Better Start Literacy
The Better Start Literacy Approach has been highly successful in developing the literacy of year 1 (kindergarten) students with low language in New Zealand. Students provided with Better Start outperformed students taught with the schools’ typical approach. Key elements in the program were a focus on phonemic awareness, relating phonemic awareness to letters and letter sounds, and applying skills to reading and writing. Students learned to identify initial sounds, segment and blend the sounds in words, and manipulate phonemes with the aid of graphemes. Students focused on phonemes rather than rhymes or syllables. A key activity was chaining in which students created new words by manipulating sounds. Shown the word bit, students used plastic or cardboard letters to form the word sit and then hit>fit>fin>pin.
Lessons began with the reading of a high-quality text that included a discussion of vocabulary. Words from the text were used to develop a phonemic awareness element and the phonics skills needed to read and write the element. After completing chaining and other practice activities, students read a story that reinforced the phonics element that had been presented. The story was then discussed. Student progress was carefully monitored with an online assessment. Students who struggled were provided with additional instruction.
The Better Start group gained almost three times as much in the ability to read nonwords as did the Regular Group. When provided the Better Start program, students who had been in the Regular Group demonstrated an increased rate of progress. However, the group that received intervention earlier in the year finished the year significantly ahead of the group that received the intervention later in the year. The researchers explained the accelerated progress in terms of the self-teaching hypothesis. “The self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995) proposes that successful early word decoding attempts help young children establish orthographic representations in memory which they can then quickly access in future reading and spelling encounters. This provides them with an advantage for continued self-learning and helps to build their reading fluency and confidence” (Gillon et al., 2019, p. 2006). Results suggest the importance of high-quality instruction for achieving equity. There was no difference between the performance of boys and girls and there was no difference between groups identified as New Zealand European and Marori or Pacific.
Gillon, G. et al. (2019). A better start to literacy learning: Findings from a teacher‑implemented intervention in children’s first year at school. Reading and Writing, 32, 1989–2012. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11145-018-9933-7.pdf
Share, D. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55, 151–218.