Inverting the Legacies of Balanced Literacy: Teaching reading and writing the right way up
Sharing Best Practice Ballarat 2022
It was a pleasure to present this talk in October 2022.
Abstract
How best can teachers and school leaders ensure all the components of reading and writing are taught coherently and effectively, with a proper emphasis on what should be explicit and what can be more embedded?
In this talk, Dr Swain will explore some of the Whole Language hangovers, including the sense that everything with teaching literacy has been upside down. Under Balanced Literacy, certain aspects of reading and writing have been prized as explicit and front and centre (think comprehension strategies). At the same time, other facets like phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, spelling, handwriting and sentence construction have been only taught incidentally and implicitly. This has occurred, ironically, as the research evidence has called for a complete inversion of these priorities
Dr Swain will draw upon real classroom examples and syntheses from the research, including the following principles:
Some reading and writing skills are constrained, and best taught explicitly and often in isolation to reduce working memory demands (e.g., phonemic awareness, word reading, spelling, handwriting, fluency, some sentence level learning).
Other reading and writing skills make more sense to develop in context or alongside other literacy activities (e.g., knowledge building, vocabulary in instruction, writing paragraphs, analysing and creating texts)
It is important to build knowledge in all the academic disciplines because of the role that knowledge plays in facilitating comprehension
Having clear scopes and sequences help to ensure that students build upon their skills each term and each year, and that the sequence of learning is coherent
Teaching comprehension strategies (e.g., finding the main idea, summarising) is useful but only for a small amount of instruction (longest research is for approximately six weeks)
In this way, it is hoped you can explore effective ways to get the emphasis right in your literacy classrooms.
Bio
Dr Nathaniel Swain is a teacher, instructional coach and researcher. He has worked as a lecturer and research fellow, and in recent years, Nathaniel has been supporting schools and teachers to embed research-informed practices. With expertise in language, literacy, instructional practices and cognitive science, Dr Swain is dedicated to empowering teachers to develop “life-changing” language and literacy skills in every student, through effective and engaging teaching. To this end, he has founded a national community of teachers, and registered charity: Think Forward Educators. Dr Swain produces a regular blog for teachers known as the Cognitorium. Nathaniel is passionate about language, knowledge-rich curricula and social justice. Nathaniel currently teaches Foundation at Brandon Park Primary, where he is also a Science of Learning Specialist. He is excited to be joining La Trobe School of Education as Senior Lecturer in January 2023.
Watch my whole presentation here:
Access other blogposts in the COGNITORIUM
You may also be interested in …
This free webinar from THINK FORWARD EDUCATORS on our approach to reading instruction at Brandon Park.
My original “right way up” blog post.
The read2Learn project at THINK FORWARD EDUCATORS
ABOUT me
Dr Nathaniel Swain
I am a Teacher, Instructional Coach, Researcher and Writer. I am passionate about language, literacy and learning, and effective and engaging teaching for all students.
I teach a class of first year foundation students, in a space affectionately known as Dr Swain’s Cognitorium. I also work as Science of Learning Specialist in my school.