Contents

• Introduction
• The place of reading and writing in language development
• Simple model of reading
• The ’Big 6’ of reading instruction
• Scarborough model
• The three cueing systems
• Freebody and Luke’s four resource model
• Is there a sequence?
• Conclusion

Dr Bronwyn Parkin

Reading models: putting the jigsaw together

Dr Bronwyn Parkin

About the author

Dr Bronwyn Parkin is an adjunct lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Adelaide and a literacy consultant with a long history of working in literacy with Aboriginal and low socio-economic students. Along with Dr Helen Harper, Bronwyn was a recipient of the 2016 PETAA research grant. Together they co-wrote Teaching with Intent: scaffolding academic language with marginalised students and the 2020 EPAA Award-winning Teaching with intent 2: literature-based literacy teaching and learning.

Reading can be likened to a jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the front of the box is the text, and all the pieces are the parts of words inside the text. We put the picture together bit by bit, puzzle piece by puzzle piece, using the shape and colour of each piece to form meaningful parts of the picture: a tree, a balloon, a person. We learn how to group pieces according to shape and colour, but it is the picture that drives us to persist, and the picture that gives sense to our activity.

Thanks to cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, we know so much about how the brain engages with and makes meaning from print. They have been able to observe how different parts of the brain fire up as readers read. They tell us that the reading process begins with visual recognition of words and letters and moves in dual pathways to pronunciation and meaning which feed into each other (Dehaene, 2009; Willingham, 2017).

Thanks to linguists, we know about how meaning is constructed. They tell us that that meaning is conveyed, depending on its cultural purposes, through different types of texts. We know about the grammatical and structural differences between oral and written language, and the challenges that arise for many students in comprehending written texts (for example, Halliday, 1987).

There is no doubt about it: the process of learning to read is complex. So how do we, as teachers, help our students to develop in learning to read, so that they can read for different purposes, for example, for entertainment, for learning and in order to be a participating citizen? How can our teaching most effectively support all the learners in our classrooms?

As knowledge about reading has grown over the years, theorists have developed a broad array of reading models to represent the reading process.

These models can be viewed as attempts to summarise the knowledge and skills required to be a successful reader, as a tool for organising our class literacy program, or as an analytic tool for working out what is happening when we’re concerned about a student’s reading performance. The models describe reading with different numbers of components; with differing amounts of detail; and, in the way they are arranged, they send messages about different priorities for teaching reading. In recent times, ‘reading’ models have been broadened to describe literacy more generally; that is, reading and writing.

Each of these models suggests a different ‘schema’, that is how the knowledge and skills required for reading (or literacy) interact.

These frameworks therefore lead us to organise and prioritise the components of our literacy program in different ways. Selecting a model matters, because it effects how teaching and learning is planned, organised, and sequenced in the primary classroom. It impacts on the cognitive and social demands of learning to read and write, and has to serve our needs as teachers, as well as the needs of every child in our class.

This PETAA Paper is written for education students and early career teachers. It has one simple purpose: to look at some of the most familiar models of reading, view them from the perspective of the broader context of language development, see how they fit with each other, and work out their strengths and limitations. In other words, we are ourselves developing a schema that helps us to make sense of these sometimes-confusing models, and know what gaps still need to be filled.

The paper reflects the content of Chapter 2 of PETAA’s recent publication The Alphabetic Principle and Beyond (Cox, Feez, & Beveridge, 2019) which is priority reading for a depth of understanding about phonics and spelling.

The five reading or literacy models listed here have been selected because they are familiar in the Australian education context. They are:

The description of each model will include the following:

• How it came to be
• What it does
• Affordances and constraints (how it might help, and the limitations of the model)

Reading and writing of written texts are only one way that we communicate through language. Before we address each model in turn, it is important to understand how they fit within the broader concept of language, using the functional model of language which is the foundation of the Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2016).