At St Mary's Primary School, we are deeply committed to achieving our goal, and our system-wide goal, that 'every child will be a competent reader'. Learning to read is an essential skill that not only enables students to have success at school, but allows them to thrive in society. We want every child to be successful with reading.

The reading scores of Australian children have remained somewhat stagnant for over 40 years. Each year, the data shows that only about 35% of 4th graders are proficient in reading. The research is telling us that while reading is more challenging for some students than others, with evidence-based reading instruction, every typically developing child can become proficient by the end of 3rd grade. 

The staff at St Mary's have been studying the research about how children learn to read and what to do when a child encounters difficulty in learning to read. The research that we have been examining and implementing is labelled the ‘Science of Reading’.

The research demonstrates that reading occurs in a specific way in the brain of all people. It does not occur naturally the way that speech does. The process must be taught. It is a process of building neuro-pathways in the brain that link sounds of speech to written symbols or letters. The strings of letters are attached to meaning, and then those ‘letter strings with meaning’ are stored in the brain’s “letterbox” for later retrieval that is instantaneous and effortless. This process is called orthographic mapping and it is our goal to help our students build a giant ‘letterbox’ of instantly retrievable words. That translates into fluent reading and subsequent comprehension. Guessing at words based on context does not aid in orthographic mapping, phonic decoding does.

A New Path at St Mary's Primary School

If your family has been a part of St Mary's Primary School for some time, you’ll notice some changes in how we teach reading. It’s an exciting time to be in education as we align our instruction with the Science of Reading.

Listed below are some points of research that we are embedding into our teaching practise at St Mary's.

Code Emphasis

This means that grades K-2 especially will focus on acquiring the skills to crack the code of our alphabet to the speech sounds in English. Did you know that there are forty-four speech sounds in English and one hundred and fifty ways to read and spell them? Kids must first learn to decode/sound-out words before they can understand the meaning of the text. Our InitiaLit K-2 programs focus explicitly on teaching our students to crack the code.

Explicit and systematic phonics instruction

Our explicit and systematic phonics instruction continues progressing from simple to complex from the early grades to the middle grades (3-4) and into the senior grades (5-6). Students focus on the study of words with grammar and morphology (learning about word parts such as Greek and Latin roots) as they progress.

Early intervention

If we see any signs that a student is struggling with the foundational skills of reading, we will implement interventions and monitor their progress. The best solution to the problem of reading failure is early identification and intervention. The programs we use at St Mary's for intervention are called MiniLit, MacqLit and the Reading Tutor Program. These intervention programs have been based on research from the Macquarie University that aligns with our pedagogy.

Phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to decode the individual sounds in words by listening, identifying and manipulating those sounds orally. While this skill will be emphasised in grades K-2, we will make sure all students at St Mary's have this necessary skill. Students in the primary grades continue to practise phonemic awareness as they progressively decode more challenging words.

Decodable Readers

Our early readers will be working with decodable texts. These are books or passages that only include words that the students can ‘decode’ (sound-out) according to the skills they have been taught thus far. Our students need practice with the phonics skills they are learning, and these books and passages provide that practice. 

As our students become more proficient at reading they will move to a variety of texts suitable to independent readers.

Assessments

Our students from Kindergarten to Year 6 are assessed using a variety of tools. These include MultiLit, InitaLit and Dibels diagnostic assessments. These nationally normed assessments give us a good indication of how easy or difficult reading is for your child. These tests include Oral Reading Fluency, Letter Naming Fluency and Nonsense Word Reading to find out which areas in the continuum of phonics skills they need help with. They will be given regular spelling tests that show which phonics patterns they are able to apply in their writing and they will also be assessed on Phonemic Awareness so we can make sure they have those crucial foundational skills. As students become proficient word readers, comprehension is a natural outcome. If your child shows a weakness in any area, they will be progress monitored and given interventions to help them become stronger in their area of weakness.

Three-cueing system

This is the practice of teaching kids to identify words by using strategies other than decoding. In the three-cueing system, students are taught that they can identify a word by deciding if it makes sense, if it would structurally/grammatically ‘fit’ in a sentence, or if it looks right rather than closely examining the phonics patterns in the word and sounding it out. This is a practice that the research has indicated that we must abandon. Your child will not be taught to check pictures to identify words or make guesses based on the first letter they see. We want our students to look at every letter in the words, apply phonics knowledge, and sound words out.

Knowledge Building and Vocabulary

Research has indicated that reading comprehension is closely connected to the background knowledge we have on a topic we are reading about and by understanding the vocabulary contained in the text. Our students will have the opportunity to build a broad knowledge base of history, science, and the arts. Students will have access to complex text, often read aloud by their teacher, and in the process, gain more complex vocabulary. The research tells us that building knowledge and vocabulary contributes significantly to their reading comprehension and should be taught beginning in the earliest grades.

Comprehension

The ultimate goal of all reading instruction, is for students to understand what they read. The model of ‘The Simple View of Reading’ demonstrates that reading comprehension occurs only when students have both Decoding/Word Recognition Skills and Language Comprehension skills. Children need the essential skills to get the words off the page as well as knowledge, vocabulary, and a good understanding of how our language works in order to comprehend what they read. We must provide instruction that will help students achieve these goals.

We now know a great deal about how the brain develops as we learn to read and what instructional practices are most effective for all children. We are committed to stopping doing what doesn’t work and be guided by scientific research to ensure that we deliver on the promise of literacy for every St Mary's Primary School student. Again, it’s an exciting time to be in education and we need you, parents, as our partners!