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

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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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Research Home Themes \| Find digests \| About the digests resources glossary researchers contact TRIPS Introduction Does Learning Support Assistant training improve literacy? Were there any differences in the effectiveness between phoneme-based, rhyme-based, and mixed programmes? What were the aims of the study? How were the children selected to take part in the study? How did the authors set up lessons to identify the best literacy strategy? What are the implications? Where can I find out more? Send us your feedback Collated digests To view/remove/add notes and save your collated digests click here Get Word Reader Learning support assistants and effective reading interventions for 'at-risk' children This digest found in Teaching Assistants English Send to a friend Word doc 90KB Printer friendly Collate for later 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.