S6 E14 - Should We Be Teaching Phonics in Years 3-6?

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Hello, hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn, and today we're tackling a question that I find in my inbox reasonably regularly. Should we be teaching phonics beyond the early years? It's a really important question and one that doesn't have a simple yes or no answer, I'm afraid. But let's dive in and have a think about the nuance of instruction in the three to six years.

Before we can answer whether we should or shouldn't be teaching phonics in years three to six and beyond that, we need to understand what research tells us about how spelling knowledge develops. We know that spelling instruction includes four key areas: phonics, orthographic conventions, morphology and etymology. There are two main theories about how we should approach this instruction.

Two Theories

Stage theory suggests that people pass through one stage after another in a hierarchical progression, that you have to learn phonics before you can learn morphology.

Repertoire theory, on the other hand, argues that all four areas should be included in instruction from the beginning. The approach that we take in our work is that both of these things have merit. Absolutely, Repertoire theory's recognition, that words are impacted by many different areas and that we enrich students' understanding by teaching that is something that we base our work on. But we also consider moving from simple to complex concepts, so we get the best of both worlds and, dare I say it, take a balanced approach to choosing content in spelling.

What the Research Says

Research by Berninger, Nagy and colleagues tells us something really important about spelling development. In their 2009 study, they found that growth in phonics knowledge drops off after year four, while knowledge of morphology continues to grow throughout the primary and secondary years. This makes perfect sense to me. Phonics knowledge can be classified as constrained. It's finite. Once students learn the alphabetic principle and can recognise and recall the various ways phonemes can be represented by graphemes, there isn't much more to learn. However, morphology is closely tied to vocabulary and content knowledge across the curriculum. We could say that it's unconstrained. It keeps growing all through the secondary and tertiary years, so it makes sense that morphology becomes the meat and potatoes, if you like, of spelling instruction in the older years.

An Ideal World...

In an ideal world, where students learn the alphabetic principle robustly for both reading and spelling in the early years, the answer to should we be teaching phonics beyond those years? would probably be No. In this ideal scenario, we've taught robustly in the early years and students reach year three with well-developed phonics knowledge. We would only tap into phonics knowledge as needed. For example, we might encounter a word like reign during a HASS lesson on monarchies. We might help students spell this word by pointing out that it has the same pattern as in the word feign meaning to pretend, and deign meaning to condescend. Some programs might include this in the core scope and sequence, but for me, the thing about this is that there are so few words with that particular pattern that there's little utility in devoting precious instructional time to teaching a whole unit on it. We are going to address words like reign and feign and deign as we encounter them in context, and we can do that in the older grades because when students have the foundations of the alphabetic principle, they are able to read well already.

It's No Ideal World

But let's be honest, the ideal picture isn't the reality facing most schools, is it? In most schools, students are arriving in year three and beyond with limited recall of phonics for spelling. In many cases they may be good readers, achieving at or above benchmark on normed reading tests, but when it comes to spelling, they struggle, and here's why this matters. Without automatic spelling, student writing will always be hampered. In order for students to write multi-paragraph texts with confidence and depth, both handwriting and spelling must be automatic. If students have to devote considerable cognitive energy to thinking about spelling basics, they don't have the headspace to think about word choice, language devices or the sophisticated thinking that we want to see play out as they write.

The answer to whether we should teach phonics beyond the early years really is it depends, and I know that's not the clear-cut answer you might have been hoping for, but stick with me as we unpack this. The first thing we need to do is make data-informed decisions about how much phonics to teach and for how long. My view is that we don't want to camp out in phonics with older students forever. We serve them much better by using data to pinpoint gaps in their knowledge, fill those gaps and then ensure long-term retention through short, sharp review. Here's something else to consider. The approach you take this year or next year should ideally be different from the approach that you'll need in two to three years time. Why? Because the goal is that we're getting better at teaching phonics in the early years, so that students don't arrive in year three with a bunch of gaps to fill.

If your school has been on an explicit phonics journey for four to five years and you still have students (who don't have significant learning difficulties) coming through the upper primary years with patchy phonics knowledge, then it's important to consider whether your early years phonics instructions may need some work. The nature of instruction and the intensity of what you provide to students will depend on your school's context and student need. If students are at or above benchmark in their normed reading assessment but they're patchy in their phonics recall, instruction can be short, sharp and targeted. For these students, the purpose is to draw their consciousness to the connections between phonemes and graphemes and give them some practice. For most students in this position, that's enough for them to say oh right, yes, I can use those graphemes for spelling as well as I can for reading, and you show it to them, you do some review and they're off and away.

If, however, students are at risk in your normed reading assessment, phonics instruction isn't just a reminder. It will likely need to be reasonably intensive and students will require careful monitoring over time to ensure that learning sticks. This data-informed approach is exactly the approach that we take in our work with years three to six. We want to make sure that every instructional minute is targeted at students' point of need. We don't want to waste students' time in lessons covering content that they don't need, that makes them switch off. But we also don't want to waste their time in lessons that aren't of sufficient intensity to help move them forward, and, as you can see, there's no one-size-fits-all here. Now, all of this sits within the broader context of what we know about effective upper primary literacy instruction.

As outlined in my Upper Primary Literacy Block guide that you can access for free on our website, word level instruction in years three to six includes three components: phonics, orthographic generalisations and morphology, and normally, for most of the content, the orthographic generalisations and phonics are connected, and etymology, that fourth part, is connected to morphology. The key here, and I know that I'm not supposed to use this word, but I'm going to anyway, the key word is balance. While we might need to address phonics gaps for some students, we absolutely cannot let this squeeze out the rich morphology instruction that should be the backbone of word level learning in the upper primary years. However, and this is really important, we should continue to provide support to older students who require it for as long as is needed. There's no exit point from that kind of work until students have learned the foundational skills they need to be confident readers and spellers.

Where to Start

So how do you decide whether your three to six students need phonics instruction? Well, start with assessment. You can't make good instructional decisions without knowing what your students are up to. We can't also simply say that every year three student or every year five student should get the same instruction because they're in that grade. Instructional decisions must be made according to the needs of students, and if you're not sure whether your students have gaps to fill or what those gaps are, we have a free spelling assessment available on our website at jocelynseamereducation.com/free-resources. Deliver this whole class, it'll take you about two hours to mark it and enter it, and I know that sounds like a long time, but two hours to do that work to save you and your students hours and hours of wasted instructional time is well worth it. This assessment will also help you monitor growth into the long term.

Let me be clear about something: teaching phonics beyond the early years isn't about giving up on high expectations or dumbing down the curriculum. It's about being responsive to student needs so that we can get them where they need to be as quickly and efficiently as possible. When students have automatic spelling, they can focus cognitive energy on the sophisticated thinking and writing we want them to do at their grade level. But without those foundational skills, that's just not going to happen.

If They Need It, They Need It

So should we be teaching phonics beyond the early years? The answer is maybe. And if I'm really honest, for most schools, probably. If students need it, give it to them for as long as they need it, but not a day longer and not at the expense of age-appropriate morphology instruction. The goal isn't to teach phonics forever. The goal is to identify gaps, fill them efficiently and then move students into the rich vocabulary and morphology work exclusively, that will serve them throughout their schooling and beyond. But you don't have to wait until the phonics gaps are filled before you begin the work in morphology. For a little while they will sit side by side in the literacy block. When you can, you drop the phonics instruction off so that you're focusing on morphology for its own sake. Resource Room members and people using our Spelling Success in Action program have everything at their fingertips that they need to do this work meaningfully.

My Plan

If you're working with students in years three to six, or seven and eight, and wondering about their phonics needs, here's my plan that you can follow. Firstly, assess the students. Find out what they know and what they don't know. Secondly, if there are gaps, fill them with targeted, intensive instruction that is appropriate to their learning need. Short and sharp for students who just need a reminder, and targeted for those who need that work. Third, don't camp out in phonics forever or assume that what you do now is what you're going to need into the future. Once students have the foundational phonics knowledge, move on and leave it behind where it belongs. And finally, remember that the best time to teach phonics is in the early years, and if you're finding that you need to do a lot of phonics instruction with older students year after year, it is a really good thing to look at how you're strengthening your instruction in foundation to year two, and we can help you there as well if that's something that you need.

Remember you won't break the children by being responsive to their needs, but you also won't serve them well by giving them instruction they don't need or instruction that isn't as intensive as it has to be to help them moving forward. Keep your eye on the data, focus on what students need and keep that beautiful vision of every child reading and writing propelling you forward. It is absolutely possible if we focus on common sense, data-informed decision that meet our students right where they are. Until next time, happy teaching everyone. Bye.

References:

Berninger, V., Nagy, W., & Abbott, R. (2009). Growth in phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness in grades 1 to 6. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 38(2), 141-163. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-009-9130-6

Seamer, J. (2024). A teacher's guide to the upper primary literacy block: Connected reading and writing for robust learning in Years 3-6. Jocelyn Seamer Education.

Templeton, S. (2020). Stages, phases, repertoires, and waves: Learning to spell and read words. The Reading Teacher, 74(3), 315-323. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1951

If you'd like to get your whole school on board with phonics being taught well from the start, click here.