The Salzburg Global Seminar convened the session Springboard for Talent: Language Learning and Integration in a Globalized World in Salzburg, Austria, in December 2017. The five-day session resulted in the Salzburg Statement for a Multilingual World, which has since been translated into more than 50 languages. Together, the more than 40 representatives from policy, academia, civil society and business, representing over 25 countries looked specifically at language policy through the lenses of social justice and social cohesion; the relationship between multilingualism and dynamic and entrepreneurial societies; the role of language policy in achieving the fourth Sustainable Development Goal for quality education; and the evolving role of technology in this field.
The report of a groundbreaking, seven-year research trial that was a powerful influence on the British government adopting systematic phonics as the best foundation for teaching children to read at primary school. The study involved dividing around 300 Primary aged children into three groups. One group was taught via the synthetic phonics method, one by a standard analytic phonics programme, and the third by an analytics phonics programme which included systematic phonemic awareness teaching without reference to print. The outcomes of the study proved overwhelmingly that the synthetic phonics approach is more effective than the analytic phonics approach. At the end of the programme, the synthetic phonics-taught group were reading and spelling seven months ahead of their expected level. It has also proven to help close the gender gap with boys’ word reading accelerating. The synthetic phonics method as implemented in the study involved, right from the start of school, children learning a small number of letter sounds and using that knowledge right away to sound and blend the letters to find out how to pronounce unfamiliar words. They then rapidly learnt more letter sounds and continued to use the strategy. The study found that these children had much better reading and phonological awareness skills than those taught either by analytic phonics, or by analytic phonics plus phonological awareness.
Presentation made to a PrimTEd seminar in February 2020 outlines the six units being developed in 2020 which will be made available in Sesotho and IsiZulu.
This is a report on a research survey undertaken in 2019 to establish the present state of teaching Sesotho and isiZulu reading in a home language at the Foundation Phase level at twelve Higher Education Institutions that that offer training to Sesotho and isiZulu student teachers.
Study of what the orthography of isiZulu requires of readers. As an agglutinative language with a conjoined writing system, isiZulu carries meaning not only in separate words, but also in morphemes that cluster together, forming long complex words. Eye tracking data shows that competent adult readers of isiZulu move their eyes across text in saccades (shifts of the point of focus) that are short in comparison with the saccades of efficient reading of English. It also shows that readers of isiZulu fixate on points of text for longer periods than do readers of English. The key argument of the paper is that the orthography of isiZulu has features that require attention by teachers of reading if their learners are to benefit from the advantages that reading in their first language should bring.
Conference presentation on Oral Reading Fluency and its correlation with comprehension among EFAL learners in South Africa
A short history of reading instruction and in particular of the Whole language versus Phonics dispute.
Opinion piece by the Director of the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy on why switching to second-language teaching too early places pupils at a great disadvantage.
A lively discussion of the entrenched rate of illiteracy among Australian children which identifies a failure in the institutions teaching reading educators to accept evidence-based science on the effective teaching of reading which has five main components: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension..
Essentially a curriculum framework for elementary school grades (up to Grade 4). Detailed and useful.
For useful standards for reading specialists and subject advisors
Twelve well thought out standards with details on What teachers know and on What teachers can do for each standard
Presentation on the work of the National Reading Coalition set up by the National Education Collaboration Trust and the Department of Basic Education's Read to Lead campaign
A position paper of the Consolidated Literacy Working Group of PrimTEd on its approach to standards for language and literacy teachers
Responding to evidence from PIRLS 2011 and Reading Recovery monitoring data that New Zealand’s 1999 National Literacy Strategy had failed, the authors look at the factors causing the failure (a constructivist orientation towards literacy education with a lack of attention to phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills, lack of response to differences in literate cultural capital, and policies on the first year of literacy teaching resistant to providing explicit instruction and assessment) and review more effective strategies based on contemporary theory and research.
Springboard for Talent: Language Learning and Integration in a Globalized World
