It is well established from research that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have generally heard millions of fewer words than their more advantaged peers and that there is a significant impact on the life chances of children with poor speech and a less well developed vocabulary.
The Portsmouth education strategy states:
“Some of the most disadvantaged children in Portsmouth start school months behind their peers and the gap can grow through their school years. As a result of Covid-19, the likelihood is that disadvantaged children in Portsmouth will have lost more ground in their language development, exacerbating the situation.”
Hence, language and literacy development is a high priority for our city.
The PEP has embarked on a collaborative programme which is spearheaded by the Early Language and Literacy Development Group and supported by our work with many stakeholders, for example, early years settings and providers, schools, colleges, the University of Portsmouth, the NHS, traded services and cultural partners.
The work of the group embeds shared values and builds on the strong relationships between stakeholders. The current focus of the Early Language and Literacy Development Group is to support the implementation of Priority 1 of the Portsmouth Priority Education Investment Area (PEIA) programme and contribute to the Education Strategy 2023-26, in particular ‘Improving early communication, language and literacy is a key priority for our city which will have a significant impact on all-round achievement and progress throughout all phases of education and beyond’.
We have developed Portsmouth’s Commitment to Early Language Development, explaining how early years settings, families, the council, health service providers and other partners aim to support early language development across the city.
Education Endowment Fund guidance reports
The Education Endowment Foundation has published guidance reports with recommendations for preparing for literacy in early years and primary, through to key stage 1 and key stage 2, and secondary.
Reading
Improving early communication, language and literacy development is a key priority for the city. The ability to read is a key to future success and a door which opens learning into other areas of the curriculum, beyond just the subject of English.
To support all education organisations across the PEP, from the early years to post-16, the PEP Early Language and Literacy Development Group have spearheaded the compilation of a document to provide useful information to educators called ‘A Portsmouth Approach to Reading‘. There are many sections, with links to references and resources. Additionally, other documents and training written by the Educational Psychology service to support the development of the teaching and learning of reading have been developed.
Reading fluency in action
Evidence shows that developing reading fluency from a young age is a sure-fire way to improve academic success across all subject areas. Over the course of 2022-23, schools across the city recorded their reading fluency work for colleagues to demonstrate what reading fluency looks like in practice, alongside an introduction to the teaching method. In addition, pupils and teaching staff reflected on the impact of fluency on their reading, writing and oracy skills.
Destination Reader
24 Portsmouth schools are now using all or part of Hackney Education’s Destination Reader programme. Destination Reader is not a reading scheme but a new approach to teaching reading in KS2. It involves daily sessions incorporating whole class modelling prior to the children applying these skills through partner work and independent reading. Children deepen their understanding of the texts they read through the systematic use of a series of strategies and language stems.
The approach encompasses the key principles of effective reading provision and fully meets the requirements of the National Curriculum by creating deep understanding of texts, developing oracy around reading and increasing breadth of reading. Destination Reader also helps to build a culture of reading for pleasure and purpose. Working with Hackney Education, the Portsmouth Education Partnership has developed regular newsletters, a supportive network group, opportunities to share planning resources and reading texts, and five Destination Reader lead practitioners who are linking with schools and organisations beyond their own.
You can access more information on the Destination Reader page.
Supporting young people at secondary school with literacy difficulties
The Educational Psychology service worked in co-production last year with several secondary schools to understand the barriers to ensuring high literacy levels for all. Focus groups with young people were also held and parents consulted as well as consulting to understand some of the key principles involved in how best to support children with literacy difficulties in our secondary schools.
What follows is guidance from the Educational Psychology team around how best to support young people with literacy difficulties as part of quality first teaching so that every teacher feels able to be a teacher of literacy.
Phonics
Phonics in 5 is a collection of videos made in Portsmouth schools, for Portsmouth teachers, teaching assistants and parents. The videos contain descriptions of terminology and the importance of phonological skill development, along with examples of teaching strategies and children engaging with phonic activities.
To further support colleagues, the PEP Early Language and Literacy Development Group have produced a phonics and spelling mapping tool which sets out a progression of words matched to each of the 44 phonemes that children encounter in different year groups.
Local Portsmouth schools who have trialled this tool have written up their action research in the form of case studies supported by the University of Portsmouth Education Research and Innovation Centre (ERIC).
Portsmouth’s Ethnic Minority Achievement Service (EMAS) has produced some guidance on how to approach phonics with pupils learning English as an additional language, based on research and some useful top tips:
What does the research say?
The trouble with any synthetic phonics scheme is that the approach does not help pupils learn English as an additional language any quicker. In fact, learning letters and sounds in isolation is an abstraction – Pauline Gibbons Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning (2002). The more abstract the concept or task being taught, the less meaningful it is for pupils already struggling to learn in an unfamiliar language. Therefore, teaching phonemes and graphemes in isolation might help children to decode and ‘read’ unfamiliar words, but without any additional context or understanding, the words are meaningless for pupils learning EAL and the language learning is non-existent.
A learner’s first language or languages will have an impact on how quickly and successfully s/he learns to pick up the English phonetic code. Speakers of EAL are often judged by native English speakers to be more fluent when their first language is closely related to English. This is because their pronunciation, knowledge of phonetic sounds, intonation, and stress and rhythm match English more closely. This suggests that when we teach phonics to young children we perhaps need to adopt a suprasegmental approach – Lightbrown and Spada (2006) and take these four areas of pronunciation into consideration, rather than teaching sounds in isolation.
Teaching phonics to pupils learning EAL: A synthetic or embedded approach? REAL Learners (2018)
Phonics is necessary but not sufficient… EAL learners have distinctive needs. First language speakers of English will have heard, used and possibly seen many words they encounter in print by the time they start to learn to read. They generally have a tacit knowledge of how English ‘works’ and are likely to be familiar with conventional ways of selecting and structuring information. EAL learners may not have had similar experiences in English, though they make have in the other language(s). They may have limited knowledge of English grammar, reading comprehension and get held up at the clause or sentence level, even if they know individual words. They may have had limited exposure to different text types in English and have difficulty processing them, especially if practices in their other language(s) are different.
The impact of synthetic phonics on teaching children with English as an additional language to read – NALDIC (2015)
For EAL learners, many words are meaningless. Ward suggests that teachers should only use words within the vocabulary of the children they are teaching. He also points out that teachers forget that some children cannot yet hear or produce some of the sounds. It is therefore unhelpful to be teaching words containing these sounds until these specific issues have been addressed.
Phun with fonicks – Racing to English – YouTube
Bibliography
- Wyse, D. and Bradbury, A (2002) Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading Review of Education BERA
- Ann Hardy (2015) The impact of synthetic phonics on teaching children with English as an additional language to read – A case study NALDIC EAL Matters 1
- REAL Learners (2018) Teaching phonics to pupils learning EAL: A synthetic or embedded approach?
- Gibbons, P (2002) Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning. Heinemann, Portsmouth NH
- Lightbrown, P.M and Spada, N (2006) How languages are learned (third edition). Oxford University
Press, Oxford. - Ward, G (2019) 12 Phun with fonicks – Racing to English (Youtube)
Some top tips
- Use nouns rather than other types of words when selecting words for children to blend and segment. For example, ‘cat’ rather than ‘sat’. Add visual representations to support the children and to reinforce when they are reading the word.
- Provide more images and more opportunities for children to talk with adults. For example, when teaching the grapheme/phoneme correspondence ‘m’ is for ‘mouse’, show the children lots of images of mice and have a discussion about mice with them.
- Pre-teach in a small group or 1:1 to give the children a chance to visit any vocabulary being used in the phonics session. Take time to discuss pictures in decodable reading books. The pace of the phonics session does not allow for this exploration, and it focuses on the mechanics of segmenting and blending.
- Over-teach in a small group or 1:1 to give children an opportunity to process the information from the phonics session. It’s another chance to talk about the vocabulary and explore the grapheme/phoneme correspondence.
- In some languages, hearing specific sounds could be an issue. For example ‘e’ and ‘a’. Providing some addition support for focused teaching and lots of opportunities for repetition will help with this.
- Strategies such as Cued Articulation (Jane Passy) explicitly show children how to form sounds e.g. the shape of their mouth, where their tongue should be. This will help with the enunciation of phonemes, especially if they are not sounds usually made within a child’s home language.
- Provide lots of opportunities for children to experience Phase 1 type activities – rhyming, rhythm, alliteration. This could be incorporated into the daily routine.
- Use flexible groupings. Don’t always put your EAL learners with the bottom group. If they are with this group initially, then make sure you assess them regularly and be prepared for them to move on quickly. Remember EAL learners need good language role models.
- Use your Bilingual Support Assistant (BLA) wisely! If you choose to have them support phonics, they will have more impact supporting the child with their understanding of vocabulary and supporting with the pre-teach and over-teach. The BLAs may not be able to annunciate the sounds exactly themselves and could be poor role models. It would be better to use your BLA to support other areas of the curriculum.
- For older children joining school – CHECK – are they literate in their first language? How was this taught? Have they used phonics before for reading and spelling? If they have, exploit links between languages and point out the differences, e.g. ‘h’ in Spanish.
English leader networks
To support heads of department in secondary schools and English subject leaders in primary schools, supportive local English manager networks have been set up by the Portsmouth Education Partnership. These meet termly as a minimum and enable colleagues to share practice, learn from each other and discuss current initiatives from the government, Ofsted and other official organisations.
English hubs
34 English hubs nationally were selected for their expertise in teaching reading and to support schools in their surrounding area. The hubs promote a love of reading and help schools provide excellent teaching in phonics and early language. They focus on supporting the slowest progress children in Reception and Year 1 and ensure every child is successful, regardless of background, needs or abilities. Our local English Hub is based at Springhill Catholic Primary School, Southampton.
The National Literacy Trust
The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity working with schools and communities to give disadvantaged children the literacy skills to succeed in life. To support teaching, both in the classroom and online, they have a range of free resources for early years, primary and secondary school classes.
School readers
The PEP works with the charitable organisation Schoolreaders which provides primary schools and with free reading volunteers. Currently they have over 2,600 volunteers supporting children each week in schools across the country. They provide this service to schools free of charge, and more than one in six primary schools across England are already registered.
100% of the partner schools in the 2024 survey would recommend Schoolreaders to other schools. “Our children are really enjoying working with your volunteers. They hugely benefit from the extra time with an adult as many of them do not have this time and support at home.” Head Teacher, Partner School
Registration is free and takes a few minutes. Head to the Schoolreaders website to register your school for reading volunteers.