Teaching Inquiry Term 2 Reflection

 How can I accelerate the reading progress of learners with low phonological awareness?

During term 2 specific teaching time has been planned for teaching letter sounds and letter names.  

We have continued to make the connections with the sounds we here in words and the letters from which they come.

These lessons happen in whole class teaching contexts (e.g using alphabet songs, letter a day focus, handwriting letter formation practise) and in small groups within reading lessons (make and break HFW, letter formation, recognition).

Over the term the learners in my target group have continued to make progress.  All learners have been tested twice in term 2 and their results are depicted below.  Although some of my target group were absent in testing week so more data is needed. There appears to be a correlation between letter sound acquisition and reading achievement.  The learners who with the slower letter acquisition are also the learners who are making slower than expected progress. 

Term 1 &2
	Letter knowledge	Letter	Letter	Letter	Attendance	ROL
Weeks at school	T1. Wk 1/2	T1. Wk 6	T2 Wk1	T2 Wk9		Rol
Student Aa	9	18	33	31	96%	100%
Student Jj	5	13	42	44	94%	92%
Student Nn	3	16	16	43	95%	57%
Student Ll	2	9	15	29	76%	78%
Student Rr	11	22	44	47	78%	78%
Student Cc	0	4	4	A	56%	28%

Closer investigation of the data reveals that the rates of progress are not consistent over all the learners.

Those learners who had rated low on either oral language or memory factors made slower progress than their classmates. 

As this cohort of learners will be moving to another learning space in term 3 I have another group of learners with which to  I will take the lessons learnt from Term1 and Term 2.  I believe that the focus of my term 3 inquiry iteration will need to include specific teaching to address oral language shortfalls.  Many of the running records undertaken in Term 2 and the formative assessment during reading lessons indicated that students made repeated mistakes in Syntax.  eg. "The ........ is in (rather than on) the table"

Phonics is necessary but not of itself sufficient to accelerate the reading achievement of students who come to school with oral language deficits.  Therefore when I choose my target students for next term I will select students who have low oral language scores which I will now assess at school entry and again at the 5 week testing.  My theory is that to accelerate reading progress I will need to address both phonetic knowledge and oral language.