ALEA National Conference Canberra 1-4 July 2023

In our session, we articulated the link between early reading acquisition and music. We modelled to participants how to use quality texts as vehicles to integrate reading and music and shared teaching strategies, advocating the importance of the arts, in particular music, as a universal experience that benefits all learning at school.

Lorri and Jubilee at conference

Music precedes language development in our brains. From music, students move to song, then speech, then to alphabetic knowledge and reading. Children need to be able to keep a beat to learn to read. Rhythm helps organize events into conventional and logical patterns. Rhythm is the main element that creates the sequence of sound and silences in music. In learning to read, rhythm helps us to select and identify phonemes, syllables, words, and phrases from an ongoing speech stream. Music has power to engage students in learning. This was the gist of our joint session.

Some relevant highlights from other sessions I attended include:

 Using Quality Children’s Literature as a Springboard for Success, presented by Ron Gorman and Kerry Handley from the Association of Independent Schools, WA. They widely cited the text, Burkins & Yates (2021).  Shifting the Balance - 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom. Stenhouse Publishing. The presenters differentiated between listening comprehension and reading comprehension.  “Listening comprehension, built through language interaction—is an essential precondition of reading comprehension. In the early years, while children are learning to read, drawing on texts that are well below their listening comprehension capacity, teachers need to focus on stretching the limits of listening comprehension through oral language development and knowledge building”. They discussed the importance of deep discussions about texts in the English classroom, highly relevant to our work in schools. “Meaningful conversations are certainly important, but we need to keep in mind that the most meaningful early work in comprehension happens in read-aloud, shared reading, and classroom conversation.”

Edwina West, Oakhill College, Reading Australia Fellowship recipient 2021; introduced us to the term “aliteracy”, which she described as the skills of reading having been acquired, but not the will to read. Her main theme was reading for enjoyment improves school achievement levels generally, not just in subject English. She outlined a range of data showing reading for enjoyment declines as students move through the grades. Edwina shared the reading choices of young people and their preferred genre, science fiction and fantasy. She made the important point that fostering a genuine and life-long love of reading will never come from extrinsic motivators. Choosing mostly Australian texts represents the diversity and authenticity of Australian society, builds empathy and cultural understanding. Like the Gorman and Handley presentation, Edwina discussed the benefits of the read- aloud, and students reading aloud for enjoyment, participating in reading strategies that build fluency like readers theatre, drama, songs and poetry recital.

Academics from Griffith University, Queensland (Hoyte, Cha & Exley) presented a session on Writing from the heart, based on their Australian Research Council (ARC) project. They shared the affordances of creative writing, including engaging with quality literature, exploring affective responses, developing empathy and students’ understandings of themselves and their world. They identified current constraints in teaching writing, including writing for assessment, formulaic approaches relating to structure and genre and current state-based pre-packaged English units.  This was particularly relevant to our work as we present a registered course helping teachers to write English units based on quality texts, and many of our participants report the some of the available state-based units did not address the learning needs of the students in their schools, and teachers found them time-consuming and unwieldy. These teacher-self reports, common feedback in our workshops, were supported by Hoyte, Cha and Exley’s research findings, in that state-based pre-packaged units sometimes contain unwieldy assessments and constrained pedagogies which result in student disengagement and stilted writing.  

Teachers always ask for recommendations for quality texts that students love, to teach in classrooms. A favourite session I attended was by Kerry-Ann O’Sullivan from Macquarie University. She reported on a study with her undergraduate students, identifying their favourite books, the ones they really want to teach.  She found responses were strongly influenced by personal favourites, and there was an over-representation of a limited group of well-known authors. This resulted in stereotypes, lack of diversity, limited character portrayals and a lack of representation of Indigenous, diverse, multicultural, and texts about gender and inclusion. Her future goals as a teacher educator relate to broadening students’ exposure to different perspectives and stories through literature.

Kerry-Ann cited the famous words of UK storyteller, musician, and poet extraordinaire, Michael Rosen, to sum up the main message of her presentation…

A child

A book

A read

A chat.

This is the way the mind grows.

    Not with a test

                                                                            But a tale.                                   (Michael Rosen)

Attendance at national conferences provide enriching opportunities to network with like minded educators, showcase practitioner knowledge and skills and raise awareness of current research projects around Australia and beyond that may result in changed teacher practice and a stronger, more collaborative profession, where educators learn with and from each other. It is always a valuable experience!

Participants during session