Episode 1: Decodable Readers with John Walker

In this very first episode of the Sounds-Write podcast, we hear John Walker answer questions about decodable readers. How should you begin using decodables? What are they for? How can you phase out the use of decodables? Hear answers to all this and more! Thank you for listening and see you next time.

Some links mentioned in this episode:
Our Initial Code free e-books
Our Extended Code free e-books
Our free courses for parents and carers
The Reading Ape's blog post 'The eyes have it'
More Sounds-Write links

Transcript

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Laura:  0:09 
Hello and welcome to the Sounds-Write podcast. This is our first episode and my name's Laura, I'm the host and I'm also Sounds-Write's Content Manager. Basically, in this podcast, we're going to be aiming to answer questions that regularly get asked by practitioners, and provide some useful professional development content straight from members of the Sounds-Write team. I'm here today with Sounds-Write's founder and CEO, John Walker.

John:  0:37 
Hello, everybody. Nice to be with you today. Thank you.

Laura:  0:40 
So, in this episode, we're going to be talking about decodable readers. We get asked loads of questions about decodables and we have our own huge line of decodable readers as well. So, let's get to some questions. Why don't you start us off, John, with what are decodable readers and are they essential to use? Are they useful?

John:  1:07 
Well, we think that they're absolutely essential, of course. And, actually, before I launch into that a bit, I'd like to just take you back to when I first started teaching. When I first started teaching, what children were given were the sorts of levelled readers that you find in many schools today. What those levelled readers did, whether there was just one line of text on a page or ten or twelve lines of text on a page, is it threw the whole of the code at beginning readers, right from the start.

Laura:  1:40 
Can we just clarify what levelled texts are? Am I right in thinking those are just, they don't consider specific sounds in any way, they would just throw a sentence of ordinary text at a child, right?

John:  1:54 
That's right. Not so ordinary texts very often as well. A lot of those texts were very repetitious. So, you'd have 'Janet and John's' series, for instance, in which you'd get words repeated over and over again. And the idea was, of course, that children would try and memorise these words and those were built on, over time, some children-

Laura:  2:16 
Sight reading, right?

John:  2:17 
Pardon?

Laura:  2:18 
Sight reading.

John:  2:18 
Sight reading, yes. I mean, some children were very good at this. Many children, though, found this extremely difficult. And of course, one of the real problems was, that even for good readers, their memories could only take so much information. By the time they got into Year 3, that's when things really began to tank and they found it much more difficult to be able to read and write at the levels that were expected of them in what we now call Key Stage 2. So many of these books were presented to children, and of course they contain sound-spelling correspondences that hadn't been taught to the children. So, children were encouraged to guess, they were encouraged to look at the pictures in the text and guess what the word was from that. They were also asked to think about the position of the word in a sentence, perhaps, and guess from that what it might be. So of course, the sorts of things that people talk about most often are that children read 'horse' for 'house' or 'house' for 'horse'. They look very similar, they begin with an < h >, they end with an < e >. But they've no real idea because nobody's really taught them how to segment and blend and manipulate phonemes in words. They also haven't taught them the code systematically and how to understand how the code works, as well.

Laura:  3:43 
Right, so how are decodables different? Well, they're very different, but tell us.

John:  3:49 
Decodables are very, very different indeed. Inasmuch as, what they do is they provide children with practice in reading connected text using the sound-spelling correspondences that they've already been taught. So for instance, in, say, Unit 3 of the Initial Code in Sounds-Write, by that time children will have been taught twelve sound-spelling correspondences. We wouldn't ask them to then read a book containing connected text containing all of those sound-spelling correspondences. We'd present them with a book that covered the sound-spelling correspondences in Units 1 and 2 to give them practice in reading connected text with those SSCs if you like, if we can call them that. So, what I'm suggesting here is that we, again, wait until they've had time really, to thoroughly absorb the information that they've been taught, in terms of code knowledge. That they are continuing to get practice with, segmenting, blending and even manipulating sounds in and out of words, at that level. But that we give them a book containing connected text from, say, Unit 1 or Unit 2. That means that they've been given plenty of time to absorb this information, they're starting to get it into long-term memory and we are beginning to see, we hope, some degree of fluency by now.

Laura:  5:28 
And I think that's a really important point to emphasise, actually, that some people sometimes miss. That you advocate for giving children decodable readers that are a couple of units behind what they're studying in class.

John:  5:43 
No, absolutely we do. Yes, of course, that's dead right. So even this is nuanced in Sounds-Write because, in, say, if a child has been taught Unit 3 formally in their class, they'll have been doing it for two weeks. By that time, as I said, they'll have learnt, or been introduced to, twelve sound-spelling correspondences and we're saying that there should be a week's lag there. By the time they get to, say, Unit 5 or Unit 6, they've learned many more sound-spelling correspondences and for some children they may need a two-week lag, not just a one-week lag. Of course, children differ. Some children get some help from home, some children have already got some prior learning before they actually came into school. So, for some of them it's going to be a bit easier. For other children who've never had any experience of this kind of learning before, they're going to need much more practice. And the key here really is practice. There's absolutely no reason why children can't be learning from these decodable readers very successfully and beginning to build their fluency if they're given practice. It's the same with any skill, and all the research shows this.

Laura:  7:05 
So one of the questions from the beginning that I think we've not quite touched on was, is it essential to use decodable readers? Do you think that schools absolutely must go out and buy hundreds of readers? What are your thoughts on this?

John:  7:21 
Well, I think that these books are certainly incredibly useful. They build trust in the code, they build children's confidence. And you can see, when you go into a class and see children reading these books successfully, just how much confidence it gives them and how much pleasure it gives them as well. Notwithstanding the fact, of course, that some of the text is a bit stilted, it's a bit restricted, because, of course, if you're only working with a limited number of sound-spelling correspondences, it's difficult to build a truly enthralling story. Although I must say that some of the efforts that have been made have been pretty good. But at the same time, of course, we're not saying that decodable readers should be used on their own. We're also saying that they should be supplemented by the teacher reading stories, reading poetry, teaching them nursery rhymes and popular songs. All of that sort of thing goes alongside these decodable readers.

Laura:  8:23 
And I think we're especially aware, at Sounds-Write, that you know, schools, and... Not necessarily schools, maybe more like tutors, for example, small reading centres, are sometimes under a lot of pressure to spend loads of money on what can be really expensive resources. So, we have actually made a lot of free decodable resources available. Our manual comes with a lot of texts, doesn't it?

John:  8:49 
It does, yes.

Laura:  8:50 
And then we have a couple of series, actually, that are for free, so we will link that below. But I think that's important to note that not everyone can afford to buy loads and loads of these materials, so it's important that we provide some for free.

John:  9:06 
No, that's absolutely right. I'm also slightly surprised, I have to say, when some schools with classes of, say, between 25 and 30 children in them, buy 25 copies of, say, one of the books from Unit 2. There are always two sets -there's a set of two books with each unit- and they'll buy both of the sets for all 25 to 30 children. I think there's absolutely no need to do that. I think that if you've got 15 books of one unit -part of the unit- and 15 of the other, then what you can do is you can have children reading those books and then swapping over. One thing I'd just like to add to that as well, by the way, is that if you are sending books home with children to read to their parents, you should have read that book with the child first, or the child should have had the opportunity to read to an adult before they take that book home. Because in many cases, of course, parents don't know what to do. Parents and carers don't know what to do with these kinds of books. And they might need some tutoring on this, if you're able to do that. But it's very important, really, that children get a chance to read these books first with somebody who's already very experienced.

Laura:  10:30 
That's certainly true, actually. We do get quite often parents getting back to us and saying that they've had a Sounds-Write book sent home with their kids and they have no idea what to do with it. So, if you are sending books home with kids that they've never looked at before, then, yeah, it's really important, I think, to brief parents on what they need to be doing.

John:  10:51 
Absolutely right. Yes, of course. And maybe schools can send home some kind of short primer to enable parents to know what to do.

Laura:  11:00 
Yeah. We do also have our free Parents and Carers course online that parents can access if they want to support their child further, actually. So, we'll link that down below as well. So we've talked about when people should use decodable readers, how they should use them, but what about phasing them out? Because that's equally important to discuss, I think.

John:  11:24 
Yeah, it's something that comes up all the time. Again, another thing that really surprises me is that teachers, some teachers seem to want decodables all the way through Year 2 and into Year 3 and even into Year 4. Now, of course, there is a case for using decodable readers, especially with children who are receiving an intervention. But really, by the time most children, I won't say all children, but most children are halfway through the Extended Code with First Spellings in Year 1, -which puts children at roughly the age of about five years and six months, six months old- we think that you can profitably, really, start to move them onto, perhaps, books that you might have wanted to throw away, for instance, such as Oxford Reading Tree Books and so on. These books provide the perfect fluency fodder, in my opinion. By the time they're halfway through the Extended Code in Year 1, of course, they've covered a lot of the main sound-spelling correspondences, and they know enough of the code already. They've practised segmenting, blending, phoneme manipulation to mastery level by this time. They have a really good understanding of how the code works. They understand that you can spell a sound with one, two, three or four letters. All of that sort of thing is really well established by this time. And many children do, what we call, explode into literacy. Lots of parents, lots of teachers, report to us that once children get to this point, they're trying to read everything and anything. Now, of course, they won't be able to read anything and everything immediately. They'll probably need a nudge here, a nudge there. But they'll also be able, on the basis of the fact that they understand such a lot and their skills are so good already, they'll be able to bootstrap themselves. In other words, work things out from the text, and maybe try a couple of possibilities when they come to a sound-spelling correspondence that they haven't yet been formally taught. So, we're really fervent believers in the fact that you can start using all sorts of texts. Now, what kind of text can you use? Well, you can certainly use short chapter books, you can use poetry and so on. We think that informational texts are exactly the thing that you should be bringing in at about this time. And one of the reasons why we think that informational texts are good is because you can get simple children's encyclopaedias. Dorling Kindersley do them. And there are others as well that I've recommended on my blog before now, that offer short, bite-sized chunks of text. Now, having said that, one thing more is absolutely essential. And that is that the teacher who's working through these texts with the children in their class is able to look at the text, is able to decide what has already been taught and what they might need help with. And be ready, therefore, to give them prompts to error correct and all that sort of thing. And children are going to learn all sorts of extra stuff, if you like, tangentially, through reading such texts, because of course they will be coming across very commonly, or very frequently encountered sound-spelling correspondences in many of the words.

Laura:  15:07 
Yeah, and I think that idea of bootstrapping... You know, they've already had so much practice with those key skills of segmenting, blending, phoneme manipulation by that point, and they really, kind of, especially more advanced readers at that level, should be able to apply that to anything they read, really, shouldn't they? With a bit of help from a teacher?

John:  15:32 
Yes, they should. And all these elements of direct instruction that we've been using up to now, really fully scaffolding texts, making sure that we give them masses and masses of practice, and so on and so forth. These sorts of things can slowly be phased out in a process of what we refer to as guided independence. It's a process that takes place over time. We want them to achieve full independence in their reading as soon as possible, give or take. But that can't happen unless you give them this kind of practice as well.

Laura:  16:17 
I just want to bring up an example, actually, we were discussing the other day how you would code the word 'one'. Because, so basically, I managed the development of our decodable readers and one of our writers had included the word 'one'. Which obviously is a word that children will come across, probably quite often, from maybe Year 1 and it's actually quite a strange and unusual sound-spelling correspondence. So, could you just explain how you would decode 'one' and then let's put it into context of why I brought it up.

John:  16:56 
Okay. Funnily enough, that's one of the words that people usually raise as a hostile question, if you like, when we're giving talks to people who aren't Sounds-Write trained, who don't know anything about it and are very often pretty hostile to phonics. Now, of course, 'one' is decodable. The first thing about 'one' is that there are three sounds in it, /w/ /o/ /n/. So, your question then, is how do you fit the sounds to the spellings? And I would say that the best way of doing it is to take the < ne > as the /n/, which actually is common in words like 'gone' and things like that. But, of course, the sounds /w/ and /o/ are encoded in the < o >. Of course, it's two letters - it's two sounds, but it's one letter. It's not dissimilar to the letter < u > in /y/ /oo/ 'nit' and words like that. And it's not dissimilar to the letter < x >, which represents two sounds, as you know. However, probably to explain it better in Years 2 and above, very likely, I would teach children that, in fact, at one time in English it was spelt, this word was spelt < a n e > and it was pronounced /ae/ /n/. I believe there's a variety of English in one of the Caribbean countries where they still say /ae/ /n/, somewhat peculiarly. But anyway, of course, language isn't static, things move on. You could see that 'ane' is probably derived from 'ein' in German or even 'un' in French, perhaps. So, it is possible to explain what's happened and how language changes. But that really is one of the most difficult words to explain in the English language. And of course, there are anomalies, language is slippery.

Laura:  18:59 
And it's funny because, yes, it's one of the most difficult words to explain, but it comes up so often from very early on. So this was the big debate the other day, on whether to include the word 'one' from the beginning of the Extended Code. I brought up that actually we have a spelling unit on the letter < o > in Unit 5 of the Extended Code. So, it fits, somewhat bizarrely, into that.

John:  19:27 
Well, I suppose. I mean, the thing is that 'the' is a very difficult word at the beginning as well. What do we do with that? It's two sounds, /th/ and /schwa/. Well, first of all, we haven't taught the schwa yet and won't be teaching the schwa for some time. We also haven't taught them that < th > is two letters, but it's one sound. You can make sense of that after you've taught Unit 7 with double < f >, double < l > double < s > and double < z >. And you can make even more sense of it when you get to Unit 11 where you are actually teaching /th/ words. But in the beginning at least, probably the best way to make sure that it's going in, is when children are reading, you point to it and you say this word is 'the' /th/ /schwa/ and you point to the sound-spelling correspondences. And when they're going to write the word, the teacher writes it on the board, making great play of the fact that this is the way we spell 'the' /th/ /schwa/ and the teacher says those sounds as they write it and they ask the children to copy it. By the time you've done that 100 times, as you're likely to do, in the course of probably the first six months of Reception, then they're going to know it pretty thoroughly.

Laura:  20:44 
And it sets them up nicely, I think, for introducing that concept in Unit 7 of 'it's two letters, but it's one sound', because they've already come across it.

John:  20:53 
Absolutely, that's right, yeah.

Laura:  20:56 
So now we've got a couple of questions that people have asked us. I think this is, so far, what we've talked about has covered a lot of other questions that we get asked very regularly, but we had two quite specific questions that I just wanted to cover. So, one of them was in our Initial Code, Unit 11, so that would be towards the end of Reception year, or Kindy in Australia, we have a decodable text called 'The Queen's Quill'. And so, we don't teach /ee/ until quite a few units into the Extended Code, so children will not have seen /ee/ yet. I think this actually links quite nicely from what we were just talking about of the two letters, one sound. Being introduced to that, kind of early on. But someone asked why do some of our books include sounds beyond the scope of the unit focus, like 'The Queen's Quill'?

John:  21:50 
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It does follow on very, very nicely, actually, from what we were talking about before. And, of course, we have included some sound-spelling correspondences that have not been formally taught, in some of our books towards the latter end, if you like, of the Initial Code. And that's absolutely deliberate. We're bringing some of these things in because they're very frequently met sound-spelling correspondences in words. So, for instance, let's take this example of 'The Queen's Quill'. I think the objection that people would make is that the double < e >, of course, hasn't been taught yet. Well, no, it hasn't been taught, but we want to sensitise them to what we think they're going to have to be encountering very shortly. And, of course, they will, in Unit 2 of the Extended Code. That's probably about the time they might even be reading 'The Queen's Quill', given the lag that we were talking about before. But even if that were not the case, the teacher would point to the double < e >, say: This is two letters, but it's just one sound. I want you to say /ee/ here. And the child should then say: /k/ /w/ /ee/ /n/ 'Queen'. And, of course, so we're doing a little bit of tangential teaching there as well. And we do lots of that, I think. So let me give you another example, in words like 'have' a lot of people say to us, well, you haven't taught this spelling of /v/ yet. No, we haven't. But, actually, the way we spell /v/ at the ends of almost every word in the language that contains a /v/ at the end of it, apart from 'of', is going to be spelt < ve >. And you just simply run your pencil, or your chopstick, or whatever you're using, to point to the sound-spelling correspondence. You're saying: This is two letters and it's one sound, it's /v/. Say /v/ here. And the child should go: /h/ /a/ /v/, or /g/ /i/ /v/ 'give'. And then read the word. Again, it's very important to be making sure that they understand and appreciate how the code works, that you can spell a sound with two letters. And I think often people forget this, even when you're working in the Extended Code. When a sound-spelling correspondence does contain two letters, you should point to it and say: This is two letters, but it's one sound. Because nearly all of these two-letter spellings are different, as you go through and teach the code. And, actually, it's just as relevant when you're teaching very, very much more complicated words later on, like 'psychology', for instance. The first sound in 'psychology' is /s/. It's spelt < ps >. This is a spelling, it's a two-letter spelling, we get very frequently from - well, not very frequently - you get from time to time, in Greek words. And it's just as relevant as when you taught double < f > or double < l > or double < s > or double < z > in the Initial Code.

Laura:  25:09 
Yeah. I think it's also, you know, in an ideal phonics dream world, maybe children would only be exposed to sounds that they've learned, right? But children in Reception will be learning to write their names. And what if their name is 'Evie', for example? They'll have already learnt that and been exposed to that. So, I think, yeah, bringing that element into our decodables is important as well, to really prepare children for what's to come.

John: 25:37 
That's right. They'll be going to stores as well, and this isn't brand placement or anything, but they might visit Tesco's, for instance, and they'll be trying to read it /t/ /e/ /s/ /k/ /o/. And we hope, actually, that by this time they are knowledgeable enough to have a go at it. The parent would say: This is 'Tesco's', that's /oe/, here. So, they're going to be learning all of this stuff as they go along.

Laura:  26:07 
Yeah. The other question that we had, which is an interesting one, is our font size is smaller than a lot of other decodable readers companies.

John:  26:20 
That's right.

Laura:  26:21 
And so why is that? Is there a rationale for that?

John:  26:24 
There is, actually. We have followed the science on this. Again, we followed the work of somebody called Rayner, who did a lot of work on exactly what your eyes are doing when you're reading. Now, most readers, most fluent readers, that is, think that as they read a line of text, their eyes are moving smoothly along that line of text. That isn't actually the case. That isn't what's happening. And Rayner showed this. In fact, we've known about it for a very long time, now. What he showed is, that as you are reading, you're fixating groups of letters. Moving from left to right, you're fixating certain letters. And then there is a saccade moving on to the next group of letters. Now, during that saccade, you are blind, strangely enough. So, for a fraction of a second, you're blind, well, it's a bit like watching a slideshow. And as I say, he showed this and the work has been replicated quite a number of times. So, what's happening is that we're sampling, if you like, letters, groups of letters as we go along through a sentence, in each word. Now, as we become more experienced, as we become better readers, we can actually fixate more letters than we were able to do when we were beginning readers. Beginning readers are only able to fixate a smaller number of letters. And that's why we've made sure that we've reduced the text to a reasonable size, so that they can read as much of a word, even if the word is a little bit longer than they otherwise would have been able to, had the font been very much bigger, because that actually makes it much more difficult to read. So hence the reason why we've kept the font size to, I won't say small, because I think that probably children's vision is better than a lot of adults’ vision, to be honest with you. And that's why we've kept it reasonably small.

Laura:  28:44 
And that's obviously not to say that children who do, for example, have impaired vision can't have adjustments made for them. That's obviously really important to note as well.

John:  28:54 
Of course. Absolutely. That's right.

Laura:  28:56 
There's a really interesting blog post on that exact topic by The Reading Ape. It's called 'The Eyes Have It', I think. So that's something to check out, if you want to hear more about that.

John:  29:08 
Yes, when he published this, I was a bit miffed, really, because I'd written a blog post myself called exactly that, 'The Eyes Have It'. So, if you're interested in this subject, I did write a couple of blog posts on the subject and that explains very carefully exactly what's happening as your eyes move across text, or move back, in fact. And the harder the text, the more regressions there are going to be, as you check to see that you've read correctly.

Laura:  29:42 
So, he beat you to it, then?

John:  29:46 
No, he didn't. I was first. [laughter]

Laura:  29:47 
You want to hear it first? [laughter] All right, lovely. Well, that brings us to the end of this first episode. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much, John, for sharing all of your expertise, as always.

John:  30:04 
Thank you. Thank you, Laura, for inviting me to come and talk on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Laura:  30:09 
Yeah, so I think in the future we're going to have more of these episodes, where we cover a particular topic. If you have any questions that you'd like us to cover, please get in touch with us on our Facebook page, Instagram, Twitter or email us on our website. And, yeah, see you next time. Bye!

John:  30:28 
Bye!