Episode 15: Q&A on Interventions with Jacinda Vaughan

In the fifteenth episode of The Sounds-Write Podcast, Jacinda Vaughan is back and answering listeners' questions about teaching phonics in intervention settings. She covers a range of topics including making adaptations for English Language Learners, correcting articulation, accent variation and much more. Enjoy!

Some helpful links:
Jacinda's first podcast appearance
Shop the Reading Together Collection in Australia
Shop the Reading Together Collection in the UK
Shop the Reading Together Collection in the US
EEF Teaching Assistant Interventions
Charlotte Wigham
Alternative Pencils
Ann Sullivan's book 'Access to Phonics'
Phonics for SEN
Alison Perry's video on b d confusion
Sounds-Write Symposium 2023 access
Sounds-Write's Facebook
Sounds-Write's Instagram
Sign up to our mailing list

Transcript

Laura: 00:02
Hello and welcome to the Sounds-Write podcast. I'm the host, Laura, and in today's episode, I'm here with Jacinda Vaughan. This is Jacinda's second appearance on the podcast, and this time she's answering listeners' questions about teaching phonics in intervention settings. I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi, Jacinda, welcome back to the podcast.

Jacinda: 00:26
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me again.

Laura: 00:29
Yeah, so last time we recorded a podcast together, I will link to that in the show notes, and it was very well received. People loved it and had lots of questions off the back of it, so we thought we would do a Q & A, which we've not done this kind of format before on the podcast, but we had listeners send in lots of questions for you. So, that's what we'll be doing today.

Jacinda: 00:54
It's very exciting. I'm keen, I've been doing my research, I've been talking to people and just really enjoyed that process. So, I'm really looking forward to answering some questions.

Laura: 01:05
Brilliant. So first question for you is, if people didn't listen to the last one, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background is?

Jacinda: 01:17
Sure. So I've worked in many different settings in the education system, so really, from early years right through to the end of Year 6. I have a background in psychology, so I did a psychology degree and then I went into teaching. I feel very much that my psychology degree has been the thing that gave me a lens on education. So when I'm looking at how I teach and how children learn, my psychology background was what I kind of see the education world through. And through that and becoming a teacher in the early years - and like that Foundation year, Year 1, Year 2, obviously, I've been teaching children to read for a long time and write for a long time - and I discovered structured synthetic phonics and linguistic phonics, which led me to Sounds-Write and I will never look back. So, it led me to teaching and leading Sounds-Write implementation in my school, and through that having this opportunity to be the in-house trainer for Australia and it's been absolutely wonderful.

Laura: 02:28
Great. So we'll go on to the first question that was asked by Miriam Fine on Twitter and she said: 'I'd love to hear ideas for assessing, documenting progress and more about the difference between keep-up versus catch-up interventions'. Bear with, this is a long question. I think you're going to tackle it in parts. 'Also, there is often the perception, at least here in the US, that we need something different for intervention versus classroom instruction. Can you address which aspects of teaching Sounds-Write are the same in intervention versus whole group, and which aspects are different in terms of pace, activities, scaffolds, etc?'

Jacinda: 03:13
It's a big one, but I thought it was absolutely fantastic because it covers such a wide range of topics that within answering those questions, all of them, we're actually answering a lot of other people's questions and as we go through and it kind of pertains to those people's questions, we'll weave them into all of these wonderful topics.

Laura: 03:32
Brilliant. Fire away.

Jacinda: 03:35
So, I think that a good place to start from on Miriam's question, is the difference between keep-up versus catch-up intervention. So, to put these types of categories into perspective, I'm going to use the bell curve to help us. So the bell curve describes the distribution of achievement in a population. So, if I give us an example of how many repetitions it takes for us to recognise or read a word, that we map the distributions of those scores and it generally turns out in a bell shape. So there's a hump in the middle and it tails off at both ends. So if you're thinking about that, the repetitions for, how many repetitions for the average child to learn a word, it's about 25. So there are children, obviously, that there's going to be much less, and then there are children that there's going to be more. And when we're thinking about our children that might have developmental language delays, they may have learning difficulties, processing disorders, whichever the challenges they face, they can be faced with many, many more repetitions. So, having that in mind, when we're thinking about the difference between keep-up intervention and catch-up intervention, if I say keep-up intervention, what that is, is that in that bell curve, which is about 68% of everybody in a general population, is that there are some children that are just below that kind of average repetitions. So, they're working on content that is the same as their cohort. So, they just need more practise on the code that they're currently using in class, but they just need more than 25, they might need 30 or 40 repetitions. When I talk about catch-up interventions, that's where children are experiencing significant delays and require significantly more repetitions of that content or different content below the class level to kind of get closer and closer to their peers. So keep-up is really generally, for the most part, the children just need additional repetition of the same content of the class. But catch-up students, they're actually catching up to their peers, whether it's code knowledge or skills, that's kind of the difference between those two interventions. Miriam, you also said, can you address the aspects of teaching Sounds-Write. Is it the same in intervention versus whole group? And which aspects are different in terms of pace, activities and scaffolding? So I'm going to tackle that bit next. So, for a whole class, we're using all of the Sounds-Write lessons, all of the follow-up lessons, just as you would, it's your general teaching. The scaffolds and the structures, i think we talked about this last time as well. And I know Naomi, in her podcast she talks about the scaffolds that you can use to support in a whole-class setting. I'll just quickly go through a few. We use continuants, so those are sounds that can be stretched without distortion. We can use the word structure to support. We can use CVC versus a CVCC word in a class for our students. Our gestural language is such an incredibly important scaffold. It's very powerful. It's giving children a place to look and to listen when we're teaching. This goes with voice emphasis, so emphasising that target sound like 'maaat'. Our lines, whether we're using lines or taking them away to increase complexity, but lines are really powerful for our students when we're thinking intervention. And leaving either the word or part of the word visible. I always teach with an A4 whiteboard in my hand, so that I can very, very quickly either give the student the word if they need the whole word, or a sound, or a spelling, and I can say 'make yours look like mine', so if they've reversed an < s >. So it's giving them the piece of the puzzle that they need to problem solve, then independently read or write a word. The other couple of strategies that are undervalued, I think, is the strategic placement of students in your classroom. So, strategically placing children that you need to very quickly and effectively error correct with. Keep them close to you, put them somewhere where you can reach them quickly in a timely fashion. And the other one is the order of students. So we don't think about it a lot, but I think that when you're talking about a class with a range of needs, the order that you ask students to respond to you is really important. Some children, when we're thinking about those repetitions for learning a word, having a number of peers being able to say the sounds, read the word, say the sounds, read the word, say the sounds, read the word, means that that next child that's not so confident in that can effectively and confidently respond. And then I always say success breeds success, so they're more willing to risk take, to give it a go. So, that order is really important as well.

Laura: 08:33
Yeah. I recently went into a school, actually one of our training schools in the UK, and we went in together actually, didn't we?

Jacinda: 08:44
Oh, that's right! [laughter]

Laura: 08:46
And it was great to see every child that came up to the board to read a word, they were coming away with success, whether that was through several error corrections, either way, no child was coming up to the front and failing and sitting back down. It was always, you know, ending in success.

Jacinda: 09:08
They were very happy. I really enjoyed that. I guess, to put it in context, I was very, very privileged to be flown to England and to spend some time in London with my UK colleagues. And to see that training school and to watch those children with that teaching with fidelity, using error corrections on the spot really did show that every single child can be successful in every single classroom. It really was an absolute privilege to go into St George's and see how they teach. And I think that their students were achieving well above. So it's like that, in that instruction, the way they instruct their children, the culture that they've built around Sounds-Write, the importance of it, has meant that they've lifted all of those children, so they're all achieving.

Laura: 09:59
Yeah, it was brilliant. It was really nice to see. And I'm hoping they'll come on the podcast.

Jacinda: 10:06
That would be very, very good. Okay, so back to our thing. So in whole-class, we can differentiate our materials. So if you're thinking about your dictations, some people use cloze dictations where they've pre-organised. So, organisation really is the key when it comes to differentiated materials. They use close for dictations. Or if you're doing Seek the Sound, you can have buddies that sit with a child who might need just a little bit of extra scaffolding. That works really well in a whole-class setting. But I think something when you're thinking about materials and organisation is, the new Portal has really opened up a world of resources that have always existed and they've always been built on. So, that's really quite incredible. But I think that the sustainability of supporting a range of students. So if you're doing a Lesson 9, which is Seek the Sound and your children are Year 2 and you're doing Unit 27 /ae/, which is More Spellings, it's quite complex. You can have a student, when they go away, to independently do that work, be using Unit 1, which is just four spellings of /ae/. So, they're still on the same code, but the complexity has just been adapted just a little bit. But your Portal is a great resource to very quickly access that type of scaffolding rather than having to hunt around the school for the book. So, that's one thing that I found really important. If we look at intervention and the things that are the same and the things that are different. I look at, the thing that is the same, is that you're using all of the lessons and not avoiding some lessons because you think your children can't do it. We do build up to lessons, but making sure that you're using all of the lessons and getting a really good mix for a spicy kind of combination of lessons keeps it interesting, doesn't it? And using the follow-up lessons and making sure you haven't forgotten. But I think that's the same. That's the same between whole-class and intervention. What's different is the dosage of the types of lessons that you might use with your students because of their needs. So you've done your teacher observation, you've done a range of screening activities, like using the Sounds-Write diagnostic, quizzes, dictations, you've listened to them reading decodable text. You've got a whole heap of information you've collected. What's different is that they may need more sound swapping, so working on phoneme manipulation, blending, segmenting. They may need more Lesson 1, which is building words at the sound level, really cementing those sound-spelling correspondences. So, the lesson's dosage changes, but the lessons themselves don't change. I think what's different might be the way that you group your students. So it could be a unit, a code unit, but it could be focusing on the skill. So some children really need help with blending and segmenting at different phoneme word structure levels. Another difference is the size of the group. Obviously in a whole-class you've got your whole class, could be 20 to 30 children. However, in an intervention setting we're looking at potentially one-to-one. In a Tier 2 intervention setting there's research around, one-as-to-four being quite effective, so you can have four children. And I think that what's the same is your responsive scaffolding that we talked about before. So, you're teaching, you're still doing the differentiation but you're doing it at a closer quarter. So it's really, really highly targeted. You can really zoom in at the point of need. So it's still the same, however, in that smaller group you really can have very quick fire error corrections. You can really get children successful and reading and writing very quickly, so, it's amplified because it's in a smaller group. The other thing that I feel strongly about is that when you think about intervention, you're working with children with the highest needs. So, whether that's they just need a little bit of extra, but a lot of the time they need quite a bit more attention and strong skills on the person that's working with them. They need to be able to error correct, they need to be able to adjust and adapt their teaching. So, while ideally that would be a Sounds-Write trained teacher, we've got lots of classroom support assistants that support in schools and they're a valuable resource. I just think it's super important that there is research around it. So, the Educational Endowment Foundation, they did some guidance around using teaching assistants to run our intervention groups and they said they're absolutely valuable and they are seeing two to three months of extra progress for that student, through working in that way. But the key component to that is being overseen by an experienced teacher. So they've got those timely kind of conversations happening, so they can problem solve when they've come up against a challenge for a student, so they've got those dynamic kind of professional conversations. What they did find, is that when it was left as more of a, they guide themselves, and they're just coming in and doing reading or small Sounds-Write lessons, that sometimes it could actually have a negative impact. So, I think that if you're going to use classroom support assistants, it's absolutely fantastic. Just remember that having an oversight from an experienced teacher is going to have the biggest impact for the students with the highest needs. That's my main advice when we're working with our students.

Laura: 15:50
And of course, teaching assistants must be trained in the same programme that's being used in the classroom. And actually, we have, especially in the UK, we have lots of courses that are primarily teaching assistants because they're the ones who are doing interventions. They're the real stars of the show in some schools.

Jacinda: 16:11
They are. They're the feet on the ground and that frontline support that can be there when the needs shown. And so I think, the teachers can do their observations and then having that relationship with our teaching assistants, to be able to give them the opportunity to provide those extra repetitions that we were talking about as quickly as possible, because it decreases the amount of support that's required later on. And our teaching assistants are absolute gold and very valuable resources. So getting them trained, but making sure that they're supported so that they can support your kids is biggest bang for your buck.

Laura: 16:54
Before we continue, I just want to tell our listeners about a brand new series of decodable readers that we've been working on called the 'Reading Together' collection. I'm mentioning it in this episode because they'll be perfect for tutors to use one-to-one, or in small groups with students, or even to send home. Each book in the 'Reading Together' collection contains text for the adult to read and text for a student to read, meaning that children are exposed to rich vocabulary and narrative whilst practising the skills and sounds taught in the Initial Code. We've also included some questions to help with students oral language development and activities at the back of the book. The series covers Units 1 to 7 of the Initial Code and it's about an alien called 'Sim' and his adventures on Earth and his home planet. It's now available to buy in Australia, the UK and the US directly from our website. I'll put the link in the show notes to this episode. So, we're going to, I think, come back to the rest of Miriam's question in a minute. But there was another question that fits very nicely here, and that was Nicole on Facebook asked: 'When delivering Sounds-Write interventions in the catch-up setting, do you still follow the same mastery document? That is, be able to read and write current code, read connected text, previous code and write code two to three units below?' So that's, for a little bit of context, if anyone doesn't know, we kind of give advice that you should be studying the current module and doing reading in connected text for two to three units behind that.

Jacinda: 18:39
Yeah, absolutely. So, you are correct, even when it's an intervention. Because we're still following the scope and sequence, but at a much slower and more methodical rate in that catch-up intervention, the mastery document absolutely holds. So you're still following your formative assessment, which means that, for example, if you're working at a Unit 8 in the Initial Code, then that mastery document says, okay, well, then you should be reading connected text, like decodable or controlled text, one or more units behind where you're currently working. And then those dictations, so those scaffolded guided writing of sentences, are two to three units back. So the mastery document holds because the scope and sequence is the same. It's just you're moving it at a slower pace.

Laura: 19:29
Excellent. So, going back to Miriam's question, then her next bit was that she would love to hear ideas for assessing and documenting progress.

Jacinda: 19:42
That's always a hot topic. It's something that's a conversation in every meeting that I have, and it's a hot topic because it's so important. Sounds-Write has always had an incredibly strong focus on formative assessment. So, teachers knowledge of their students is front and foremost in knowing when we're moving forward. We collect data as we go through a lesson. So it's knowing, I would say you can tell when you're going through a lesson, the number of error corrections that you might need to make. If you're error correcting regularly, it means your students are still in that learning pit where they're learning to read and recognise and write words at the word level. But, if they're responding to you and you're not having to error correct very often, they're starting to get that automaticity, that fluency of reading, that means that's quite comfortable. Which is, the second part of that is, that if you're error correcting a little bit, then they probably still need time. It's also, how long does it take them to say the sounds and read the word, or are they just reading the word? So if they're just reading the word, it shows you that they've got that automaticity and the flow in their recall. So, that's kind of like across your lesson, you're paying attention to those types of things. But if you want written recording, that's where your quizzing is coming in, where you are looking at quizzing units that you've previously taught. So obviously you're still reviewing them, but going back and doing just an oral quiz, a really quick snapshot quiz, gives you an idea of whether children can recall things that you've taught them in the past, with accuracy. We have dictations which are taking that into that sentence level, which requires quite a lot of cognitive load there, because we're not just working at a word level, we're putting it into the context of a sentence. And I think we said before, is that we're looking at two to three units prior. So, you're looking at so many different things when you use a dictation, and you're analysing, can they spell words accurately within the sentence in a dictation? Or, have they got their capital letters? Have they got the full stops? So, you can analyse a dictation for many, many different levels. But at a Sounds-Write level, when we're working at a sentence level, it requires more so, if they've got accuracy there, you know that that's embedded now. We have other assessments. We've got our Sounds-Write diagnostic assessment, that's not really used with a whole class to keep a track of our students. It's more in an intervention setting and you're still not using it all the time in an intervention setting. You might do it at the start of the year, the middle of the year, and the end of the year, but it's not designed to be used that way. We have other tests that you can use, the Young's Parallel Spelling Test. And that one's a really good one because it's non-referenced. It means that you can track a cohort. Again, you're not doing it all the time, it's the start of the year and the end of the year. You're getting data to show growth across a year and it will give you a spelling age. And obviously your spelling age is much deeper than your reading age because it requires recall memory, it's not using a prompt like a word, so that's really useful to track. I find the other thing that I use quite regularly to do my monitoring and tracking is if you think about your connected text and decodable texts, yes, they're a unit behind where you're at. But think about everything that goes into reading. Again, like, dictation it's a very complex skill. So if they can fluently read the code below where you're teaching, you can see that they're tracking and their progress is continuing to go forward, so you can track the code that they're reading fluently in a decodable text.

Laura: 23:37
Yeah, I loved when I recorded the podcast episode with Anna Comas-Quinn, who's the head of research at Sounds-Write. I'd never thought about the fact that testing writing and dictation is actually a much better test than reading because it's so much harder. And yeah, it requires that recall memory. So yeah, I think that's a great point.

Jacinda: 24:02
Yeah. So I guess to finish off with that part, is that I just wanted to make it really clear, and I know that we did this last time when we were talking, but making it clear that when you've got your whole-class Sounds-Write teaching, you've got your intervention teaching, but they're not mutually exclusive. That you've got all students, and I mean all students participating in that whole-class teaching. And then on top of that, you've got your intervention, remembering they're needing more repetitions of either the content that's happening in the classroom or they're ever creeping towards their cohorts knowledge. And one thing here is that Robert Merton popularised the term the Matthew Effect, which comes from the gospel reading of Matthew 13:12. It refers to cumulative advantage. So, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So Keith Stanovich, he describes in his research that early or new readers, when they're acquiring the skill of reading, early success in reading breeds continued success. So they continue to grow, they feel more successful, so they can continue to be more successful. But children that struggle to read and get those first initial skills under their belts, they will continue to struggle. And I just think it's important that, if our children aren't exposed to the code that their cohort is being taught, then they'll never catch up to their peers. And I found that I've been an intervention teacher for a really long time, but I also teach in those classrooms in my school. So I'll go in and I'll teach a whole-class lesson and I have my children that I have in intervention in front of me. And time after time they surprise you because they're not a blank slate. They are quite capable, they come to you with quite a lot. So, holding them to high expectations like you do everybody else, they'll always rise to that level. And I've always been surprised, I'm like, 'Oh, okay, that's fantastic', because they're not blank slates, they're able to engage, and through differentiation, they've been really excited to do that. So, yeah, let's have high expectations for everyone and make sure that they're part of the whole-class teaching and they get that additional practice that they need.

Laura: 26:27
And I think, this is the final part of Miriam's question. So, 'There's often the perception, at least here in the US,' she says, because she's from the US, 'that we need something different for intervention versus classroom instruction'. This is a great question, I think, and we get asked this quite a lot I see, you know, like on our Facebook page and things like that. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to hearing your answer to this.

Jacinda: 26:59
I completely agree with you. It's something that is often discussed, is that do these children need something different, a different programme, a different approach? And the answer is no. In Sounds-Write's case, that is a speech-to-print approach, so, thinking about phonics and being able to decode words, it's deeply rooted in the evidence base. So, it is the best way that students learn to read and spell and it's fully backed by a range of disciplines, so in cognitive psychology, in neuroimaging, speech and language research and educational research, is that, when students are taught with a phonics approach in those first years of learning how to read, it's more effective. So, when we think about the way that Sounds-Write is structured, that they need more of that same approach, and we were talking about that bell curve and the number of repetitions. It's not something different, it's actually just more of that same pedagogy, that same approach to phonics and lifting those sounds off the page to decode them and read words. If you're interested in that type of thing and digging a bit deeper, you might like to listen to podcasts or watch YouTube things from Stanislas Dehaene. Pamela Snow has some incredible podcasts that are really easy to listen to for educators and Mark Seidenberg . We've got our access to our symposium still, and there's a lot of incredible people that spoke on the symposium. So if you're interested in the symposium, look for Sounds-Write symposium, and I believe the recordings are still accessible for people if they're interested. So there's lots of information. I guess, because Sounds-Write is based in that phonics research, that, you can think of intervention as a dosage issue, as we were talking about before, is that they need more of particular things that are within that Sounds-Write approach. And highly responsive teaching is required, and following the data and just knowing our students. I think a last note here is that, implementing Sounds-Write in my school, I did that over a number of years. And what I've seen is that if you take a whole-school approach to Sounds-Write and you have a really strong focus on the fidelity to the lesson, so, teaching them the way that they've been designed to be taught, not missing out any of the steps, especially the writing component, that you've got really robust planning of revision and consolidation components, and your intervention is implemented as soon as the teacher identifies that a student is falling behind, that the gaps don't appear or they're smaller. And it requires way less resources to support a child to become proficient at their cohorts level. So I think those are really important things to remember when it comes to implementing Sounds-Write as an intervention.

 Laura: 29:48
Yeah, that's great. I think something that I would add to that, is if we think about The Simple View of Reading view of reading, some children might have much more of an issue with decoding and some children might have much more of an issue with oral language. And so these interventions, phonics, evidence-based interventions are brilliant for tackling the decoding side. But actually, some children, it's really important to identify which, of the two, students are having trouble with, so that you can really target the interventions to meet those needs.

Jacinda: 30:33
Absolutely.

Laura: 30:36
Okay, so on to the next question. Alison Perry on Instagram asks, 'How can Sounds-Write be used or adapted for students with special needs?'

Jacinda: 30:47
I love that it was Alison Perry. So I'm very blessed to work very closely with Alison. And after she posed this question, she did some of her own digging. And we worked together to interview a lovely lady named Charlotte Wigham. And she's a speech pathologist and a Sounds-Write practitioner, and she predominantly works with Tier 3+ students, so students with very extensive needs. And she uses Sounds-Write to work with these students, to teach them how to communicate, which I think is just amazing. So Alison found this lady and we interviewed her, and it was an absolute privilege. She had such passion and knowledge. It was really quite incredible. She has a whole heap of tools that she uses to support students with extensive needs in that Sounds-Write space. And I'll be able to give you a couple of links for the bottom of the podcast. But I think, a couple of the things that really stood out to me, so I've just got two main things. She talked about alternative pencils. And I'd not heard the term before, but didn't realise that I was actually using alternative pencils in some of the adjustments that I've made. And she talked about low-tech and high-tech adjustments. So a low-tech adjustment might be using magnetic letters. So what happens with those, is children with poor motor skills are able to move them much, much better. I've been very creative with my magnetic letters because not all of them come with two- or three-letter spellings of sound. So, me and Superglue got friendly and my magnetic letters have multiple letters stuck together so that it's the right spelling for the sound. So, that's a low-tech version of an adjustment, and it's quite effective for children with poor dexterity. A more high-tech version might be, it's kind of medium-tech, so iPad apps. So, you've got the Sounds-Write app. We've got that for students, they can use that to build words and to read and write words. But then a very high-tech one might be the use of eye gaze systems, where a student may be using their eyes to look in a particular quadrant of a screen to be able to communicate which sound they would like to be recorded. So that's quite high-tech, but that's the level that she is using with these extensive need students, which I think is just wonderful. The other thing that she pointed out, which I thought was very important for all classroom teachers, for whether it's your run of the mill kids, the kids that are learning Sounds-Write in an effective and average way, but also when you're thinking about those students who need a little bit more in your classroom. She said that the power of gestures and lines were highly important for students with extensive needs. So taking that into consideration, that shows you the impact that those two very simple things that we can do can have for your students in your classroom, even if you don't have these extensive students in your classroom. Yeah, so she was absolutely fantastic. And I think another person that you can look at when you're doing research for students with more extensive needs is Ann Sullivan. And she has a book called Access to Phonics: Practical Access Strategies to Teach Children with Complex Needs of All Ages. So, that book has a really good range of strategies that you might be able to implement within your Sounds-Write lessons. She also has some demonstration lessons with students with extensive needs on YouTube, so, if you look up Ann Sullivan. Yeah, so it was an interesting opportunity to really dig deeper and think harder about those other students that we have in our classrooms. And Alison, she did answer her own question, which I thought was lovely. [laughter]

Laura: 34:46
Yeah. And actually, Ann Sullivan, she did a talk at our symposium. She always says that Sounds-Write, and her, I think it's called Phonics for SEN, go hand in hand together. I love watching her kind of classroom demonstration or her lesson demonstrations. They're really amazing to see how you can make all these adaptations to fit students needs. It's really cool.

Jacinda: 35:15
Yeah, so that was really interesting, and I really enjoyed the process. I think there was another element that I've used and I think is worth mentioning. So, when you think about sensory processing and attention challenges that children might experience, I think harnessing the power of multi-sensory learning is really important. So, that's what Sounds-Write I think does very, very well, is that because it's this dance between the teacher and the student, and they're moving things, they're saying the sounds, they're reading the word, they're saying the sounds, they're writing the word, there's this call and response, and there's moving, there's a lot of movement in there. I think that harnessing that multisensory nature of Sounds-Write is very, very supportive with children who have sensory processing and who have those attentional difficulties. Building in brain breaks is useful for attentional difficulties. So they need things to be short, sharp, and shiny. So, you do a lesson, you have the little brain break, and whether that brain break is possibly even just switching to another Sounds-Write lesson and keeping it spicy, keeping it interesting. And I think that the fluency of you teaching the lessons increases the engagement and responsiveness, that pace of the lesson. And using those adaptations of the lesson. So, flipping the page, not just using the front part of the page, will keep that engagement high when it's that attentional focus that you're looking for.

Laura: 36:47
Okay, so the next question is from Makata. I hope I'm saying your name right, on Facebook, asked: 'I'd be curious to hear Jacinda talk about how Sounds-Write works for English Language learners.'

Jacinda: 37:01
So, Sounds-Write has been great for the students that I've had. Now, I've come from a school where it doesn't have a high number of English as second language learners, but I have had a number of students that do have English as their second language, and it's been very, very useful. So, again, I went and phoned some friends and had really lovely conversations just to see whether the things that I've been doing are the most useful and practical for a wide range of English learners. And I had a chat with Biljana, who's one of our new Australian in-house trainers, so she's welcome to the team and we had a lovely trip together. And I spoke to a colleague named Lisa Rippon, who has a great deal of experience in this area. And thankfully, all of the things that I've been doing with my students are the things that they add on to their teaching with children with English as second language. And just before, you said The Simple View of Reading view of reading, and the two components to that are decoding, so lifting the words off the page, that's one part of the equation, and the other one is language comprehension. So Sounds-Write in particular is really targeting that. Lifting the words off the page, teaching students the logic of our alphabetic code and how it works, focusing on precise pronunciation and helping them. Because we take for granted that we can pronounce all the sounds in the English language. Students that have come from a different language background may not have those. So, helping them to accurately pronounce those sounds, or as close as we can get them, so that they are mapping those sounds to the words. So what we did talk about that was exactly the same, was that when we're teaching a word, we're situating it in a contextual sentence. And you can do that really quite simply with the scripts. We can say: These are all the sounds that you need to build the word 'great'. Say the sounds, let's build 'great', like, 'I'm having a great day'. And then they say the sounds and they build the word 'great'. So, we are situating it within a sentence that gives them context and they go 'Oh, right.' As they're thinking, they understand the meaning. The other thing that you can do, is that you use a relevant picture. So you're dual coding, so you've got two forms of information. So the word might be 'mat', 'sit', 'run', 'jump', 'swim', 'top', but you're matching it with a picture, so it's giving the meaning to what the word is, so it's giving it a little bit more depth and something else for the brain to hook onto. Developing that vocabulary. So you're supporting your English as second language students to build a library of English words and their pronunciations. But, not forgetting that there's a whole different part of that equation, like you were saying before, is the language comprehension component and that's part of a wider language programme. So, Sounds-Write fits nicely, in being able to lift words off the page, understand the alphabetic code, and it sits within a wider understanding the syntax of language and the deeper meanings of words. Yeah, so Sounds-Write is absolutely a powerful part of a English as second language programme. However, it's just one of those parts of The Simple View of Reading view of reading. It needs to be backed up with the language comprehension.

Laura: 40:17
Yeah. And I think possibly even more so, that language comprehension part is going to be really important for those children, to level the playing field with other students. Because they might not speak English at home and so they're probably not getting lots of that more complex language, hearing that from their parents and things like that. So they'll need to get that from school.

Jacinda: 40:43
Yes. And they definitely do that on the playground. They have a lovely time. But, yeah, definitely in our classroom settings and the books that we read and rich conversations, that's where we're getting that understanding of the meaning of all the words that we try to read.

Laura:  41:01
Okay, so Sue on Facebook asked: 'In an intervention setting, how can you help with the < b > < d > confusion?'

Jacinda: 41:10
So, way back in the day, when they were deciding the symbols that represented those sounds, the < b > < d > < p > and < q >, they didn't take mirror invariance into account. So what mirror invariance is, is the brain's ability to see a face or an object from any angle and still recognise it. Or a chair. A chair is a chair, is a chair, is a chair. It's from any angle, it's still a chair. So < b > < d > < p > and < q >, they're just rotations and flips of the same shape. So the brain is designed to see something from any angle. And when they chose those letters, those letter symbols, to represent the sounds, they didn't really know about that. I wish they'd chosen something slightly different. Children need a great deal of exposure to < b >'s and < d >'s within the context of a word. So the best way to help a child settle the directionality of those < b >'s and < d >'s is to really teach them in the context of whole words. So, lots of word building and word reading and word writing. Another thing that's really helpful is, when they're writing, focusing on the letter formation, because it's so different for those < b >'s and those < d >'s. When they're doing their letter formation, it's helping secure the directionality of those letters, but definitely always within the context of a word. That's one of my main things. Also, it's completely developmentally appropriate for children, those first couple of years of schooling. So a lot of people see < b > and < d > confusions in that first year, particularly as a sign of maybe having a learning difficulty. It isn't always a sign of that. It's because that mirroring variance is causing them some challenges. They haven't had enough exposure, enough practise to words with those letter formations in them. So, it is still developmentally appropriate. And I think I said before is that lesson one, which is that word building, so, cementing the sound-spelling correspondences within the context of a word, reading it and writing it. The other one is our sound swap. So when you're doing a sound swap, what you're doing is, if you write a sound swap and you're swapping in and out those < b >'s and those < d >'s in the context of words, you're just giving more opportunities to read the word and see it in its correct position. And I think there's also another... Let's bring up Alison Perry. [Laughter] She's just a wealth of knowledge. She's got so many gems of wisdom when it comes to Sounds-Write. And I've got a couple of them still to come, because she's such a font of knowledge. She's got a fantastic video that can be referenced. I don't know whether you've got the link, but she does a talk about the shape of the mouth and < b >'s and < d >'s and things like that. So, it's also another reference that you can have a look at when you're thinking about < b > and < d > confusion. I think this kind of feeds in a way, so < b > and < d >, it's a visual confusion, but auditory discrimination is also one of the confusions. And I think Annette from Facebook...?

Laura: 44:16
Yeah. So the next question was going to be... And I think we're coming up to an hour, so let's do a bit of a rapid fire on our final few questions. So, Annette said that she has a student who gets confused between the sounds /f/ and /th/. So, saying 'free' for the number 'three'. So she'd love some strategies to kind of help correct that.

Jacinda: 44:51
Okay. So I'd suggest - and I'm sure she is already doing it - so, I would suggest through gentle and consistent reflections of the correct sound and then asking them to repeat it, will help the student fade those errors. So I found that, if the student said /f/ /r/ /ee/ 'free' instead of /th/ /r/ /ee/, I would say the /th/ /r/ /ee/ and I'd say: Your turn. And then they would correct it by saying the same thing. Then I would make sure that when they're saying the sounds, to write any words with those sounds in it, that they go slowly, and they are saying the right sound as they are writing it down. So that's my main strategy, is making sure you're reflecting the correction, getting them to reflect the correction, and then when they're saying the sounds, to write the word, that they are saying it correctly. And if they're not, asking them to do it again correctly because it's just gentle correction and being consistent with that, over time, it fades.

Laura: 45:49
Excellent. Next one. Wendy on Facebook said, 'Any tips for how to approach poor articulation?' So saying, for example, 'puh' instead of /p/ and especially for middle school or older students. Who, she wants to support their self esteem, she doesn't want to sort of baby them in the way that she corrects this.

Jacinda: 46:16
Yeah. So I think Wendy, it's a great question and I think you're absolutely correct. When you've got a middle schooler and they're a little bit older, we definitely want to protect their self esteem and not treat them like you might treat a foundation student, which is the baby stuff. Is having open conversations with the student and explaining to them why precise pronunciation is so important and how it affects their reading fluency and their spelling accuracy. I think they're quite capable of having those grown up conversations and understanding and then self-correcting and being a part of that conversation rather than us correcting them. Giving them the 'why' helps for older students.

Laura: 47:03
Yeah, and something we talked about in Donna's episode was that we've seen a few schools kind of do videos, where each child says a different sound and they can kind of go back and reflect on that correct pronunciation. And that's definitely something that I think you could do as well with older students. You know, sort of set them the task of going home and making a video of themselves saying the sounds precisely.

Jacinda: 47:31
Yeah. Taking ownership.

Laura: 47:34
Yeah. Okay, next one. Jocelyn on Facebook says; 'When teaching words that end in < e > double < l >, like 'bell', and also < e > < l >. In her New Zealand accent, the < e > sounds like an /a/, as in 'apple'. And some of her intervention students get frustrated and confused. So, how can she minimise that frustration? I think you'll have lots of experience of this Jacinda.

Jacinda: 48:01
[Laughter] Kia ora, Jocelyn. I completely hear you. So, I am from Aotearoa. And I think that when we're considering words that have a vowel with an < l > following it, like 'bell', 'tell', 'yell', that you take into consideration something that's called co-articulation, another conversation I had with Alison. She's a speech pathologist as well as an experienced Sounds-Write trainer. Co-articulation refers to the realisation of speech sounds when they're influenced by their neighbouring sounds when we're speaking. So, we speak in connected speech, so there aren't segmented sounds. We do that, when we're spelling. And the vowel sound like in 'bell', you've got an open mouth for the /e/ and then your tongue has to very quickly go up to the top of the roof of your mouth, which changes when you're speaking in a connected speech, the vowel sound. So it's the /l/'s fault. It's actually not our accent. But Alison also brought out that even in the Australian accent, if we think about the /a/ sound, like in 'mat' versus the word 'man', because the /n/ is a nasal sound, it has an impact on the /a/. So it's accent dependent and it's the way that natural speech flows, and the sound before it is having an impact on the following sound. Yeah. So, that's why I think it's really important that we emphasise our spelling voice when we're working with students, especially in that intervention setting. And I know, as a Kiwi, that I have had to actually work very, very hard. So, I slow myself down and make a conscious effort. Because I know my mouth feels different from when I speak naturally in my Kiwi accent, as when I'm teaching in my group of Australian children. So I think my advice there would be, I understand, but I have slowed down. I don't rush and I'm very precise, especially with those /e/ and /a/, because for us, they get quite squished. Yeah. So slow down, and word building probably will help you out there, too.

Laura: 50:24
Yeah. And as we said, we talked earlier about our visit to St George's. We watched a lesson from a Northern Irish teacher teaching in London and she kind of was adapting the way that she says certain words in Sounds-Write lessons to match the accent of the students in London, and she did it really smoothly. And, yeah, she was a brilliant example of that, watching that.

Jacinda: 50:54
She was, she was! And yeah, so if she can do it with a Northern Irish accent, we can slow ourselves down.

Laura: 51:03
Okay, I think this is the final question. Shereen on Facebook, says: 'I'm working with someone who is a Gestalt language processor and is ASD. Would Sounds-Write be suitable for this child? they're in need of literacy support.'

Jacinda: 51:21
So, without knowing student, it's quite difficult to know. So, I've worked successfully with a really wide range of students and not found a student that hasn't thrived with a Sounds-Write approach so far. I think in your case, with the Gestalt language processing, the framework of the lessons will provide a really great support for the student, because they've got a lot of structure and routine. And what I found, particularly with students with ASD, is that the consistency of the rules or the game, the lesson, that they can connect with that. The language is consistent, the routine is consistent, so they make stronger connections because it's predictable. And when you're working with students, that you're working within their comfort zone, because it decreases the amount of anxiety that is around learning a new literacy. So I would absolutely be using it, but taking a very gentle, responsive approach to how you work with those children.

Laura: 52:25
Excellent. Well, that is the end of our questions. So, thank you so much, Jacinda, for this. I feel so lucky to have colleagues like you, who are just such a wealth of information. So, thank you so much!

Jacinda: 52:42
Thank you. It was an absolute pleasure to dig into these questions, and to do a little bit of research and talk to all the wonderful people that I did get to talk to while I was researching and making sure I was giving as much information as possible. But it was wonderful. Thank you.

Laura: 52:58
Yeah, thank you. And I hope for a third appearance of Jacinda on the podcast in the future, I'm sure.

Jacinda: 53:09
Sounds great. [Laughter]

Laura:  53:12
All right, thank you for listening. See you next time.