The Big 6 of Effective Literacy: Six E-workshops July-September 2022: see recordings and notes below

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Presented by Julie Nugent and the RTLB team

We can now lean on what Science is telling us about best practice in teaching reading. Research has shown that there are six key components that are necessary to support learners to read successfully. Because of the importance of these components, they have become known as the 'Big Six’: oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. These are essential components whether in the early years of schooling or for Tier 2 and Tier 3 options for older, struggling readers.  

This series of 6 x 1 hour, online workshops will explore these elements including assessment and provision across the 3 layers of support for each component.

 

Workshop 1: Phonological Awareness: Links >>>>>>>>>>

Thursday 7th July 3.15-4.15pm - see RECORDING AND NOTES

“Phonological Awareness (PA) is the foundation upon which the other reading skills are built. Simply stated, the definition of phonological awareness ‘is the ability to notice the sound structure in words’ (Kilpatrick, 2015). When students don’t master PA, it can adversely affect their progress in the other essential reading components.” The good news is that phonological awareness is relatively simple to assess and support. We will explore phonological awareness, how to assess it, and a range of activities to incorporate into your practice when teaching learning readers.

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Workshop 2: Phonics - see VIDEO RECORDING AND NOTES

Thursday 28th July 3.15-4.15pm

The English language has just 26 letters, and 44 graphemes—letters or groups of letters— are used to represent our 44 phonemes. Our 44 phonemes are expressed in written language as graphemes. In addition to teaching students the most frequent sound each letter makes, we also need to teach the most common graphemes that represent each sound.  We will explore how to use a structured approach to literacy to assess and teaching phonics. 

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Workshop 3: Fluency - see VIDEO RECORDING AND NOTES

Thursday 11th August 3.15-4.15pm

Accuracy, rate and expression are each important elements that contribute to overall reading comprehension. When a learner's focus is on decoding, their energy is focused on the mechanics of reading. We will explore how to assess fluency and some supportive strategies to enhance our work in this area. 

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Workshop 4: Vocabulary - see VIDEO RECORDING AND NOTES

Thursday 25th August 3.15-4.15pm

 The importance of vocabulary for reading comprehension has been recognised for almost 100 years. We can know a word on many different levels: spoken form, written form, conceptual meaning, role in sentences, association with other words etc. We must build on the rich language experiences our students bring to school to teach them the vocabulary of print.  This workshop explores how we can contribute to students' development in this area to improve their reading comprehension and links to text. 

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Workshop 5: Oral Language - with Sarah Pearse - see VIDEO RECORDING AND NOTES

Thursday 8th September 3.15-4.30pm

 For most students, their Oral Language skills predict how easily they will acquire reading skills. We learn to read within a sea of rich oral language experiences. For many people, this is the link to motivation and engagement with text. We will spend this hour exploring essential components and supportive provision of oral language rich experiences to enhance reading skill development. 

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Workshop 6: Comprehension - see VIDEO RECORDING AND NOTES

Thursday 22nd September 3.15-4.30pm

Deriving meaning from text. While most of our students come to us with a good ability to speak and comprehend oral language, reading comprehension is developed when a student learns concepts, tools and skills to unpack written text. Gough and Tunmer (1989) outline this as an equation called the Simple View of Reading. We will explore how the elements of Decoding and Language Comprehension work together to produce reading comprehension abilities including how to assess these abilities in our students.