Australian early childhood education positions literacy learning as a set of social practices contextualised by one's unique experiences and knowledges. Despite widespread agreement about the need to teach phonics and other code-breaking practices, the ways early childhood educators integrate "constrained" skills are not well understood…

Docklands Primary School opened its doors in Melbourne in January 2021. In this case study, Emina McLean, Head of English, describes how Sounds-Write was implemented in Foundation to Year 2 in the middle of the pandemic. Despite four lockdowns forcing periods of online teaching, various standardised tests show 80% of students on average meeting or…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) released a report that applies two methodological approaches new to the WWC that together aim to improve researchers' understanding of how early literacy interventions may work to improve outcomes for students in grades K-3. First, this report pilots a new taxonomy developed by early literacy experts and…

Phonics continues to be one of the most controversial literacy instruction topics debated in the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Given the importance placed on phonics in early literacy learning and the role that teacher beliefs play in the types of code-related literacy children encounter, the purpose of this two phase mixed-methods study…

Teachers in England and South Australia annually administer the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) to Year 1 students, with the purpose of identifying struggling readers. Students who do not meet the score threshold have not met the expected standard of word-decoding ability, meaning further support may be warranted. We sought to quantify the extent to…

In this case study, Angela Helsloot, Principal at Allambie Heights Public School, on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, uses data from standardised tests and benchmark reading assessments across the school to show the positive impact that Sounds-Write instruction has had in Kindergarten and Year 1. [For the complete volume, "Systematic Synthetic…

This paper explores the design, development and evaluation of an early childhood literacy iPad application, focusing on the English Alphabet, called "A to Z Safari" trialled in Australian classrooms. A to Z Safari was designed to assist students in the early years of schooling with learning the alphabet and building on their knowledge of…

Language-rich environments are key to overall quality in early childhood settings, including frequent child-staff interactions around picture books and dramatic play. In a language-rich environment, explicit teaching of literacy concepts, such as phonics, is embedded in authentic and meaningful situations where alphabet letters and sounds are…

Commercial phonics programmes (e.g. Jolly Phonics and Letterland) are becoming widely used in the early years of school. These programmes claim to use a systematic explicit approach, considered as the preferred method of phonics instruction for teaching alphabetic code-breaking skills in Australia and the UK in the first years of school…

This meta-analysis summarizes research on the effects of a comprehensive, interactive web-based software (AXXX) on the development of reading competencies among kindergarteners and elementary students. Findings from seven randomized control trials and quasi-experimental studies undertaken in a variety of contexts across Canada, Australia and Kenya…

Recent Australian and international government reports refer to the importance of teacher knowledge in the sound structure of language and its relationship to beginning reading. In this study, a group of 162 pre-service teachers responded to a questionnaire including questions related to their attitudes towards using phonics instruction in the…