Implementing the Science of Reading at Pacific Lutheran College

The Science of Reading is the converging evidence of what matters and what works in literacy instruction, organised around models that describe how and why.

The Science of Reading is a culmination of major research from English-speaking countries that have been consistent in their findings on learning to read and the teaching of reading.

“Learning to read is a complex skill. It requires effective instruction from teachers who are trained to support students from the very beginning. Phonics is crucial but is only part of the solution that would see all students receiving effective literacy instruction. Teachers at Pacific Lutheran College make links between speaking, listening, reading, and writing from the start and this helps our students connect the dots faster.” shares Mrs Sue Zweck, Head of Learning K – 5 at Pacific Lutheran College.

One of the main differences between traditional methods of teaching children to read and the Science of Reading research is teaching decoding strategies. In the early years classroom, it is common to teach children a handful of reading strategies that can be drawn upon when children get stuck on a word. These strategies may include:

• using the pictures for guidance,
• skipping over words and coming back to them
• guessing words based on the context of the text
• using the first letter of the word to help.

The Science of Reading research has found that these strategies may not be needed to help children become fluent readers.

“Reading is not a guessing game. Effective readers use their phonics knowledge to break down words to read.” – Clare Wood, Literacy Specialist.

“That is not to say that our teachers don’t provide helpful strategies to help a child during reading if they get stuck on a word.” Mrs Sue Zweck comments. 

“The use of Decodable Readers is really important in implementing The Science of Reading in our classrooms. Decodable books are simple books that are written for our beginning readers and contain the specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences students have learned. This provides our young learners with the opportunity to use their developing segmenting and blending skills to read words to develop automaticity, or the ability to recognise words quickly and effortlessly and experience independent reading success.”

Decodable books encourage children to sound out words using decoding strategies rather than guessing from pictures or predicting from other cues. They can be introduced once beginning readers have learned some simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences and can blend from left to right.

The Science of Reading tells us that sight words are not stored in our visual memory and therefore we need to integrate sight words into our phonics instruction. Heart Words are an effective, phonics-based approach to teaching sight words.

“Heart Words are high-frequency words that appear most often in print. They are the first words we want to anchor into our students’ memory because they appear so frequently in texts. The ability to automatically retrieve these words allows students to read fluently and successfully.” says Mrs Zweck.

“Pacific students and teachers in Foundation College are enjoying the introduction of this new way of learning literacy. It’s wonderful to be able to access the research and resources to better understand and implement into the students learning journey.”