The MiniLit Early Literacy Intervention Program
What is MiniLit?
MiniLit stands for ‘Meeting
Initial Needs In Literacy’ and is an early literacy intervention program. It is
designed to be delivered daily, for one hour, to small groups of up to four Year
1 students who have struggled to make adequate progress in learning to read
during their first year of schooling.
Who developed MiniLit?
MiniLit is the product of an ongoing
program of research and development carried out by a specialist team of academic
researchers and special educators, led by Professor Kevin Wheldall from
Macquarie University. It has been under development for over five years.
A continuing process of refinement by trial and revision was employed until the
program met the stringent efficacy criteria to justify its release to the wider
community. The published version of MiniLit entailed a major revision of previous
experimental versions and represents scientific evidence-based best practice.
What is MiniLit based on?
MiniL it is informed by the
findings of scientific research, carried out over the past 40 years, into how
reading works and how it may best be taught. It is also in accord with the
recommendations of national reports into effective reading instruction that
have emphasised the five key pillars of reading instruction (sometimes known as
the ‘five big ideas’), namely: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary
and comprehension. The relevant research and the findings of the national
inquiries are reviewed in the following two refereed journal articles:
Reynolds, M., Wheldall, K., &
Madelaine, A. (2010). Components of
effective early reading interventions for young struggling readers. Australian
Journal of Learning Difficulties, 19, 35-57.
Reynolds, M., Wheldall, K., &
Madelaine, A. (2011).What recent reviews tell us about the efficacy of reading
interventions for struggling readers in the early years of schooling. International Journal of Disability,
Development and Education, 58, 257-286.
MiniLit is
predicated on ten desiderata drawn from these sources:
1.
Intervention is timely and offered during the
second year of formal schooling, as soon as it is identified that the student
has ongoing difficulties that cannot be addressed by the regular classroom
instruction.
2.
Instruction is delivered in small groups of up
to four students.
3.
The program includes phonemic awareness,
phonics, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension.
4.
The main activities in phonemic awareness relate
to learning to blend and segment and should ideally involve using letters once
students are familiar with some letter-sound relationships.
5.
Phonics is taught through a synthetic approach.
6.
There are planned procedures for students to
build automaticity in word recognition.
7.
Instruction is explicit and systematic.
8.
A well-trained teacher or a paraprofessional
with teacher support delivers instruction.
9.
Sessions are frequent, preferably daily, and
involve at least 20-30 minutes of intensive instruction.
10. Assessment
procedures and tools are available to identify struggling students and to
monitor their progress.
What does MiniLit consist of?
MiniLit consists of 80 carefully
structured lessons (sufficient for at least two terms of instruction) in an
easy to hard sequence and is divided into two levels, Levels 1 and 2, with 40
lessons at each level. There are three main components of each lesson, all of
which should be carried out on each occasion that a MiniLit lesson is taught.
These three main components are:
· Sounds and Words Activities
· Text Reading, and
· Story Book Reading
It is very important that all of these components are taught daily, as specified in the
manual for the program:
MultiLit.
(2011). MiniLit early literacy
intervention program. Sydney: MultiLit Pty Ltd.
How are struggling students identified for participation in
Minilit and how is their progress monitored?
Ideally, young struggling readers
should be identified at the commencement of the second year of formal
schooling. Preliminary benchmarks for early identification have been
established on several literacy measures and are reported in:
Reynolds, M., Wheldall, K., & Madelaine, A. (2011).
Early identification of young
struggling readers: Preliminary benchmarks for intervention for students in
years one and two in schools in New South Wales. Australian Journal of
Learning Difficulties, 20, (in press).
A weekly curriculum-based measure of early reading progress
has also been developed to monitor the progress of struggling readers, reported
in:
Reynolds, M., Wheldall, K. &
Madelaine, A. (2009). Building the WARL: The development of the Wheldall
Assessment of Reading Lists, a curriculum-based measure designed to identify
young struggling readers and monitor their progress. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 14, 89-111.
What is the evidence for the efficacy of MiniLit?
Successive iterations of the
MiniLit program have been continually revised following efficacy trials. Reports
of the early development trials of MiniLit are reported in the following
journal articles:
Reynolds, M.,
Wheldall, K., & Madelaine, A. (2007). Developing
a ramp to reading for at-risk year one students: A preliminary pilot study. Special Education Perspectives, 16, 39-69.
Reynolds, M., Wheldall, K, &
Madelaine, A. (2007). ‘Meeting Initial Needs In Literacy’ (MINILIT): Why we
need it, how it works and the results of pilot studies. Australian Journal of Special Education,
31, 147-158.
Reynolds, M.,
Wheldall, K, & Madelaine, A. (2007). ‘Meeting Initial Needs In Literacy’
(MINILIT): A ramp to MULTILIT for younger low-progress readers. Australian Journal of Learning
Disabilities,12, 67-72.
A recent analysis of the progress of 90 struggling young
readers who had attended MiniLit programs for four days per week for 15 weeks
showed that they had made substantial and statistically significant gains
(p<0.0005) on all of the measures of reading and related skills with large
effect sizes evident (‘d’ ranged from 0.96 to 1.41, with a mean of 1.08). Randomised
control trials have also been completed confirming the efficacy of the program.
Reynolds, M., Wheldall, K., & Madelaine, A. (2010). An experimental
evaluation of the efficacy
of an intervention for young struggling readers in year one. Special Education Perspectives, 19(2),
35-57.
Buckingham, J., Wheldall, K., & Beaman-Wheldall,
R. (submitted for publication). A randomised control trial of a tier two small
group intervention for young struggling readers. Sydney: Macquarie University
Special Education Centre.