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Sound Waves Literacy and the Reading Commitment
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Sound Waves Literacy and the Reading Commitment
Sound Waves Literacy 30/5/24
For educators all over Australia, improving students’ reading outcomes is a shared goal. So, no matter what state or territory you’re based in, the Queensland Reading Commitment is essential reading for its invaluable, evidence-informed insights and recommendations about how schools can improve reading outcomes.
What is the Queensland Reading Commitment?
When the Queensland Government announced its Reading Commitment in late 2023, it sent a clear and strong message to schools, teachers and parents about its goal to significantly improve reading outcomes for all students. It committed to achieving this through a consistent evidence-informed approach to the teaching of reading in Queensland schools. To assist with implementation, it has promised additional staff, ongoing support, updated teacher training and funding.
The Queensland Reading Commitment mandates that every school in the state will approach reading instruction in the same way, which includes:
- following evidence-informed practices
- teaching synthetic phonics systematically and explicitly
- introducing beginning readers to decodable texts
- assessing students’ decoding skills.
The new Reading Commitment is based on current multi-disciplinary research in fields including education, psychology and linguistics. The Queensland Government pressed the importance of teaching reading in its Reading Position Statement, stating ‘Reading is the process of decoding and making meaning from text. Unlike speaking and listening, reading is not a naturally developing skill — all students need to be explicitly taught to read.’
Importantly, the policy reinforces that Balanced Literacy and Whole Language approaches are no longer considered acceptable methods for teaching reading.
Understanding how evidence-informed frameworks apply across the primary years
Learning to read is a complex process. Perhaps the two most widely recognised frameworks for achieving reading comprehension and therefore reading success are The Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope, so it’s no surprise that these frameworks are included in the Reading Position Statement.
Both frameworks identify that learning to read requires two key components of instruction – word recognition and language comprehension.
Let’s unpack The Simple View of Reading* model to see what this means for learning application and reading comprehension. It’s important to consider the integral part played by the multiplication sign in this framework:
It indicates that reading is the product, not the sum, of identifying words and understanding texts. If you were to have zero on either side of the expression, your outcome would be zero reading comprehension.
To further illustrate this component of the model, consider an uncommon word like verisimilitude. As an expert reader, you’re able to decode this word. However, you may have limited knowledge of what the word means. Without the language comprehension to know what this word means, reading comprehension is not achieved.
In contrast, most five-year-olds can tell you that a tyrannosaurus is a large dinosaur with powerful teeth and small arms. However, looking at the word tyrannosaurus, they are unlikely to be able to decode or recognise the word. Comprehending language doesn’t mean you will be able to decode words.
With these frameworks, experienced educators will know that while these two components absolutely inform one another, the focus of instruction must shift and adapt across the primary years.
In early primary, students are first learning how to read (word recognition) and so educators can rely more heavily on the formal teaching of reading and spelling through a systematic synthetic phonics program (with the use of decodable readers of course). Addressing the language comprehension can typically be interwoven through story time and rich discussions about texts and text meaning.
As students move to middle and upper primary, it’s still essential for teachers to use a synthetic phonics approach as part of their spelling instruction. This continues to provide students with the foundations of word recognition skills but with more complex grapheme choices and a greater number of multisyllabic words. Instruction should also progressively expand in the teaching of morphology and etymology to further provide students with the word recognition skills required to be able to lift words from the page when reading, as well as broaden their vocabulary in a structured and systematic way. Furthermore, upper years educators must increasingly pair this instruction alongside formal teaching of comprehension, grammar and text type composition using a variety of authentic texts to exponentially build students language comprehension skills.
In summary, it’s important for all educators to understand the symbiotic relationship between spelling and reading. A solid approach to spelling instruction provides a platform for word recognition skills which can assist and transfer into language comprehension skills, together achieving reading success.
How can Sound Waves Literacy help schools implement systematic synthetic phonics to meet the Reading Commitment?
Sound Waves has been a trusted favourite in Australian primary schools for more than two decades.
Sound Waves has championed a systematic synthetic phonics approach to spelling and integrated phonemic awareness, synthetic phonics, morphology and etymology. Its structured literacy method serves as the cornerstone for reading, writing and spelling success, in alignment with the Science of Reading. Continuously refined through evidence from peer-reviewed research, it stands as an informed and evolving program.
Schools adopting Sound Waves for literacy instruction gain access to a comprehensive toolkit for evidence-based, whole-school, explicit, systematic teaching. This enables them to deliver high-quality lessons, assessments and remediation. Additionally, educators receive free, ongoing support and professional learning workshops from experienced local Education Consultants.
Teachers benefit from a wealth of resources, including a detailed Scope and Sequence, Curriculum Match documents, engaging slideshows for each lesson, ready-made student activities for consolidation of concepts, Decodable Readers (for early years) and an array of extras such as printable resources, games and teaching tips. With all this, teachers are equipped with practical and engaging resources to systematically and explicitly teach spelling and service the word recognition skills required for reading success.
Let’s pull out a few examples of how Sound Waves Literacy resources help educators deliver on the Reading Commitment across early primary and upper primary:
Foundation to Year 2
As part of the synthetic phonics instruction Sound Waves Decodable Readers are used as an essential tool to teach beginning reading in Foundation and Year 1. The books are conveniently available in three levels of difficulty (Support, Core and Extended) that help teachers cater for a range of reading ability typical in the first few years of school – while still adhering to an evidence-informed systematic introduction of graphemes during reading practice. As students progress to Year 2 more complex phoneme–grapheme relationships are introduced and an increase on the teaching of morphology and spelling patterns takes place. The early years sets students up with the important foundations to begin developing word recognition skills.
Years 3 to 6
The program broadens into a deeper word study application. Synthetic phonics instruction increases in complexity as students are taught more unusual phoneme–grapheme relationships and spelling patterns (orthography). Explicit teaching of focus concepts also deepens in morphology (prefixes, suffixes and Greek and Latin roots), etymology (word origins) and other key concepts (homophones, synonyms etc). Together, this approach provides students with a systematic way to build their vocabulary – effectively giving them the tools to read and spell new and unfamiliar words required for word recognition development.
By this stage, most students have mastered the basics of learning how to read. Educators should also increasingly introduce a variety of authentic texts alongside the spelling instruction to strengthen and expand the language comprehension skills required for reading comprehension and overall reading success. If students are still struggling with word recognition they can continue to use decodable readers as a tool. However, it’s important to understand that curriculum texts are the best place to teach language comprehension skills like complex sentence structure, inference and summarising, practicing fluency and prosody and rich vocabulary.
View the Sound Waves Scope and Sequence to see how the progression of phonemic awareness, phonics, morphology and etymology is sequenced across the years.
Want to know more?
Book a free professional learning workshop to find out more about Sound Waves Literacy resources and how they can help you achieve your reading commitment goals.
The professional learning workshops are run by a highly experienced and knowledgeable team of Education Consultants, who are former classroom teachers, curriculum leaders, intervention teachers and principals.
Request a workshop for your school or register for one of our virtual workshops.
References:
*The Simple View of Reading was proposed by Gough and Tunmer in 19861. It was further detailed and tested by Hoover and Gough in 19902 and Hoover and Tunmer in 20183. In 2019 Tunmer and Hoover4 expanded on the Simple View of Reading with their Cognitive Foundations Framework.
- Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6–10.
- Hoover, W.A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing 2, 127–160.
- Hoover, W.A., & Tunmer, W.E. (2018). The Simple View of Reading: Three Assessments of Its Adequacy. Remedial and Special Education, 39, 304–312.
- Tunmer, W.E., & Hoover, W. A. (2019). The cognitive foundations of learning to read: a framework for preventing and remediating reading difficulties. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 24:1, 75–93, DOI: 10.1080/19404158.2019.1614081