Abstract
Several international literacy surveys since 1970 have consistently shown that while some of our top students have performed as well as those from most of the other participating countries, New Zealand has one of the longest tails of underachievement. It is suggested that one reason for this tail is that early literacy programs lack a focus on the explicit teaching of phonological-based skills. Furthermore, this tail has continued to lengthen since the introduction of Reading Recovery in the early 1980s, which suggests that this program has not been particularly effective in addressing the literacy learning needs of many students including Maori and Pasifika. This paper discusses the findings from a small-scale study that focused on the assessment and teaching of phonological-based skills and strategies within a year one class in an urban school. A key finding was that the students who had received the intervention out-performed the nonintervention control group on every assessment measure used in the study. The results also highlight the importance of early phonological-based assessments as a basis for the development of relevant and effective literacy instruction for at-risk literacy learners in their first year of school.
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Greaney, K., Arrow, A. Phonological-based assessment and teaching within a first year reading program in New Zealand. AJLL 35, 9–32 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03651871
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03651871