Tom Nicholson

“High 5!” Strategies to enhance comprehension of expository text

This article reviews theoretical and research evidence to support the explicit and systematic teaching of five comprehension strategies that will help all students tackle expository texts with success. The article explains the “High 5!” strategies and how to teach them. An example of a lesson is included to show how the five strategies connect with students background knowledge to enhance comprehension.

The effect of phonics-enhanced Big Book reading on the language and literacy skills of 6-year-old pupils of different reading ability attending lower SES schools

The purpose of this study was to improve the literacy achievement of lower socioeconomic status (SES) children by combining explicit phonics with Big Book reading. Big Book reading is a component of the text-centered (or book reading) approach used in New Zealand schools. It involves the teacher in reading an enlarged book to children and demonstrating how to use semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic cues to learn to read. There has been little research, however, to find out whether the effectiveness of Big Book reading is enhanced by adding explicit phonics. In this study, a group of 96 second graders from three lower SES primary schools in New Zealand were taught in 24 small groups of four, tracked into three different reading ability levels. All pupils were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: a control group who received math instruction, Big Book reading enhanced with phonics (BB/EP), Big Book reading on its own, and Phonics on its own. The results showed that the BB/EP group made significantly better progress than the Big Book and Phonics groups in word reading, reading comprehension, spelling, and phonemic awareness. In reading accuracy, the BB/EP and Big Book groups scored similarly. In basic decoding skills the BB/EP and Phonics groups scored similarly. The combined instruction, compared with Big Book reading and phonics, appeared to have no comparative disadvantages and considerable advantages. The present findings could be a model for New Zealand and other countries in their efforts to increase the literacy achievement of disadvantaged pupils.

Literacy in early childhood and primary education: Issues, challenges and solutions

Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education provides a comprehensive introduction to literacy teaching and learning. The book explores the continuum of literacy learning and children’s transitions from early childhood settings to junior primary classrooms, and then to senior primary and beyond. n nReader-friendly and accessible, this book equips pre-service teachers with the theoretical underpinnings and practical strategies and skills needed to teach literacy. It places the ‘reading wars’ firmly in the past as it examines contemporary research and practices. The book covers important topics such as literacy acquisition, family literacies and multiliteracies, foundation skills for literacy learning, reading difficulties, assessment, and supporting diverse literacy learners in early childhood and primary classrooms. It also addresses some of the challenges that teachers may face in the classroom and provides solutions to these. n nEach chapter includes learning objectives, reflective questions and definitions to key terms to engage and assist readers. Further resources are also available at www.cambridge.edu.au/academic/literacy. Written by an expert author team and featuring real-world examples from literacy teachers and learners. Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education will help pre-service teachers feel confident teaching literacy to diverse age groups and abilities.

What are the criteria for a good intervention study? Response: "Unrecognized ambiguities in validity of intervention research: an example on explicit phonics and text-centered teaching"

Thompson (2015) has raised several validity issues about our study (Tse and Nicholson, 2014) while acknowledging that it would score well in terms of Troias (1999) criteria for “What makes a good study?” A response to the critique is detailed briefly below. n nThompsons first point was that the study lacked evidence about what instruction children received prior to and concurrent with the intervention study. Interactions with teachers and the principals of the schools however indicated that reading instruction was similar from one school to the next. Any differences among schools and classrooms were also controlled for in that participants were randomly assigned to groups thus spreading possible effects of differences in instruction across all groups. n nThe second point was the absence of justification for the phonics rules taught however the article explained that the taught Anglo-Saxon decoding rules were from Calfee and Patricks (1995) well-known explanation of Anglo-Saxon letter-sound patterns. The intervention followed their scope and sequence in the study. It is not clear why this might be a validity problem in that the study did reference the source of the phonics rules. n nThe third point was that participants vocabulary age was low at 4.8 years compared with chronological age of 6.3 years and thus Big Books may have been inappropriate. Their standard score was 86 which is close to the average range (90–110) and there are studies to support Big Book reading with lower SES children such as these (Nicholson and Whyte, 1992; Valdez-Menchaca and Whitehurst, 1992; Whitehurst et al., 1994). The Big Books were also selected so as to be at the reading level of the children who were being taught and given that their reading level was in the beginner range the language should have been understandable for them. n nThe fourth point was that the article did not discuss whether children had opportunities to use their decoding skills to process the items of the pre and post-test measures. Although not reported our data did confirm that the combined group scored better on regular words (e.g., went) than irregular (e.g., love). The Bryant Test of Basic Decoding skills also gave opportunities to use decoding skills. n nThe fifth point was that the phonics group practiced phonics quizzes but the Big Book group did not practice reading of text. This was not completely the case. Children in the Big Book group did get opportunities to practice reading of text through the Big Book lessons. They did three readings of each text and read along with the teacher. n nThe sixth point was that the orthogonal analysis was not sufficient and needed to compare the performance gains of the combined group with those of the treatment control group (math-only). To do this however risked statistical error so instead of carrying out all possible comparisons among the four groups the decision was to use Helmert contrasts which were pre-planned orthogonal contrasts. This approach offered protection against statistical error (Kwon, 1996; Keppel and Wickens, 2004). As Kuehne (1993) has pointed out, using post-hoc comparisons increases the chance of type 1 error (in the study, to do six post-hoc comparisons across four groups would increase the possibility of type 1 error to 26%). The Helmert contrast procedure is common in other disciplines but less common in education. The way the Helmert contrasts worked in the study was that the control group mean was first compared with the overall mean score for the other three groups. Then the phonics enhanced Big Books group mean was compared with the overall mean for the two remaining groups (Big Book and phonics). Finally the means of the Big Book and phonics groups were compared. It was like peeling an onion. The logic was that if the control group was not better than the mean of the other three groups and if the phonics enhanced group was better than the mean of the combined Big Book and phonics groups, and if there was no difference in the contrast between the Big Book and phonics groups, then it can be inferred that the phonics enhanced group was superior to the other groups. The orthogonal contrast worked just as well as all possible contrasts with less risk of type 1 and 2 error. n nThe seventh issue was that speed of reading was not reported. Thompsons previous research would suggest a slower reading speed for the phonics enhanced Big Book group but it could counter-wise be argued that they would have gained similar fluency to the Big Book group because they also read Big Books. To answer this question, fluency would be a useful variable for future studies to find out which approach is more effective for fluency. n nTo conclude, one reviewer commented that the present study could be “a model for how such work might be conducted on a larger scale, which might lead New Zealand and other nations to progress in dealing with the [achievement] gap issue.” Replicating and scaling up the present study will clarify further whether enhancing Big Book reading with explicit phonics brings disadvantaged children closer to their expected reading and spelling age in a short time with only a small adjustment to Big Book instruction.

The effects of preliteracy knowledge, schooling, and summer vacation on literacy acquisition

ABSTRACT What causes the literacy gap and can schools compensate for it? The authors investigated 3 drivers of the gap: preliteracy knowledge, schooling, and the summer vacation. Longitudinal literacy data over 5 time points were collected on 126 five-year-olds attending higher or lower socioeconomic status (SES) schools during their first 15 months of school. There were several noteworthy findings: (a) gaps in preliteracy knowledge at school entry favor higher SES schools, (b) preliteracy knowledge predicted later progress over and above SES and gender, (c) during the school year there was a widening of the gap between higher SES schools and lower SES schools in reading and spelling skills, and (d) children attending lower SES schools exhibited losses during summer whereas children attending higher SES schools nearly always gained. Contrary to previous studies, the present results indicated that when there are concentrations of children from higher and lower SES in schools located in the childrens respective SES areas, the achievement gap widens.

To what extent does children’s spelling improve as a result of learning words with the look, say, cover, write, check, fix strategy compared with phonological spelling strategies?

Abstract The ubiquitous weekly spelling test assumes that words are best learned by memorisation and testing but is this the best way? This study compared two well-known approaches to spelling instruction, the rule based and visual memory approaches. A group of 55 seven-year-olds in two Year 3 classrooms was taught spelling in small groups for three lessons a week, 20-min per lesson, over ten weeks. In the first intervention, students learned statistically likely spelling strategies for vowel sounds, syllable breaking strategies, and the doubling rule. In the second intervention, students used a look, say, cover, write, check, fix strategy, listed words in alphabetical order, and wrote them in sentences. The control group completed non-spelling activities. Results showed that although both intervention groups learned to spell taught words better than the control group, the rule-based approach had greater transfer to spelling of new words for both proficient and less proficient spellers.

Editorial: New directions in research on reading and writing difficulties

It has long been a puzzle that some children seem to learn to read and write no matter what the instructional method, whether it is implicit learning such as the book experience approach in whole language or whether it is explicit learning through the phonological approach. At the same time, it is well known that many children fail to read and write. Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) reviewed research on why some learn while others fail and concluded that literacy difficulties happen when beginner readers use the wrong strategy. Most first words are learned not through phonics but by memorization, selective association with a cue in the word that is remembered, such as the “tail” on “dog”. This is the way words are learned in other languages such as Chinese, but it puts a heavy load on memory and makes the learning process very slow. Not only this, children start school knowing perhaps 10,000 spoken words, and they will see many of these in print in their first years of school – and see them for the first time. The majority of children figure out a better way to learn to read and write than by memorizing words – instead, they crack the code, realizing that letters represent phonemes in the words they speak. They understand that print is speech written down. This insight however is not enough in that the letter-sound correspondence rules of English are really complex, and it takes years for children to become fluent just in decoding the words on the page. Gough (1996) called these letter-sound rules the “cipher”. Students without the cipher read and spell very differently. Children who know the cipher are better able to read nonwords and spell real words than those without the cipher. Their spelling is more phonetic; their reading errors have more graphic similarity. Their errors are very different to the students with difficulties whose errors are not anywhere near as close to the actual words. How do we teach the cipher? In the whole language approach, the aim is for children to use three cueing systems – semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic – and that these cueing systems are best accessed through reading of text, which is the basis of the book reading approach. In this approach, graphophonic cues are seen as of minor importance, so that the student only needs to look at the first one or two letters and can then guess the word they want to read. This approach relies very much on children being able to use their language knowledge to predict what the word must be using very few letter clues. The problem is that context is a fickle friend. It is there when you do not need it; not there when you do need it (Gough, 1996). Context clues enable us to predict with accuracy only when the word is highly predictable, at the end of a sentence, and with a lot of context help behind it. In real text reading, context clues only help us to predict one in ten content words and this is not enough (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). Phonics, however, directly teaches rules that will help the child to read and spell. Explicit teaching of phonics is the missing ingredient in whole language approaches to reading instruction. Once the student has some knowledge of the cipher they can build on this through further reading until the cipher is installed. This is not all there is to reading. The simple view of reading says that the cipher (or decoding ability) is crucial for learning to read and spell words; the other part of the puzzle is language understanding which is crucial for comprehension. Those who have difficulties with reading and writing may be weak in one of these two areas or both. We need both to become effective readers and writers. This is the theory, anyway. How can we test whether it is correct? The six studies in this special issue

Does linguistic comprehension support the decoding skills of struggling readers

Abstract This study investigated the contribution of linguistic comprehension to the decoding skills of struggling readers. Participants were 36 children aged between eight and 12 years, all below average in decoding but differing in linguistic comprehension. The children read passages from the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability and their first 25 miscues were categorised into syntactic, semantic, phonemic, and graphophonic similarity. Children were first grouped in terms of higher and lower linguistic comprehension levels. Analysis of miscues showed no differences between the groups in miscue similarity. They were then grouped according to pseudoword reading skill. There were significant differences between the groups for all miscue types except semantic similarity. An analysis of miscues using multiple regression showed that, after taking account of age, pseudoword reading was the best predictor of quality of miscues. In addition, linguistic comprehension contributed to syntactic similarity of miscues over and above decoding.

Does learning the alphabet in kindergarten give children a head start in the first year of school? A comparison of children’s reading progress in two first grade classes in state and Montessori schools in Switzerland

Abstract The main purpose of this study was to examine whether the age at which children start to learn to read affects their later progress. The study was conducted in Zürich, Switzerland, and compared a first grade class in a local school with two first grade classes in a Montessori school. It was found that although the Montessori children had an advantage over the local children in alphabet knowledge at entry to Grade 1, this was not translated into a significant advantage at the end of Grade 1 in either phonemic awareness or reading ability. Further analysis revealed that pretest alphabet knowledge for the whole group was significantly related to progress. In addition, scatterplots showed that some children started school with high levels of alphabet knowledge but did not make progress, indicating that alphabet knowledge is necessary for literacy progress but not sufficient.

Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education by Claire McLachlan

Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education provides a comprehensive introduction to literacy teaching and learning. The book explores the continuum of literacy learning and children’s transitions from early childhood settings to junior primary classrooms, and then to senior primary and beyond. n nReader-friendly and accessible, this book equips pre-service teachers with the theoretical underpinnings and practical strategies and skills needed to teach literacy. It places the ‘reading wars’ firmly in the past as it examines contemporary research and practices. The book covers important topics such as literacy acquisition, family literacies and multiliteracies, foundation skills for literacy learning, reading difficulties, assessment, and supporting diverse literacy learners in early childhood and primary classrooms. It also addresses some of the challenges that teachers may face in the classroom and provides solutions to these. n nEach chapter includes learning objectives, reflective questions and definitions to key terms to engage and assist readers. Further resources are also available at www.cambridge.edu.au/academic/literacy. Written by an expert author team and featuring real-world examples from literacy teachers and learners. Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education will help pre-service teachers feel confident teaching literacy to diverse age groups and abilities.