Taking care of Matthew

Some 25 years ago now, Keith Stanovich popularised the concept of Matthew effects in reading. The Matthew Effect takes its name from a passage in the St Matthew Gospel:

“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (Matthew 25:29)

Often translated as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”, this neat analogy clearly struck a chord with reading specialists. Because if you start off by learning to read well, you will indeed get richer and richer; certainly metaphorically, but probably quite literally too.

You will read far more than your less fortunate peers, you will have greater exposure to a wider variety of books, you will learn far more new vocabulary words, you will pass from learning to read to reading to learn much more quickly, and so on. If, on the other hand, you come to school ill-prepared for learning to read, with poor language skills as a result of social disadvantage for example, and you do not latch on to what reading is all about quickly, in that first year of schooling, you are likely to experience continuing failure throughout your educational trajectory. Because literacy underpins everything. In other words the gap between the reading haves and the reading have nots, the literacy rich and the literacy poor, widens over the years creating social division and perpetuating social disadvantage from one generation to the next. Teaching children to read, then, is not just an educational issue; it is a social justice issue.

And it is this concern with social justice that has motivated our work in MultiLit from the outset. Our aim has always been to help those who struggle to learn to read for whatever reason, but particularly those students from socially disadvantaged, culturally diverse and Indigenous backgrounds, as well as those with other special learning needs. Our non-categorical approach to teaching asserts that what all of these children need is effective scientific evidence-based instruction.

It is a source of continuing bewilderment to me, that so many professionals in education continue to resist the idea of direct, explicit and systematic instruction in phonics, while at the same time shedding crocodile tears about the plight of the disadvantaged children struggling in our schools. But they are often the cause of the problem. To use a medical term, the problem is iatrogenic; it is the ‘treatment’ the students are receiving, or rather the lack of effective instruction in schools, that is often the cause of the reading problem. Low-progress readers are frequently simply ‘instructional casualties’.

It is a concern with helping all children to learn to read, regardless of the apparent reason for their difficulties, that has been the driving force behind our work. This is why we launched the Making Up Lost Time In Literacy or MultiLit Initiative in 1995. We were initially concerned with trying to help older low-progress readers in the final years of primary school so that they could stand some chance of making a success of high school. The MultiLit Reading Tutor Program was our solution, a one to one program of direct, explicit and systematic instruction in the basics of reading comprising a focus on teaching word attack skills, teaching a bank of frequently occurring sightwords and providing a supportive context for book reading in which to generalise these newly acquired skills.

We worked with older low-progress readers because this is what we knew; this is what we had been researching for a number of years. But we were always aware that we were the ambulance picking up the instructional casualties while also lobbying for more effective initial reading instruction in schools. As we often said, our aim was to make ourselves redundant! We naively thought that the effort we put into pressing for the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy might bring this about. But we all know what happened as a result of the Inquiry … very little indeed.

Whatever the case with initial reading instruction, and even if scientific evidence-based teaching of reading were to be introduced, there will always be a minority of children who will struggle to learn to read. We currently estimate that we should target the bottom 25% of students as being in need of additional remedial support. Consequently, it makes good sense to intervene early with children who are struggling to learn to read in their first year of schooling, before the Matthew effect becomes entrenched. Whatever reservations one might have about aspects of Reading Recovery (and we have certainly not been bashful about expressing our own reservations), the late Dame Professor Marie Clay deserves enduring credit for her pioneering work on the importance of intervening early with children who are seen still to be struggling in the key skills of learning to read after their first year of schooling.

While we can admire Marie Clay’s pioneering work, it has to be remembered that Reading Recovery has remained virtually unchanged in over thirty years now. An awful lot has happened in that time. We now know far more about how reading works and how it should best be taught. But we always thought that someone else would come up with an alternative program that would ideally be at least as effective but more cost effective than Reading Recovery, predicated as it is on daily one to one tutoring by a highly trained Reading Recovery Teacher. We waited but nothing happened and so, over five years ago now, we started to think about how MultiLit might be adapted to meet the needs of this much younger target group.

The MiniLit Early Literacy Intervention Program is the product of an ongoing program of research and development carried out by our specialist team of academic researchers and special educators. 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. We do not just write and hope! This final published version of MiniLit entailed a major revision of previous experimental versions and represents what we believe to be scientific evidence-based best practice.

MiniLit 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 completely in accord with the recommendations of the various 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.

It 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: Sounds and Words Activities; Text Reading; and Story Book Reading. It is very important that all three of these components are taught daily, as specified in the manual.

But does it work? 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 on all of the measures of reading and related skills with large effect sizes evident.  ‘Gold Standard‘ randomised control trials have also been completed supporting the efficacy of the new MiniLit program.

Who's for coffee?

Several years ago now, my wife, Robyn, and I found to our amazement that we had actually won something in a prize draw. Apparently our name had been pulled out of the hat at the local vet clinic and we had won a brand new, all singing, all dancing, espresso coffee machine. (Considering the vast amount of money we had invested over the years with the vet to keep our dogs in tip top health, it was not a huge return, but decidedly better than nothing at all.)

            With mean-spirited glee, and to the angst of our trendy kids then still living at home, we decided to take it away with us to our weekender in the country (‘Harefield’), so that the ‘young adults’ would not wreck it while we were away.

            It sat on the kitchen bench, still in its box, for several country weekends before I finally decided that I really did have to learn how to drive the thing. To this old fogie, it looked more like something that belonged in a science lab, or in Dr Who’s Tardis, than in a kitchen.

            I examined each part carefully and gratefully located the instructions booklet. This is when the trouble started…  I read the instruction booklet thoroughly. Then I read it again. I was still none the wiser. As a literate adult, I could read and understand every word in the booklet but I still had no idea what to do with the coffee machine.

            The booklet continually referred to ‘the coffee maker’ that, not unreasonably, I took to mean the gadget, the espresso machine. It was only on the third reading that the light went on and it dawned on me that it meant me. I was the coffee maker!

            Now what lessons can we draw from this little tale of domestic confusion, other than that it is never safe to trust a baby boomer with a Generation Y affectation …?

            First, we can reflect on the simple model of reading that posits that reading comprehension is the product of reading accuracy and listening comprehension. It is no use being able to read the words if you do not know what they mean. I thought I knew what was meant by coffee maker in this context but I was wrong. Hence, I could read the booklet but I could not understand what I had read.

            Second, what I really needed was tutoring in coffee making from a barista or at least someone who was more accomplished in the dark arts of coffee preparation than I am. And this sort of tutoring is, of course, one of the things that low-progress readers need to achieve success: effective tutoring by a more accomplished reader.

            Third, I should have stuck with the coffee plunger that works really well for me. (Incidentally, my wife bought about ten coffee plungers on sale, for next to nothing, but we could not give them away to our sophisticated kids!) Now the analogy is not perfect because I like good espresso coffee as much as the next poseur but new and modern, let alone cool and trendy, is not necessarily a good thing. And so it is with reading instruction.

            We have learned to our cost that cool and trendy Whole Language teaching made for far too many low-progress readers. We once knew how to teach reading; we did it quite well and most kids learned how to read reasonably quickly. And then we wilfully adopted an unproven method that proved to be not nearly as effective, but we carried on using it regardless. And we called it progressive education! As my kids would say: “how weird is that?”

            Fourth, it wasn’t my fault! The espresso machine booklet was a lousy instructor: it did not operationally define its terms and present the information in a logical order. Nor did my pathetic attempts at discovery learning serve me any better. I was completely unable to construct my own personal approach to coffee making with this machine.

            With basic skills, like coffee making and reading, we all need initial direct instruction in the early stages. I can construct my own version of a decaf triple shot macchiatto later, in the same way that I’ll subsequently be able to detect the inherent, privileged phallocentic hegemonies in the books I read. But I do actually need to learn how to read first.

            I could go on … I’m on a roll here with the lessons to be learned about reading from my attempts to make espresso coffee. Suffice to say that the espresso machine languished in a kitchen cupboard for quite a time while I continued to use the plunger. Some years later I finally learned how to use it. Now, who’s for coffee …?

How do we ensure that all children learn to read?

            If all children are to learn to read to a good level of proficiency in the first few years of schooling, we need a clear plan to ensure that no child falls through the net. Such a plan must be both effective and cost-effective. It has become increasingly accepted in recent years that a three tier, phased model of reading instruction, known as Response to Intervention (or RtI), is the best means of achieving this.

            The three tier RtI model is predicated upon a first tier of exemplary initial instruction in reading for all students during their first year of schooling (Kindergarten in New South Wales). This first tier of instruction should essentially comprise the best scientific evidence-based instruction. To the layman, this sounds obvious but in many Australian schools a less effective implicit model of reading instruction has held sway for the last few decades. Much of this implicit approach to reading instruction is highly desirable as a bedrock upon which to build effective reading instruction, and it may be enough for a minority of children, but most will need direct, explicit and systematic instruction in the five pillars or ‘five big ideas’ of teaching reading : phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. What is often lacking in initial reading instruction, in particular, is effective, specific instruction in what is known as synthetic phonics; how to relate letters to sounds and to blend letter sounds into words.

            Even when afforded exemplary reading instruction, there will always be some children who take longer than others to catch on. It is important to identify these low-progress readers as early as possible so that they do not fall too far behind their peers as their difficulties compound. Children who do not learn to read in the first few years of schooling are typically destined to a school career of educational failure because reading underpins almost all subsequent learning. A safe strategy is to target students who fall into the bottom twenty five per cent of the population for remedial reading intervention, as soon as their difficulties become apparent. Students’ progress should be checked regularly, in order to provide remedial intervention for those who need it from the beginning of Year One, at the very latest.   

            The RtI model recommends that struggling readers, the low-progress readers who comprise the bottom quartile, should be offered more intensive Tier 2 intervention in small groups of three to four students. Again the instruction provided to these students should be based on what the scientific research evidence has shown to be most effective— essentially the same five big ideas of reading instruction but more intensive and more individualised. In small groups, teachers are able to be more responsive to the specific idiosyncratic needs of the students with whom they are working. Small group instruction can be just as effective as one-to-one instruction for children without severe reading difficulties.

            Even with a solid Tier 2 small group reading program in place, there will still be a very small number of students who ‘fail to thrive’, perhaps about 3-5% of all Year 1 students. These are the students for whom we should reserve Tier 3 one-to-one intensive reading instruction, preferably with a specialist reading teacher with a sound background in special education. The same five big ideas are still critical. What is different, of course, is the intensity of instruction. Having successfully taught the vast majority of Year 1 students the basics of learning to read by Tier 1 and, where necessary, Tier 2 small group teaching, it is a far more manageable proposition to provide these few remaining students with the individual reading support that they will need, for as long as they need it.

            With this three tier Response to Intervention model in place, predicated upon scientific evidence based reading instruction, almost all, if not all, children will become proficient readers. Of course, the RtI model does not stop at the end of Year 1, it is important to monitor reading progress closely for all students, especially for the first three years of schooling. But by employing these procedures rigorously and teaching scientifically, it is not too much to expect all of our children to learn to read.

Note: A longer version of this post is available at: http://tinyurl.com/7cr8ddo

What's wrong with me?

          When I suggested to my daughter that I might write an article entitled ‘what’s wrong with me?’, there was the instant retort: “An article? I would have thought a whole book!” Oh ha ha ha – such a cruel and ready wit in one so young… I refer, of course, to the demise of the simple word ‘me’ in popular usage.

            It seems as if many writers and, particularly, speakers will go to almost any lengths to avoid uttering the simple little M word. It stems, I suspect, from our mothers and others continually correcting us as small children when we said such things as “Me and Jim are going to the footy.” (”No darling, you mean James and I are going to watch the football game.” “Oh, are you coming too then Mum?” and so on …)

            This was then compounded by the demise of formal instruction in English grammar in schools, over several decades now. As a consequence, while many are left with the sure and certain knowledge that the use of me sometimes leads to ‘bad’ English, they have no idea as to when and when not to use it. Far better, then, to try to avoid using it as much as possible, just to be on the safe side … to avoid sounding 'common'.

            As a result, we frequently hear things like “Would you like to join Jim and I for dinner?” from otherwise apparently literate individuals who would never dream of  saying “Would you like to join I for dinner?” (“Yes, me would!”, one might be tempted to reply.)

            Far, far worse, however, is the seemingly ubiquitous overuse of ‘myself’, an otherwise inoffensive little reflexive or emphatic pronoun with ideas above its station. And so we hear people say things like “They made myself and my wife very welcome”, when they mean “my wife and me”. Similarly, we might hear “It has been decided that Hector and myself should represent the university” (“Hector and I”). And yet we would rarely hear anyone say “It has been decided that myself should represent etc ...”

            I know; I know what you are going to say: “But English is a living language that is continually evolving.” And so it is and is continually enriched as a result. But we must take care not to allow our liberal and tolerant sensibilities towards linguistic divergence to perpetuate infelicities that stem from fear and ignorance. It is not hard to teach students that ‘I’ is the subject and ‘me’ the object in a sentence. Why then do we not do so? Could it conceivably be because some teachers struggle with this distinction themselves? Or is myself being uncharitable?

About MiniLit

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.

As Easy as IKEA

            IKEA has to be one of my least favourite shopping venues. Doubtless many excellent homeware products are available there if you are brave enough to enter the IKEA maze. But, frankly, I break out in a cold sweat on the rare occasions I venture inside and vow to take a ball of string next time, so that I’ll be able to find my way out again. I have to admit, however, that I am always fascinated by the Scandiwegian names of the various items on display. Last time I visited, I started to copy some of the words down until I was put off by the nervous looks of fellow shoppers who were clearly not as amused. ‘SNITSIG’ read one sign; STUVA read another; and then came GORM, LEKSVIK, BOLMEN, MAMMUT, BARNSLIG and SNIGLAR, like a troop of dwarves from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

            If it were not for the presence of the items themselves or the smaller explanatory labels in English, I would not know to what these words referred. Nevertheless, I could read them all aloud easily (if not necessarily pronounced totally correctly), as could most young fluent readers who have been taught the alphabetic principle of letter sound correspondence, also known as phonics. In fact, walking through IKEA and reading the signs is a bit like taking the sort of reading test we give young children to find out if they are making good progress in the basics of learning to read.

            Such tests of ‘nonwords’, words that are phonically regular but have no meaning in English like ‘snitsig’ or ‘gorm’, can be very useful. They help to tell us how well children are able to decode unfamiliar words that they have not learned by sight as a result of frequent repetition. If we were to use actual English words that are phonically regular (like ‘tractor’, ‘comment’ or ‘chapter’) we could not be sure that children were using phonic decoding skills; they may have memorised them as whole ‘sight words’ from reading books.

            Some educators get hot under the collar about the use of nonword tests. They argue that reading is about deriving meaning from the written word and since nonwords, by definition, have no meaning, testing nonwords has to be a totally pointless exercise. This argument misses the point about the use of nonword tests. I don’t think anyone would claim that reading is only about accurate decoding using phonics but knowledge of the alphabetic principle is a necessary (although not, of course, sufficient) precondition for reading for meaning. If children do not understand the words they are reading, they may indeed be said to be merely ‘barking at print’. But if they cannot decode the words on the page in the first place, they have no chance of utilising their existing knowledge of word meanings

            By using IKEA type tests of meaningless nonwords, we can help to determine whether children are progressing well in the important precondition of being able to decode words. If they are, when they encounter unfamiliar words in future, they will be able to use their phonic skills to sound out the word, relate it to a word already in their spoken vocabulary and, hence, derive its meaning. Of course, we also need to assess other aspects of a child’s reading skill such as reading fluency and, especially, reading comprehension per se. But it would be a mistake to dismiss nonword tests as irrelevant in the quest for meaning. Something to think about the next time you go past the sniglar and the mammut in your quest to find that elusive IKEA exit.