How do Australian schools teach letters, sounds, and reading to children?

In recent days, society has paid special attention to teaching and learning spelling for first graders. There have been many opinions on how to teach and learn spelling, sounds and letters in current textbooks, especially the book "Vietnamese 1 - Educational Technology".

The article by Dr. Nguyen The Duong (Institute of Linguistics) shares a perspective on the issue of teaching mother tongue in the first year of primary school from the reality of Australia, a country with an advanced education system in the world.

Learning to read from… 5 years old

Children in Australia officially become acquainted with letters and learn to read from the age of 5 when they start primary school, which is one year earlier than in Vietnam.

The first class of primary school is called Prep, which means “preparatory” class, similar to the “primary” class in Vietnam in the past, where students begin to be exposed to the school environment through subjects such as mother tongue, math, natural science and social science.

According to the Australian Curriculum, Prep students need to be able to distinguish between sounds and letters.

After completing the first year of primary school, students should be able to recognize all the letters of the English alphabet and distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters.

They also need to know and use the most common sounds represented by most letters.

Beginners need to know how to combine sounds to read words that have CVC structures (that is, consonant – vowel – consonant).

In addition, children must also recognize and create rhyming words, words with similar initial sounds, syllables and sounds in words when speaking.

In writing, students must also demonstrate an understanding of letters and sounds, begin to use punctuation marks and capital and lower case letters correctly and in the right places.

Teach sounds before teaching letters

The method of teaching reading and writing in Australian schools is called synthetic phonics.

This method is applied in many countries, including England, Canada, America… It focuses on the relationship between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters).

These sounds are taught separately and then combined into specific words.

Sounds at different positions in words such as beginning, end, middle are also taught and clearly distinguished.

Australian students are taught sounds first.

Teaching sounds is done through songs that are very cute and easy to understand. These are melodies from songs that are familiar to children but have new lyrics to serve the purpose of learning sounds.

For example, the sound /k/ would follow the melody of the song “She'll be coming round the mountain” with the following lyrics:

Kites are flying in the sky

/k/-/k/-/k/

Kites are flying in the sky

/k/-/k/-/k/

Kites are flying in the sky

… flying in the sky

… kites are flying in the sky

/k/-/k/-/k/

While singing, children raise their hands high, making movements as if they are flying a kite. From there, they will grasp words with the “flag” sound /k/ such as kites, sky… and at the same time grasp the pronunciation of the sound /k/.

What needs to be emphasized here is that at first, the synthetic phonics method does not focus on teaching meaning, but focuses mainly on correct pronunciation.

Therefore, students may create nonsense words likefeepgoodchoy, as long as they recognize and understand the pronunciation of these nonsense words. In addition, teachers often guide students to practice… writing poems, which are essentially rhyming sentences. The “poems” may be silly, but the most important thing is to help children grasp the rules of sound and rhyme.

Although it is a requirement for students to know the names of letters at the end of Prep, in the first stage of Prep, teachers do not teach students the names of letters.

Letter names are only taught once children have mastered sound/letter associations and sound blending.

Usually, the letter names are introduced through the very famous ABC song.

Reading ability is standardized into levels.

After mastering the principles of sound, each week the teacher gives the children a list of 12 sight words.

These are basic vocabulary words, often used with high frequency and can be memorized by sight without having to separate sounds or rhymes, such as I, you, we, in... By the end of Prep, children are taught 200 sight words.

With sight vocabulary and knowledge of sounds and rhymes as a foundation, Prep students also begin to learn to read.

Australian children's reading ability is divided into 30 levels from easy to difficult. The country's education program expects students to complete these 30 reading levels by the end of Grade 2. After completing Prep, students are expected to reach reading level 6.

However, this expectation does not mean that all students are required to pass this level 6 upon completing Prep.

In any class, students' reading ability is not equal. Some students learn to read more slowly, so after completing Prep class, they can only pass level 4, or even level 2.

Although they did not reach the expected threshold, these students were still promoted to the next grade.

On the contrary, students who demonstrate good reading ability are completely allowed to “skip”, meaning they can skip a few levels. Therefore, in the same class, after one year of Prep, some students can reach reading level 23, but others can only reach level 2 or 3.

Typically, teachers will divide the class into different reading groups, depending on reading level. Therefore, in a class, if a student has a reading level that is superior to the rest of the class and cannot be paired with other students, that student, during reading practice, is transferred to another class to be paired with students of similar reading ability. However, most students reach their highest reading level after completing second grade.

There are absolutely no reading textbooks.

It is worth noting that Australia does not have a fixed textbook system like Vietnam.

Instead, to help students read and assess their reading ability, Australia has a very rich, complete, perfect and scientific reading system.

The book content is very rich, from funny stories, fictional stories to scientific books written from the simplest to the most difficult according to each reading level.

This system of books is provided to each classroom. In each classroom, there is usually a very large bookshelf. Books are arranged on the shelf according to each reading level. Students at which reading level will choose the appropriate book, take it home to read. The teacher will be the one to check whether the student has passed that reading level or not and make the decision to let the student stay at that reading level, move up a level or skip.

In a class where students are at different reading levels, teachers never feel frustrated or pressured about student performance.

On the contrary, students are allowed to develop naturally, according to their own abilities. Students are allowed to be themselves, and are not caught up in the cycle of achievements and general standards of the school.