Keynote: Speech to Print as an Intervention

Kids in word-level reading/spelling intervention typically have poor phonological processing, and often also struggle with attention, memory, language and/or other skills. Many aren't highly motivated to please us or do homework. Interventionists need to be wary of verbiage and emphasise showing and doing over talking, focus on linking speech sounds and word structure to spellings, and stick to the evidence. When flexibility is needed (e.g. the kid will only write about Pokemon), we need to constantly check whether we can justify the changes we make, and not waste time.

To make this session practical, Alison will talk about three evidence-based strategies she considers compatible with speech-to-print approaches:

Embedded Picture Mnemonics. These help kids over the difficult, paired-associate learning hump of linking phonemes with graphemes in memory. There is a Spelfabet Embedded Picture Mnemonic for every phoneme, to show kids there are more sounds than letters. NB There is no need for a mnemonic for every grapheme.

Word-building that demonstrates how to add prefixes and suffixes to known words. This quickly expands the number of words a learner can spell and read e.g. take 'ease' and build 'easing', 'eased', 'easy', 'easily', 'unease', 'uneasy', 'uneasily', 'disease' and so on. Rather than using complex 'if-then' type language to explain juncture changes, Alison will show how she uses double-sided letter tiles to 'flip' e.g. 'n' into 'nn' when turning 'run' into 'running', or 'y' into 'i' when making 'sunny' into 'sunniest'.

Targeting high-utility academic words. Robust vocabulary selection can be tricky in non-school intervention settings because it's often hard to find out what's coming up on the curriculum. Alison has combined some Tier 2 wordlists, deleted duplicates, sorted them by number of syllables, added relevant bases and derived words, and has been using them when working on reading/spelling polysyllabic words. She will make her list freely available.