word-reading skills. These students typically understand the ‘bare bones’ of the story. They can often retell the story, and they may be able to recall information that has been explicitly referred to in the story. However, they may not be able to draw meaningful connections to background knowledge and to draw inferences, both of which are crucial to developing the situation model upon which real understanding is based.  Students with adequate general knowledge, but poor vocabulary may read and understand well when they are reading about familiar topics. However, their comprehension suffers when reading about novel topics or when the text contains unfamiliar words.

Instructional strategies that may be useful include:

1. Audit the lesson and identify the pre-requisite crystallised knowledge. Check that the student has that knowledge. If not, teach it! Make use of parents or teacher aides or whatever you need to. Just make sure that the student is pre-taught the pre-requisite knowledge before the lesson begins. Otherwise, they’re just set up for failure.
2. Provide advanced organisers (e.g., an outline of material to be used in a lecture).
3. Teach previewing strategies to identify aspects of texts, such as headings, index, chapter headings, that give clues to the background and structure of the text.
4. Teach them how to identify and highlight key information.
5. Point out when important parts of lessons are about to be introduced (e.g., “this is the most important thing”, “if you only learn one thing today, this is it”).
6. Use “what we know, what we don’t know” strategies to help activate background knowledge before a lesson or reading a text.
7. Help the student develop writing plans (mind maps) that specify ideas, background details, and vocabulary to which they will need to refer.
8. Teach the student to use a thesaurus for writing.
9. Pre-teach new vocabulary in key content areas of the curriculum.
10. Write key terms on the board during lessons, particularly when introducing new concepts.
11. Simplify instructions and pre-define terms (e.g., a feldspar is like a little crystal in a rock. Now listen carefully, granite is a very hard rock that is composed of tiny feldspars; that is, it is made up of lots of tiny feldspars. Remember that feldspars are like little crystals in the rock.)
12. Consider providing the important components of a lesson in cloze format. Cloze sentences are sentences that have certain words missing. The job of taking notes is mostly done for the student, with the exception of key words that require them to consider the key points of the lesson or to access background knowledge.
13. Teach related vocabulary in groups (e.g., get, obtain, purchase, borrow, commandeer). Teach the students how these related words have similar, but sometimes different applications. Provide them with opportunities to compare and contrast these words as they learn them.

Students need to be able to regulate arousal levels to ensure optimal learning or task performance. Students who have weak mental energy control may simply lack the stamina required to maintain optimal behaviour/learning.  Their mental energy may be hard to start up and once started, used up quickly.  They may also waste energy on irrelevant details.

Students with reduced alertness can find their class experience tedious. They experience mental fatigue and/or boredom when they try to concentrate.  As a result of being tuned out, they tend to miss the beginnings and ends of statements or directions.

These students are frequently misunderstood.  They can be accused of not trying or laziness.  Their inconsistency is particularly puzzling and frustrating.

How to help at home

1. Because these students can have difficulty “tuning in”, parents should always prompt them to: “Listen very carefully, I am going to tell you something important about………”.

2. Students with weak mental energy control need frequent breaks during homework time.  Use a kitchen timer and allow ‘stretch breaks’ every ten minutes (some students will need even more frequent breaks).

3. Many students who have difficulties with mental effort have trouble getting started with work.  Parents can assist by helping them get organised, and perhaps by performing the first step themselves.  Anything that can get the child going helps to facilitate the flow of mental effort.

4. Sometimes combining regular changes of work site with frequent breaks can enable students to renew mental effort.  They may need ten minutes working at a desk, ten minutes at the kitchen table, followed by ten minutes of mathematics on the lounge room floor.

5. The stimulant medications can assist with behavioural and motor inhibition and aid development of the executive functions such as mental energy control.

Managing weak mental energy control in the classroom

6. Teachers can help students with reduced mental alertness and mental effort by requiring them to put forth relatively small amounts of work or focused attention at any one time.  For example, there may need to be brief breaks between components of a writing task or mathematical problems.  Better to have five minutes of focused effort than 15 minutes of unfocused, ineffective work.

7. Teachers should also have an inconspicuous method of providing the student with a reminder to tune back in during periods of high distraction or when s/he is obviously tuned out (e.g., a tap on the shoulder).

8. These students should be allowed to stand up and stretch, walk to the back of the room, or even visit the toilet a number of times per day or section of the day.  They can keep a checklist documenting such breaks and receive praise for not needing to take all of them on some occasions.  Students taking these breaks must understand they cannot be disruptive or talkative.

9. Teachers may need to signal a student with limited alertness when something especially important is to be taught.  For example, the teacher could stand directly in front of him/her when addressing the class and say: “Now listen carefully, I’m about to give you important instructions about our book assignment”.

10. Teachers and teacher aides may assist with work initiation by spelling the first word, writing the first sentence, doing the first math problem and so on.