Structured Literacy (SL) cf Linguistic Phonics (LP) cf Structured Linguistic Literacy (SLL)
My husband needs a code book, not to understand the English language but to understand the jargon I speak when I start talking about teaching practices.
SL, LP, SLL [His eyes glaze over, “Too many Ls, you’re confusing me…”]
AP (Analytic Phonics), SSP (Systematic Synthetic Phonics)…[Nodding his head but losing the plot: “They’re still phonics though, aren’t they?”]
BL (Balanced Literacy), WL (Whole Language)…[“Uh, huh..” Does the dishes and slips out of the room, leaving me pondering my dilemma alone…]
I am caught up in knots at present trying to decide whether I care about such labels or not.
Some say Linguistic Phonics is ‘not a research term’ in reading science. (Although many LP programmes trace their routes back to researcher Diane McGuinness, who used the phrase.) Others say ‘reading science’ is itself not a single field and is a misleading term.
I am not a researcher nor the seller of a programme nor a consultant teaching a certain approach: I am a simple teacher and parent trying to make sense of all the labels, so here is my attempt at explaining the current increase in such labels and acronyms.
It comes down to marketing and communicating convoluted ideas into simple words so that people can tell one thing apart from another. But it also risks 'factionalising' best practice.
For a long time now, I have advocated for Structured Literacy as the teaching practices that should be adopted in NZ in preference to Balanced Literacy or Whole Language instruction.
I learnt that Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) was essential to teaching SL, so I undertook training in Sounds-Write as it had good reviews from respected speech language therapists who used it in remedial reading clinics, it combined access to theory and hardcopy resources, and it was reasonably affordable for 6 weeks of online training.
Then, to my surprise, some people who had undertaken alternative SSP training (Multisensory Structured Literacy or MSL) said that those who were using Linguistic Phonics (the theoretical underpinning of Sounds-Write) could not be said to be teaching ‘proper’ Structured Literacy because it did not teach rules or syllabification in the same way as did traditional Orton-Gillingham or MSL-based approaches.
In fact, SL had been coined as a marketing term by a wide range of different Orton-Gillingham providers, through the International Dyslexia Association, to give them an easier phrase to promote or ‘sell’ their multisensory SSP programmes to parents, educators and education departments. (More recently it has come to also stand as a kind of shorthand for the teaching practices that transfer Science of Reading research into literacy lessons.)
Since the trademarking of the SL brand, however, a meta-analysis of O-G approaches has found that its core, successful component is SSP and that the multisensory part is not proven or disproven to be effective.
Therefore, any SSP - including O-G, MSL and Linguistic Phonics - is better than Balanced Literacy using only a smattering of analytic phonics; in other words, following a phonics scope and sequence (systematic), teaching from simple to complex, and integrating reading and writing skills for both segmenting and blending (synthesising), is at the heart of Structured Literacy advocacy movement. Furthermore, reading and writing instruction should go from sounds, to words, to sentences, to passages, to whole texts, with the ultimate aim of students being fully literate in both reading and writing, using comprehension and communication of ideas across the full curriculum. (And, yes, analytic phonics is helpful during word study in the later stages of a scope and sequence.)
Recently, I was invited to go on a list of approved SL tutors in NZ; we had to provide evidence of our training in being able to teach SSP but if we had also been trained using an MSL approach, we would get a special endorsement against our listing. Why? So parents could be assured that the tutor was following evidence-based best practice…Fair enough.
If this is the case, however, why are parents of struggling readers not then also being told that the multisensory components of O-G or MSL programmes are not essential but having a tutor following a SSP approach is? Or that following a speech to print Linguistic Phonics approach may have advantages for younger children over rule-laden programmes?
Is it this turf war for name recognition that is driving the rebranding of Linguist Phonics programmes as Structured Linguistic Literacy? If what I trained in can’t be called ‘real’ Structured Literacy, then should I join this other group of advocates and promote myself as a SLL practitioner?
I’d personally rather not make the differentiation because I feel it waters down the advocacy for SL which is far preferable to Balanced Literacy, early analytic phonics and the debunked 3-cueing methods, and the latter is far more damaging to student progress than the difference between SL or SLL.
Why get in knots over this, if at all?
I think this debate illustrates the misunderstanding about the ongoing nature of the body of work referenced as the Science of Reading. I’m not going to say ‘nothing is set in stone’ because obviously some things are proven (the Earth is round and learning SSP for English is useful.) However, teaching is both an art and a science; new research is being done and discussed on a regular basis and part of an educator’s job is to determine ‘So what? How can this help me understand the barriers to learning for my current students? Which methods will result in improved results for my students?’
Anyone advocating for improvements to our reading instruction in schools needs to be open to discussing new research or different evidence-based methods but we must not lose focus on agreeing to agree on what is currently known and shared best practice.
If we just disagree, in a constant game of ‘one upmanship’, we will be doing a disservice to the students in our care.
References:
A Prototype for Teaching the English Alphabet Code by Professor Diane McGuinness p17 https://rrf.org.uk/pdf/nl/49.pdf
https://www.phonicbooks.co.uk/2023/01/17/structured-linguistic-literacy/
Nora Chahbazi presents How and Why a Structured Linguistic Literacy Approach Closes the Gap
Marnie Ginsberg presents Another Way: How Can One Teach Decoding without Rules and Syllable Types?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVWjlDWF_S4
https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/which-best-analytic-or-synthetic-phonics
Structured Literacy: A New Term to Unify Us and Sell What We Do, By Hal Malchow, President IDA, https://dyslexiaida.org/structured-literacy/
What Does Science Say About Orton-Gillingham Interventions? An Explanation and Commentary on the Stevens et al. (2021) Meta-Analysis by Emily Solari, Yaacov Petscher, and Colby Hall https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Article-for-May-2021-TRLJ.pdf
https://www.deb.co.nz/dyslexia/need-to-know/what-to-ask-a-tutor/
Plus private Facebook Group chat, not able to be copied due to group rules, with discussions for and against the differentiation between SL, SLL and other evidence-based methodologies for teaching phonics.
