Research With A Primary Focus

Literacy and literacy learning in general

Literacy and literacy learning can be seen as operating on four levels of practice: decoding, semantic, pragmatic and critical.
(Freebody and Luke, 1990; Luke and Freebody, 1999)

Public discourse often equates literacy learning with decoding, or, at most, reading a text to extract items of literal meaning.  But pragmatic literacy - putting reading to use in a range of situations - is necessary if the learner is to operate with any degree of autonomy in the world.  And critical literacy is essential for a healthy democratic society.  Both can be taught from the early stages of literacy learning in school.

Implication  
Children need to operate effectively at all levels.  Teaching children to decode is not enough.

Engagement is crucial to effective literacy learning
(Guthrie and Wigfield, 2000; Justice at al., 2003; McWilliam, Scarborough and Kim, 2003)

The term engagement is used to denote children's attentiveness and persistence, and their enjoyment.  It is hardly surprising, but also essential, to remember that children learn more effectively when they are engaged in a task.  However there is a very real danger that the teacher's focus on covering a set amount of material or completing a lesson plan may involve a loss in children.s engagement.

Implication 
Engagement is the key to the hugely complex task of literacy learning and student teachers should bear this in mind in all their planning and teaching.

Literacy learning must involve both the large shapes such as instructions and story patterns and meanings, and the small shapes of phonics and spelling patterns.
(Clay, 1972; Goodman and Goodman, 1977; Bussis et al., 1985; Barrs et al., 1989; Pressley, 1998)

Children need to learn to decode the marks on the page and to encode spoken language in letters, and this learning does not come easily to all.  However, they also need to learn about how a story can draw you in, the predictability of certain story patterns, how different types of text work and the kinds of meaning that can be made through them.  They need to learn what literacy can do for them, if they are to invest the amount of effort that learning to read requires of them and if they are to become confident, effective, efficient and engaged readers.

Implication 
A balanced view of literacy teaching and learning - about both the large and the small shapes - is needed from the earliest stages of literacy learning, so that neither aspect is neglected.

English spelling is complex and does not lend itself to an approach to the teaching of early reading based entirely on synthetic phonics.
(Chomsky and Halle, 1968; Sampson, 1985; Strauss and Altwerger, 2007).

Whereas the vast majority of Spanish and Finnish words can be successfully 'sounded out', with one phoneme at a time matched to its corresponding grapheme (letter or group of letters representing one phoneme), the same is not true of such common English words as 'child' and 'call', much less of words such as 'one' and 'two'.  In order to learn to recognise words effectively, readers need to supplement synthetic phonic knowledge with awareness of larger word units, such as syllables and rimes (a vowel and its following consonants - the 'ild' in 'child' and the 'all' in 'call').

Implication 
English spelling is complex, so teaching children to spell should involve rimes and other patterns as well as the representation of individual phonemes.

English spelling tells us about word origin and meaning as well as, or sometimes instead of, pronunciation
(Chomsky and Halle, 1968; Sampson, 1985; Strauss and Altwerger, 2007)

The letters 'ed' on the end of 'strolled', 'jumped' and 'landed' all mark the past tense, but are pronounced in three different ways. Words such as 'duvet' and 'foyer' retain their French spelling.  English spelling is governed as much by meaning and word origin as it is by regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences.

Implication
Children must also be taught that English spelling reflects word meanings and origins as well as pronunciation.

Reading in English involves a dual route to word identification: the straightforward phonic path is complemented by an additional 'orthographic' path, in which readers attend to larger spelling patterns.   Many children already know this implicitly and take notice of larger spelling patterns
(Brown and Deavers, 1999; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005; Castles, 2006)
The relatively recent recognition by psychologists of the dual route to word identification in English is enormously important, since it calls into question approaches to early reading in English based on phonics alone.  However, it leaves undecided the issue of whether approaches to the teaching of decoding should encourage two routes from the very start, or whether some phonic regularities should be established before the larger units are introduced.

Implication 
Children should be encouraged to attend to larger word units as well as individual grapheme/phoneme pairings, and their attention should be drawn to these and other patterns in words they already recognise.

Fluent reading is not a bottom-up, synthetic process in which we first recognise letters, then build them into words, but a highly complex process involving many kinds of knowledge in the initial perception of words.
(Cattell, 1886; Clay, 1972; Rumelhart, 1976; Pressley, 1998; Wolf, 2008)

It has been known for over a hundred years that perception is not a passive process in which images register on the retina as on a photographic plate.  We see what we know.  The brain plays an active part in detecting units in the incoming data, so that a competent reader can 'see' and remember a whole sentence in the same time as she takes to see a few randomly ordered words or letters.  When we encounter a new piece of text, our perception of the words is guided by our expectations of what it might be about.  The more we know about the topic, the less visual information we need to identify the words on the page. 

However, at the same time, we do notice particular letters, and these also prompt ideas about what the words might be.  So we have top-down hypotheses - ideas about words and then letters generated by our overall expectations - and bottom-up hypotheses - ideas about words generated from the letters we have taken note of.  Where they agree, our reading can be smooth.  Where they conflict, we need to look back, with extra attention, checking both the accuracy of our word identification and the sense we have made of the text so far.

Implication 
We all need to be more aware of how we read, if we are to teach children to read fluently and effectively.

Children use fundamentally different processes to recognise words as they make progress in learning to read.
(Bussis et al., 1985; Frith, 1985; Wolf, 2008)

In the early stages of learning to read, which are likely to start long before they encounter formal tuition in school, children recognise words as whole entities, or gestalts.  They tend to pay more attention to their overall shapes, colour and appearance than to the identity and order of their component letters.  They cannot work out new words for themselves, but are dependent on picture cues or being told what the words are.  Children in this logographic phase as Frith terms it, may learn a large sight vocabulary. 

But to read new texts with fluency, children have to enter what Frith calls the alphabetic phase, in which they learn to relate the letters in a printed word systematically to the spoken sounds they represent.  Most children need considerable support and persuasion to enter this phase and progress through it.  It is hard work - particularly for children learning to read in English.  However, as they become fluent, they enter the final or orthographic phase, in which they 'recognise' new words almost automatically, without having to work their way through them, having by now internalised the spelling patterns of our writing system.

Implication 
Close, sequential attention to the letters of a problem word is fine for those in the middle stages of learning to lift the words off the page, but other approaches must precede and prepare for this, and others must follow, if children are to become fluent readers.