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Learning support assistants and effective reading interventions for 'at-risk' children

Introduction

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How can teaching assistants support the literacy skills of young learners at risk of literacy failure?

Research has shown that where young children have learned to manipulate the speech sounds (phonemes) associated with letters or groups of letters in words, their reading and spelling ability has improved.  There is also evidence that children who are trained to pay attention to the sound structure of language at a very young age are better able to identify words through their primary years, especially when they are also taught how letters and sounds correspond to each other.  The researchers in this study identified two particular approaches to teaching literacy which they wanted to test for their effectiveness. These were:

• rhyme-based phonological awareness programmes, which help children see similarities in the sound and spelling of words by grouping them in rhyming families, such as 'cat', 'hat', and 'mat'; and
• phoneme-based programmes, which teach children to use the smaller sound units associated with individual letters. For example, the word 'cat' consists of three sounds: 'c'–'a'–'t'.

Keen to investigate literacy teaching methods which could be reproduced in normal school circumstances, the researchers trained Learning Support Assistants (LSAs) to deliver the programmes, and then compared the effectiveness of these with regular classroom teaching programmes based on the National Literacy Strategy.

Keywords:
United Kingdom; Teaching assistants; Support staff; Literacy; Reading; Writing; Spelling; Phonological awareness; Professional development

Does Learning Support Assistant training improve literacy?

The researchers tested the literacy skills of children who had attended special literacy programmes with trained Learning Support Assistants (LSAs), and compared the results with children who had been taught as normal on National Literacy Strategy programmes. Although the literacy skills of all the children involved in the study improved, the pupils on the rhyme-based and phoneme-based programmes improved to a greater degree in terms of:

• phonological awareness. Children were able to recognise and generate words that rhyme; 
• letter-sound knowledge. Children could associate the appropriate sound to a particular letter; and 
• decoding skills. Children could read nonsense words which they had not come across before (e.g. 'jid'), based on their knowledge of the alphabet.

The researchers felt these results suggested that with brief training, and deploying phonic programmes already in use in schools, LSAs could be an effective additional support for children 'at risk' of literacy difficulties.

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Were there any differences in the effectiveness between phoneme-based, rhyme-based, and mixed programmes?

There was no significant difference between the effects the programmes had on improving awareness of words that rhyme or decoding skills. However, the phoneme-based programme achieved greater improvements in terms of knowledge of letters and sounds than either the rhyme-based or mixed programmes (i.e. programmes which incorporated elements of the rhyme-based and phoneme-based approaches).

This suggested that children were better able to analyse the sounds within a word when they had been trained to distinguish individual letters and sounds. This was not the case in the rhyme-based approach which focused on matching the sounds of groups of letters, such as '-at' in 'hat' and 'cat'. The authors also pointed out the fact that phoneme awareness training emphasises the link between letter and sound, and provides a symbol system for representing phonemes. This makes the analysis of how words are made up easier.

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What were the aims of the study?

The researchers designed the study to test two questions related to literacy teaching in the first year of primary school.  They wanted to find out:

• whether briefly trained LSAs were able to work with young children who had poor literacy skills to substantially improve their performance in decoding, knowledge of letters and sounds, and awareness of words that rhyme; and
• whether there was a difference in effectiveness between rhyme-based or phoneme-based programmes, or whether a mixture of the two was of more benefit.

The researchers designed the research in such a way that, if there were lessons for the deployment of LSAs in general, schools would be able to replicate the procedures in the study with existing resources.

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How were the children selected to take part in the study?

The researchers invited all the primary schools in one LEA to take part in the study, and selected the first nine to respond.  They then arranged for the LSAs to test all 498 Year 1 pupils in the schools for:

• phonological awareness.  This was based on a test of the children’s ability to recognise and generate words that rhyme.  For example, the LSA showed the children a single picture of a dog followed by a set of four pictures of a cat, a log, a ball, and a cup.  The children first named all of the pictures, and then had to find the picture that rhymed with ‘dog’; 
• word reading and spelling.  The LSA asked the children to read six words (‘at’, ‘had’, ‘let’, ‘dig’, ‘cut’, ‘top’), and to write six words (‘sat’, ‘hop’, ‘but’, ‘red’, ‘win’, ‘leg’)  spoken one at a time by the experimenter;
• non-word reading.  This involved children reading out loud six nonsense words (such as ‘rit’, ‘jid’), which were presented next to cartoon monsters and the children believed to be their names; and
• sound knowledge.  The LSA showed children cards with 26 individual letters on them. Half of the letters were shown in each testing session.  The LSAs asked the children to say out loud the sound that went with the letter.

The researchers selected the poorest reading 108 children and divided them into four groups for the main study.

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How did the authors set up lessons to identify the best literacy strategy?

The experimenters arranged four literacy programmes for a nine-week period, which had as their focus:

• National Literacy Strategy
  Children worked in groups of similar literacy levels on word-level activities appropriate to the second term of Year 1 of the National Literacy Strategy.  This included identifying individual sounds in a word, learning to read and spell consonant cluster such as 'bl-', and '-nd', and learning to recognise 30 high-frequency words by sight.
  
• phoneme-awareness
  Activities in this approach were divided into three phases:
  1. The LSA encouraged the children to place letter blocks around a vowel at the centre of a board (e.g. the 'a-board').  In this way children made a word (e.g. 'cat'), and by stacking consonants on top of each other, created new words (e.g. 'cap' or 'hat').
  2. This phase focused on repeated writing of vowels that come in the middle of a word. Then children wrote consonants to build CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words.
  3. Children read the word, and sounded it out, pronouncing each sound individually, with an adult.
  
• rhyme-awareness
  Having learned an initial 10 letters of the alphabet, the children received a rhyme unit on a work-card (e.g. '-at'), which displayed the 10 letters at the top. The LSA showed the children a picture and asked them to complete the word with a plastic letter. If the children needed an additional prompt they could go through the row of consonants at the top of the sheet and find the correct letter. Additional activities included writing words, simple word searches, and sorting words into '-an' and '-at' groups.
  
• mixed (rhyme- and phoneme-awareness)
  The mixed programme shared many elements of the rhyme programme. In addition children were made aware of the phonemic elements of words, e.g. they were told that 'at' was made up of 'a' and 't'. The games in this programme focused on rhymes and individual sounds.

All of the approaches had certain common elements. In the first part of each session children took part in letter-sound learning activities involving saying, tracing, and looking at letters, supported by the Jolly Phonics stories and activities. Children spent 10 minutes of each session on their particular programme, and then spent the last five minutes on phonological awareness games tailored to phonemes or rhymes respectively.

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What are the implications?

In completing this digest, the authors began to ask the following questions about implications for teachers and learning support assistants:

• This study found in favour of a phoneme-based approach over a programme aimed at raising awareness of rhyming patterns.  How much emphasis do you place on training children to distinguish the individual sounds of words? Do you think more time spent on this would improve pupils’ ability to read?
• The authors of this study experimented with literacy teaching by devising 9-week programmes with biases towards different aspects of learning to read. In what ways have you been able to ask questions of and evaluate specific elements of the National Literacy Strategy? Could an experiment-evaluation approach be incorporated into your curriculum planning?
• How confident are you that LSAs are used to best advantage in literacy sessions in your school? What sort of staff development could you suggest which would make their deployment more effective?

In addition school leaders may wish to consider the following points:

• How familiar are LSAs in your school with the differences between rhyme- and phoneme-based approaches to literacy? Would it be feasible to replicate the experiment in this study in your school to inform the discussion on how best to teach literacy?  
• The authors suggested that training LSAs to take a more active role could improve the literacy skills of ‘at risk’ pupils.  What are the advantages of LSAs main deployment being with ‘at risk’ pupils? Does this approach raise any questions about the role of teachers and LSAs, or the way their deployment is perceived by pupils?

The digest authors also began to ask the following question about implications for school governors and parents:

• The study focused on ‘at risk’ children who had poor literacy skills. If parents have children in this category, how are they informed of their child’s progress, of what the school is doing for their child, and of ways they can help improve their child’s literacy skills?
  

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Where can I find out more?

Detailed information on the National Literacy Strategy including resources and professional development guidance can be found at: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy (accessed 1 July 2005)

For another TRIPS digest on supporting literacy skills visit: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/research
/themes/literacy/TueFeb241436132004/

Hall, K. & Harding, A. (2003). A systematic review of effective literacy teaching in the 4 to 14 age range of mainstream schooling. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education. Download the report at eppi.ioe.ac.uk

The BBC provides a host of resources and ideas for parents and teachers to help young children develop literacy skills, go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/4_11/literacy.shtml

The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity dedicated to improving literacy in the UK. Its website has a wealth of information and resources on literacy in general. Its website is: http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/ (accessed 1 July 2005)

For an overview of literacy research, theory and practice: Pahl, K. & Roswell, J. (2005) Literacy and Education. Sage: London.

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