Language Delays, Reading Delays, and Learning Difficulties: Interactive Elements Requiring Multidimensional Programming

By Hay, Ian Elias, Gordon; Fielding-Barnsley, Ruth; Homel, Ross; Freiberg, Kate

Abstract Researchers have hypothesized four levels of instructional dialogue and claimed that teachers can improve children’s language development by incorporating these dialogue levels in their classrooms. It has also been hypothesized that enhancing children’s early language development enhances children’s later reading development. This quasi-experimental research study investigated both of these hypotheses using a collaborative service delivery model for Grade 1 children with language difficulties from a socially and economically disadvantaged urban community in Australia. Comparing the end-of-year reading achievement scores for the 57 children who received the language intervention with those of the 59 children in the comparison group, the findings from this research are supportive of both hypotheses. The interrelationships between learning difficulties, reading difficulties, and language difficulties are discussed along with children’s development in vocabulary, use of memory strategies and verbal reasoning, and the need for multidimensional programming.

In Australia, teachers have reported that 80% of the students identified as having learning difficulties have problems in learning to read (Louden et al., 2000). Although the identification of the most effective procedures to assist these children is a challenge to educators, there is strong support for the importance of appropriate interventions in the early years of schooling (Hay, Elias, & Booker, 2005; Kamil, Mosenthal, Pearson, & Barr, 2000; Molfese et al., 2006) and an awareness of the interrelationship between children’s language delays, early reading difficulties, and learning difficulties (Catts & Kamhi, 2005).

Language is considered vital to the development of children’s social skills, cognitive abilities, and academic outcomes (Bishop, 1997; Rutter & Mawhood, 1991; Verhoeven & van Balkom, 2004). The evidence is that language difficulties and learning difficulties have a significant negative impact on children’s education (Lerner & Kline, 2006; Silver & Hagin, 2002; Turkington & Harris, 2006) and that there is a strong relationship between children’s early language and phonological awareness /sensitivity and later reading and spelling development (Joshi & Hulme, 1998; Lipka & Siegel, 2007; Snowling, Adams, Bishop, & Stothard, 2001). When children show delays in language development, they are also more likely to display difficulties in peer social interactions and problem solving (Fujiki, Brinton, Isaacson, & Summers, 2001; Fujiki, Spackman, Brinton, & Hall, 2004).

Emergent Literacy

In their review of children’s acquisition of reading, Whitehurst and Lonigan (1988) proposed a developmental continuum between young children’s language skills and their later reading and comprehension skills. In particular, children’s early language development is considered to be a developmental precursor and a good predictor of children’s early reading development (Teale & Sulzby, 1986), as well as their metalinguistic awareness, alphabet, and book concepts (Saada-Robert, 2004).

Certainly, it is widely accepted that (a) children have learned much that is important about literacy before formal reading instruction begins (Bishop & Leonard, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998); (b) this need for engagement in a child’s literacy development has to start early (Morgan & Goldstein, 2004; Rutter & Mawhood, 1991); and (c) there is significant variability in the amount of early shared language and literacy development occurring for children in different home settings (Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Senechal, 2006). In regard to this last point, there is recurring evidence that children from homes of higher socioeconomic status (SES) are advantaged in later reading achievement tests (Raz & Bryant, 1990; Wasik & Bond, 2001; White, 1982) and are more successful at making the transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” (Camp- bell, Kelly, Mullis, Martin, & Sainsbury, 2001).

Although White’s (1982) meta-analysis was supportive of the relationship between higher SES and children’s reading achievement, White also noted that SES alone was a weak predictor when it was studied separately from specific home environment factors. White argued that SES measures, such as parental occupation and family income, were not the main impact factors on children’s reading achievement; rather, it was the social, language, and literacy enhancement activities associated with higher-SES homes that were the critical influences on children’s literacy development. These activities involved the parents and others engaging in a supportive dialogue and social interaction along with shared reading, reading aloud, and discussing the stories and vocabulary with their child (Hewison & Tizard, 1980; Raz & Bryant, 1990; Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Scarborough & Dobrich, 1994). For example, Teale and Sulzby reported that book reading occurred as seldom as five times per year in some low-income families.

As others have pointed out (Senechal, 2006; Snow et al., 1998; Wasik, Bond, & Hindman, 2002; Whitehurst et al., 1994), such findings have underpinned the need for the development of literacy and intervention programs that aim to encourage children’s vocabulary, language, and book reading in low-SES communities and for early childhood teachers to ensure that they incorporate significant language and vocabulary development into their general education program, particularly for children from families where English proficiency is an issue (Marvin & Wright, 1997; Schiff- Myers, Djukic, McGovern-Lawler, & Perez, 1993; Senechal, 2006).

Students with Learning Difficulties

Tomblin, Zhang, Backwalter, and Catts (2000) stated that children’s reading ability and spoken language ability were strongly correlated (r = 0.68) and that reading delays were identified in 52% of the children with language impairments. Furthermore, based on best practice as suggested by the National Reading Panel (2000) report, Al Otaiba and Fuchs (2006) reported that children identified as nonresponders to best reading practice-often identified as phonological instruction-were significantly different from their successful class peers on measures of verbal memory, vocabulary, syntactic awareness, word segmentation, word naming speed, and verbal intelligence as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 1981).

The claim is that up to 50% of children with learning disabilities (LD) are typically nonresponders to what may be best reading practice for children without LD (Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2006). This high number of nonresponding children could be related to the findings of Lovett et al. (2000) that traditional early reading remedial and intervention programs extended only for short durations of time (just a few hours per week for 8 to 12 weeks), were of a low intensity, and rather than being multidimensional in focus, tended to be one-dimensional, with an overreliance on teaching phonological awareness and word decoding skills, regardless of the student’s deficits in other domains such as vocabulary, verbal memory, and syntactic awareness.

There is also evidence that children’s early problems associated with phonology, syntax, semantics, and the linguistic system do not fully disappear after the early school years, with ongoing intervention and support required for many students with residual language-related difficulties in the middle and secondary school grades (Bishop, 1997; Cooney & Hay, 2005; Lewis & Freebairn, 1992). The problem is that many children with significant reading and learning difficulties or disabilities have deficits in both phonological awareness and language skills (Saada-Robert, 2004; Snowling, 2005), and whereas language delays are considered a cause of reading delays, the children’s lack of reading skills also has an ongoing negative influence on the children’s vocabulary and language development (Catts & Kamhi, 2005). This reciprocal relationship between language and reading has significant implications for the type and range of interventions that teachers provide to children in the beginning school years. Even when researchers controlled for intelligence and SES factors, students with early language difficulties still had more difficulties with reading, spelling, and reading comprehension than their peers without a language difficulty (McNaughton, 2002). Furthermore, students with early language difficulties typically selected educational pathways that were less academic and often exited school earlier than their peers (Snowling et al., 2001).

With reference to early reading instruction, although letter- name knowledge and phonological awareness (e.g., the awareness of the sound units, such as syllables and phonemes in spoken words) are known to facilitate rapid decoding and are important predictors of reading achievement (Adams, 1990; Byrne, Fielding-Barnsley, & Ashley, 2000; Snowling, 2000), they are not the only predictors of reading success (Bishop & Leonard, 2000; Scarborough, 2005). In particular, Scarborough (2005) has noted the predictive importance of children’s concepts of print, expressive vocabulary, sentence and story recall skills, and receptive and expressive language along with the children’s phonological awareness and letter naming skills. Moreover, Scarborough argued that children’s reading development is multidimensional and that the different elements are interactive, so that an enhancement in one element, such as language, can have a direct or indirect influence on another element, for example, word decoding. The argument that children’s reading development is a multifaceted, multidimensional, cognitive process involving the dynamic interaction of a range of related variables was also put forward by Stanovich and Beck (2000). Enhancing Early Language Development

Children with early reading delays need more exposure to and more practice with both expressive and receptive areas of language, such as vocabulary development and syntactic and semantic development, as well as greater amounts of dialogical interactions that engage and extend the children’s level of language complexity (Catts & Kamhi, 2005; Landry et al, 2006; K. Nation, 2005; Wasik et al., 2002). Gombert (1992) has argued that children’s language development directly and indirectly fuels the development of children’s phonological and phoneme awareness, whereas Snowling (2005) concluded that deficits in phonological awareness are usually a direct consequence of slow vocabulary development (a classic marker of language delay). Similarly, Catts, Fey, Tomblin, and Zhang (2002) have argued that the majority of children with language delays suffer a double reading disorder, in the sense that the operation of both of their reading development pathways (phonological decoding and semantic meaning) is compromised. The implications for teachers are that children who have language delays are also more likely to need instructional periods that are shorter in duration but more frequent compared with their peers without language delays (Cook, 2000; Verhoeven & van Balkom, 2004). Teachers also need to keep their language of instruction at a suitable level of complexity and clarification to better accommodate these children’s speed of oral language processing (Bishop & Leonard, 2000; K. Nation, 2005).

Blank, Rose, and Berlin (2003) have proposed that, to improve children’s language development, teachers should enhance their dialogue and classroom instruction. From their research, Blank et al. have hypothesized four levels of language complexity and student- teacher dialogues. As Table 1 shows, at the lowest or first level of the dialogue, the child is required to develop a vocabulary to describe objects, events, topics, and concepts (e.g., responding to the question, “What is this?”). The second level focuses on the organization and classification of this vocabulary (e.g., “How can we group these objects?”). This organization facilitates the child’s encoding into and retrieval of the information from the child’s long- term memory. The third level is focused on reorganizing and adding to this information, based on what the child already knows of the topic and concept-that is, the linking of the information to higher order reasoning (e.g., “What else do you know about this?”). The fourth level deals with abstractions, with the child reflecting on and restructuring and advancing his or her perceptions of the concepts (e.g., “What do you think will happen if … ?”). Initially developed for the early years of school, Blank et al. ‘s four dialogue levels also have application to students in the higher grades (Blank, 2002).

Often teachers may incorrectly assume that the child can deal with the higher order teacher questions before the child’s earlier levels of language proficiency are understood (Hay & Fielding- Barnsley, 2006). For example, a Grade 1 child who is still working at the vocabulary and classification stage of Blank’s levels of discourse would be confused by a teacher talking about “good” and “bad” foods if that child still does not know the names of the common fruits and vegetables and most of his or her language experience of “good” or “bad” deal with being cooperative with his or her parents. Questions about food being good or bad are Level 4 questions, and the teacher needs to work with the child at the more basic vocabulary and organization levels before advancing to an abstract level of questioning and dialogue.

Unfortunately, although Blank et al.’s (2003) dialogue theory for enhancing children’s language development and children’s ability to cope with the formal instruction of the classroom seems promising, there is little documentation on its effectiveness. There is some evidence, however, from Freiberg et al.’s (2005) preschool and kindergarten research that Blank’s language dialogue instructional approach, embedded in a mainstream learning program, may be effective for children vulnerable to developing early reading difficulties. Thus, the core aim of the present study is to investigate the effectiveness of Blank’s procedures with children considered at risk and vulnerable for reading difficulties.

Collaborative Service Delivery Model

There is increasing evidence that children’s language skills are more readily enhanced and sustainably improved when the language intervention occurs in the child’s own social learning environment (Elias, Hay, Homel, & Freiberg, 2006; Nash, 2002; Gates & Grayson, 2004). This finding has led to an increased focus on collaboration with and training of others in the child’s learning environment- particularly teachers and parents-by professionals who have more experience or knowledge about a particular domain (Dettmer, Thurston, & Dyck, 2005; Verhoeven & van Balkom, 2004).

In the context of the planned research, using a collaborative intervention model for children with language difficulties, the support teacher with special training in children’s language development provided an indirect service to the students, focusing more on the mentoring of the teachers who directly delivered the majority of the intervention program and on modeling and demonstrating lessons and strategies that the teachers could reproduce and adapt (Dettmer et al., 2005; Hay, 2002; Wasik et al, 2002). The expectation was that in a support model, shared ownership of the program would encourage and enable all team members to cooperate in the decision making, planning, and implementation of the program.

Therefore, the aim of this research study is to investigate the effectiveness of a Grade 1 intervention program that incorporated strategies based on Blank’s levels of dialogue (Blank et al., 2003), using a collaborative support service delivery model to work with children from a low-SES environment who were considered vulnerable to early reading and learning difficulties. The study used a quasi- experimental research design comparing the end-of-year reading achievement of two similar cohorts of children-those who followed the traditional Grade 1 program, and those who experienced the traditional Grade 1 program plus the additional language intervention. In this design, the end-of-year reading achievement of the Grade 1 children who attended the same school in the year prior to the intervention was compared with the end-of-year reading achievement of the Grade 1 children who followed a similar program plus the additional language intervention. In this design, the expectation was that both cohorts of Grade 1 children were drawn from a similar social, cultural, and physical community and experienced a shared local learning environment (see Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2000, for a discussion of this design).

Method

Participants

Permission to conduct this research was given by the relevant educational and university authorities along with written consent from the children’s parents and caregivers. The urban school selected for the study, located in Queensland, Australia, had Grades 1 to 7 on one campus. During the 2 years associated with this study, the total student population of the school was around 350 students, with the school maintaining three classes of Grade 1 children with about equal numbers of boys and girls. The comparison Grade 1 cohort included 59 children (29 boys, 30 girls), and the intervention Grade 1 cohort included 57 children (27 boys, 30 girls). At the time of initial testing of both cohorts, 1 month into the school year, the mean age of the children was 5 years 9 months (SD = 4.95 months).

Although the language of instruction for both cohorts of Grade 1 children was English, many of the children were from homes where English was not the first language. With reference to the ethnic background of the local school community, 42% were Caucasian, 4% were Indigenous, 32% were Vietnamese, 16% were Pacific Islanders, and the remaining 6% were mainly from Middle East, African, or Chinese backgrounds. School records showed that more than 25% of the families of children attending the school were dependent on welfare payments. At the time of the research, government documentation on this urban community noted that (a) half of all dwellings were public housing, (b) sole-parent families constituted approximately a third of the total families in the district, (c) nearly one person in five was a child under the age of 10, (d) nearly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, and (e) the median household weekly income was one of the lowest in the state. Significantly, the juvenile crime rate was recorded as three times higher than in other communities, and child abuse notification rates were high.

Initial language and early literacy testing of both cohorts of children demonstrated a similar pattern of results, with approximately 40% of the children from both groups commencing formal schooling with at least a 12-month delay in receptive language age scores based on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 1997) and about 20% of the children showing at least a 12-month delay in expressive language age scores from the Hundred Picture Naming Test (Fisher & Glenister, 1992). In terms of basic alphabetic knowledge, approximately 60% of the children could not name 21 or more of the letters in the alphabet (80% of the alphabet), and a third of the children could not name 13 or more letters (50% of the alphabet). In terms of basic phonological awareness skills, about a third of the children were unable to regularly succeed at basic rhyme activities, such as “name another word that rhymes with fox,” when given a range of pictures including one of a box. Intervention

In the intervention, the language support teacher worked with the three Grade 1 teachers over the course of an academic year. The support teacher visited the school, spending about 2 hours per week with each teacher during Term 1 (about 12 weeks). She conducted formal and informal inservice programs with the classroom teachers and mentored their progress and took small groups of children for activities based on Blank’s theory of language enhancement. Regular visits were continued for the rest of the school year, but these visits became less frequent once the Grade 1 teachers were familiar and confident with implementing Blank’s language development strategies. Although Blank et al.’s (2003) test and manual provide the teacher with an outline and a conceptualization of the four levels plus some examples, it is still the responsibility of the teacher to incorporate and adapt Blank’s approach to the context and situation of each individual classroom.

In this intervention, many of the early lessons and activities were designed to develop the children’s knowledge of nouns and verbs (Level 1 of Blank’s model) and how they could be classified and organized (Level 2 of Blank’s model). The children were encouraged to give their answers in full sentences, with the teacher responding to and modeling for the children using extended sentence dialogue.

The following example of a lesson that the teachers designed is based on the theme of gardening. In this lesson, the teacher had the children name gardening implements from pictures and real objects (e.g., a spade, handfork, rake, wheelbarrow) in response to a Level 1 question. Level 2 questions involved the teacher asking questions of the children to classify the objects into logical groups, for example, “Which of these gardening tools have wood in them?”"Which would you use in a small garden?”"Which would you use in autumn?”"I am going to describe an object, and I want you to tell me what I am thinking of?” In terms of Blank’s Level 3 dialogue questions, the teacher would ask, “Who else apart from a gardener would use a wheelbarrow?” Looking at a set of pictures containing garden vegetables and garden tools, the teacher also asked level 4 questions such as, “Which of these are used for planting out seedlings? Why?” Following this gardening unit, the teacher would then move on to other lessons associated with naming and classifying, for example, insects found in the garden, then common living things found in the garden.

Procedure

As already mentioned, in this intervention, the support teacher worked with the classroom teachers to plan, foster, and implement a more developmentally appropriate language curriculum for each child in the classroom. For example, the greater proportion of the teacher’s talk during a lesson might have been pitched at the child’s current Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (PLAI; Blank, Rose, & Berlin, 2003) level, and the remainder (perhaps 30%) at the next developmental level. That is, the teacher’s language was neither too easy nor too difficult for the child. Rather, the teacher’s language was at an appropriate instructional level at which she or he modeled language at the next level of conceptual complexity and proficiency. Such a balance of easy and difficult teacher talk facilitates the child’s participation in dynamic language-enhancing dialogues delivered in small-group activities or planned individual lessons.

The support teacher also worked with the classroom teachers to foster the children’s social language and communication skills and the children’s understanding of the instructional language in the classroom. This involved teaching children to (a) attend to the teacher, (b) ask for help, (c) practice and understand group process skills, (d) use turn taking, and (e) develop positive peer interactions.

It is important to note that Blank’s language development approach was additional to and in extension of the well-established Grade 1 reading development program that had been conducted at the school for some years. This established program had a strong phonological and word decoding focus that included (a) alphabet activities, as suggested by Adams, Foorman, Kunberg, and Beeler (1998); (b) the development of children’s core reading sight-word vocabulary based, in part, on Spencer and Hay’s (1998) Australian sight-word list; (c) the use of commercial programs, such as the phonological program Jolly Phonics (Lloyd, Wernham, Jolly, & Stephen, 1998); and (d) the use of the initial word knowledge, phonics, and spelling activities from Davies and Ritchie’s (1998) program Teaching Handwriting Reading and Spelling Skills (THRASS). Two of the three Grade 1 teachers involved in the intervention were the same for both cohorts of children, with all teachers using the same basal reading scheme for both cohorts of Grade 1 children. The assumed critical difference between the two cohorts was the embedding of notions of children’s language development into the instruction offered to the second cohort of children.

Results

An ANOVA between the previous Grade 1 children’s end-of-year reading age test scores measured using the Burt Word Reading Test (Gilmore, Croft, & Reid, 1981) and the end-of-year reading age test scores for the children in the intervention cohort demonstrated a significant difference, F(1, 114) = 5.99, p = .016, between the two groups of children. Based on end-of-year reading age scores in months, the intervention cohort (n = 57) performed better in reading (M = 81.42, SD = 8.01) than the comparison cohort (n = 59; M = 77.41, SD = 9.50).

Similarly, based on the end-of-year Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1999) reading age test scores, 61% of the Grade 1 children in the year prior to the intervention scored below their chronological age. In comparison, only 29% of the intervention cohort children scored below their chronological age on the NARA at the end of Grade 1. There was a significant statistical difference between the two cohorts, chi^sup 2^(1, N = 116) = 11.45, p < .001.

It is also interesting to note the number of intervention cohort children who made significant changes in their language performance as measured by Blank et al.’s (2003) language assessment instrument. At the start of the year, about 60% of the children were considered at risk-that is, functioning at Level 1 or Level 2 on Blank et al.’s language scale. At the end of the year, only 25% of these children were functioning at either Level 1 or Level 2 of Blank’s language scale (see Table 2). A chi-square analysis demonstrated a significant improvement between these two measurement points, chi^sup 2^(1, N = 57) = 15.96, p < .001. Of the 13 children still considered to be at risk in the area of language proficiency at the end of Grade 1, 9 were children for whom English was a second language, whereas the others were suspected of having some form of mild intellectual impairment or some level of cognitive processing difficulties requiring a more individual intervention.

Discussion

The findings from this study are supportive of the earlier research conducted by Wasik et al. (2002), which showed that children raised in disadvantaged communities often enter school with limited language skills and less exposure to the print-related experiences that are considered necessary for early literacy development. As a consequence, these children are less well prepared for learning than their peers who have established key language and early literacy skills. Just as important, this research also demonstrates that it is not phonological knowledge and book reading alone that contribute to the early development of literacy. The development of such skills is also associated with the discourse that occurs about book reading and the communication and interactions within classrooms that create a rich context in which children learn and use language and literacy skills. Effective classroom discourses for the child with limited communication and language skills involve engaging the child in reciprocal verbal interactions that support the child in using progressively more linguistically complex dialogues. It is the claim of this study that such discourses directly facilitate the development of children’s language proficiency and indirectly facilitate the development of their reading skills.

Why did the addition of Blank’s language development strategies to the school’s traditional Grade 1 program facilitate reading development? For example, when the teacher asked the children to name the foods in front of them, the teacher was enhancing their vocabulary; but when the teacher moved on to the second stage of Blank’s discourse hierarchy and asked the children to classify these foods into fruits and nonfruits, then the teacher was directly and indirectly teaching memory and cognitive organization strategies. Similarly, when the teacher went on to ask the children to explain their answers, the teacher was facilitating the children’s verbal reasoning.

The intervention may have also been effective because it addressed the concerns expressed by Lovett et al. (2000) that traditional early reading remedial and intervention programs extend for short durations of time and tend to be one-dimensional rather than multidimensional in focus. In this research study, the intervention was conducted for the whole academic school year, and although the traditional Grade 1 program in the target school had a strong focus on children’s phonological and word decoding development (e.g., alphabet activities; Adams et al., 1998; Jolly Phonics; Lloyd et al., 1998), the additional emphasis on children’s language development provided children in the intervention group with a more multidimensional program of instruction that better addressed their early reading development needs. Given that children with reading difficulties commonly have vocabulary delays, verbal memory difficulties, and poor verbal reasoning skills (Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2002, 2006; Torgesen, 2002), Blank et al.’s (2003) approach to enhancing language seems very suited to this population of at- risk children. Also, whereas some early childhood teachers may incidentally enhance children’s language, the explicit and systematic teaching of vocabulary, verbal memory organization skills, and verbal reflection that Blank’s procedures encourage may be the critical variable, in combination with an assessment procedure that allows teachers to better monitor and understand children’s diverse stages of language development.

The success of this multidimensional intervention is compatible with the theoretical notions of Stanovich and Beck (2000), who concluded that children’s decoding, language, and metacognition abilities work in an iterative, dynamic, and interactive way, so that gains or deficits in one domain directly or indirectly influence the development in another domain and thus ultimately affect the entire reading process. Furthermore, whereas there is considerable debate in the literature regarding the optimal levels and intensity of phonological instruction components in the total reading program, the suggestion that any one approach or intervention can be a “one size fits all” model denies the reality of the diverse range of problems in the population of children who find reading acquisition difficult (Duke & Pearson, 2002; Lerner & Kline, 2006). Certainly, research has indicated that young children with learning difficulties make greater progress when instructional interventions are multifaceted, combining a range of approaches. For example, some of the best results are achieved in intervention programs when they include a variety of elements, such as awareness of sound-letter relationships, vocabulary development, and strategy teaching (Jordan, Snow, & Porche, 2000).

This study is also supportive of and consistent with the findings of the meta-analysis conducted by M. Nation et al. (2003), that effective interventions had nine common traits and characteristics, namely that effective interventions (a) were comprehensive (implemented throughout the grade or school system), (b) included varied teaching methods, (c) provided sufficient dosage, (d) were theory driven, (e) provided opportunities for positive relationships to develop, (f) were appropriately timed, (g) were socioculturally relevant, (h) included outcome evaluations, and (i) were implemented by well-trained staff.

Although the present research provides evidence that a children’s language development intervention, along with systematic phonological instruction, benefits children who traditionally have difficulty in early reading development, it is acknowledged that there are limitations to the study. First, the support teacher introduced new resources into the three classrooms in terms of the time available for working with teachers and working with groups of children. Therefore, it could be that the critical variable was the additional resources introduced into the three classrooms, rather than the language activities, or a combination of both. Second, this study was relatively small scale and located in only one school. A larger study that randomly assigned schools and classrooms groups to either the intervention or the traditional Grade 1 program could be a direction for future research. Also, in this study, the main outcome measure for the children was their end-of-year reading ability scores. In a future study, a greater variety of outcome measures could be included, such as more language measures, school and reading self-concept measures, and follow-up measures of the children’s Grade 2 and 3 reading progress.

Much of the debate in Australia on children’s early reading development has been dominated by a discussion of the importance of decoding words and phonics (Elkins, 2002; Louden et al., 2000; Woolley & Hay, 2004). In this, Australia is similarly positioned to the United States and in accordance with the findings of the National Reading Panel (2000) report. Although we recognize that phonics has its place, phonics alone cannot be the first or only focus for at-risk beginning readers, particularly for young children from diverse backgrounds with limited experience in language- and literacy-based activities. The timing of the introduction of phonics and the duration and intensity of phonological instruction are critical for these young children.

The concern is that an overemphasis on phonics instruction to the exclusion of other language and literacy activities may restrict some children from developing the concepts, background knowledge, and confidence necessary for the later development of word identification and comprehension skills. This point has also been articulated by Au (2003) based on her family and early literacy programs with at-risk Hawaiian children. Likewise, Stahl (1997) noted that children go through three broad stages in learning to identify words: awareness, accuracy, and automaticity. For Stahl, the matching of visual letter knowledge to letter-sound knowledge occurs after the child understands the language concepts associated with the word and follows from the instructional discourse between the child and the teacher or significant other, such as the parent, in the child’s social learning environment.

Thus, there is a need to provide the necessary language and literacy instruction to children based on where each individual child is situated on the language and literacy continuum. In this sense, the axiom stated by McGee and Purcell-Gates (1997) holds true: “Children learn to read and write successfully if their teachers accommodate their instruction to the children, and they struggle if they do not” (p. 312).

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ian Hay, PhD, is a professor of special education at the University of New England, New South Wales, Australia. His research interests include learning difficulties, literacy development, and motivation. Gordon Elias, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Griffith University, Queensland. His research interests involve children’s language and literacy development. Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include children’s reading and literacy development. Ross Homel, PhD, is a professor in and director of the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance at Griffith University, and researches transitional pathways of children from disadvantaged communities. Kath Freiberg, PhD, is a research fellow at Griffith University and researches child and community development. Address: ian Hay, School of Education, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, 2351, Australia; e-mail: Ian.Hay@une.edu.au

AUTHORS’ NOTE

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council grant (No. C0107593) to Ross Homel, Gordon Elias, and Ian Hay as the chief investigators, with Mission Australia as the industry partner. The cooperation of Education Queensland, Carmel Prothero, and Ruth Ernst, developmental language teachers, and Susan Anderson, learning support teacher, is gratefully acknowledged.

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