A Canadian programme shows that children from low socio-economic status and minority groups benefit from early literacy-intensive teaching. Amedeo D'Angiulli of Thompson Rivers University and Linda S. Siegel of the University of British Columbia report.

Imagine for a moment a scenario in which any child, rich or poor, can attend a universal literacy programme from Kindergarten to Grade 4, and be exposed to a comprehensive variety of approaches able to suit the individual distinct learning styles and tempos. Although at a considerably smaller scale, this scenario is what inspired the model implemented in the 30 schools making up the school district of North Vancouver in Canada. All children in this district have participated in a rich literacy program as part of the district-wide school curriculum: A programme designed by teachers for teachers.

The literacy programme includes three main modules:
1) teaching of 12 reading strategies (referred to as the "daily dozen")
2) six reading components: Guided Reading, Shared Reading, Reading/Writing Connection, Home Reading Programme, Independent Reading and Read Aloud and Respond
3) instructional activities with an explicit emphasis on the sound-symbol relationship, and independent activities such as cooperative story writing and journal writing using invented spelling.

Learning to listen to language and to hear rhymes and the initial sounds in words are important skills (called phonological awareness) that help the child learn to read. All of the modules included in the North Vancouver programme are offered in the context of classroom-based and small group activities in which teachers have children practise different components of phonological awareness and other aspects of oral language. Although the specific contents vary, all activities have a similar basic structural organisation that is delivered systematically. The children draw pictures about a story that the teacher reads to them, or they act out the story. Sometimes they even write a story about the life-cycle of the salmon, an important local industry. The programme is also intensive. Children are engaged daily in tasks that at different moments require rhyming, alliteration, explicit manipulation of phonemes (i.e., counting, identifying, noting order, and locating position of phonemes, for example by tapping), analysing words into phoneme-sized units (phoneme segmentation), and combining letter sounds into words (phoneme blending).

An important part of the North Vancouver literacy programme is systematic periodic evaluation of the programme through assessment. Trained graduate students and teachers conduct individual 25-minute assessments in the schools each spring. Thus, the research linked to the assessments becomes an integral part of the North Vancouver district strategy for intervention and remedial help targeted at individual students. This replaces a teacher-based referral strategy, avoiding long waiting lists (sometimes two years in other districts) and hours of testing with a more feasible and much less expensive systematic but brief assessments of all students.

Our study has been conceived as a continuing longitudinal monitoring of children's progress. The evaluation uses achievement and cognitive standardised tests for word reading, phonological awareness, spelling, syntactical knowledge, lexical retrieval time and accuracy, and working memory. Reading comprehension, problem solving and arithmetic skills are also measured. The assessments include teachers interviewing and conducting child observation. The tests have been carefully selected for each grade, based on reliability and sensitivity reported in previous pilot research by our team. Because all children participate in the programme we do not have a comparison group of children not exposed to the programme. Instead, we use alternative, multiple sources of evidence to show that this type of programme can be successful. Mainly, we have analysed achievement/cognitive progress rates in groups with different socio-economic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. For example, children from affluent families usually have a faster learning rate than children from poor families. This sort of background knowledge can be used to see whether and when the programme can successfully attenuate these substantive differences.

According to our research, preventive literacy-intensive teaching such as that implemented in North Vancouver shows important results. First, most of the children who enter the programme in Kindergarten are quite successful throughout their school career. The benefits are not limited to literacy-related subjects but extend to arithmetic and problem solving. By Grade 3, the programme seems to reverse some of the disadvantages associated with low family socio-economic status (SES), such as coming from a family with low income or unemployed parents, coming from a single-parent family, and moving school and residence frequently. The programme is especially beneficial for children coming from minority and new-immigrant families whose first language is not English, who therefore have little or no English language proficiency when they enter school. The results show that these children sometimes even end up reading and spelling better than their monolingual counterparts by grade 3. Contrary to national and international trends, the children who report larger gains come from disadvantaged families. Last but not least, since the introduction of the programme the prevalence of severe reading disabilities in the district has gone from 26 per cent to 4 per cent. In light of these results, what are the "winning ingredients" that produced this phenomenal success rate?

First, intensive literacy teaching for relatively few hours per week produces considerable positive long-term changes in reading and other related linguistic skills. The classroom teachers as well as the school resource teachers working in North Vancouver provide these activities for 14 to 20 minutes, three times a week in Kindergarten and three to four times a week after that. During the sessions, the teachers balance the amount of explicit, systematic reading and writing teaching with the other activities such as independent writing and invented spelling.

Early timing is crucial for this type of "preemptive intervention". It should start at the pre-school, in Kindergarten. Equally important, it should be continued and sustained at least through the earlier grades. For some children, intense and motivated parent participation, older sibling or mentors' scaffolding sustained all the way through the first grades helps enhance the benefits of the programme (some modules can be designed so that activities can be easily adapted for use at home or outside the school). The structure of the activities can be similar from Kindergarten through the succeeding years. However, the content of the stories, books and materials should change to address age-appropriate themes and to reflect the increasing complexity of reading and writing materials (e.g., use of longer sentences, more complex sentence structure, less frequent and/or less familiar words). Such adjustment is the basis for progressing through different levels of proficiency. Teachers should integrate these activities in the daily school routine as much as possible.

Early literacy-intensive teaching programmes similar to that offered in North Vancouver reduce the risk of reading disability as well as literacy inequality. This is very important for children coming from new-immigrant or minority families. In fact, the difficulties that some children manifest at school, for example by showing lack of age-appropriate or grade-appropriate oral language proficiency, may be interpreted simply as signs of school adjustment or acculturation. This perception may encourage the tendency within schools to overlook or delay addressing the possibility that students learning English language, for example, may have genuine difficulties with word decoding or language processing typical of reading disability. Literacy-intensive programmes that include systematic assessment and that balance explicit teaching with basic exposure to books and related activities can prevent the consequences of under-assessment and the need for targeted (and often late) remedial interventions. Furthermore, these programmes are low-cost.

Research itself has a positive effect on teachers because they are relieved from the responsibility of identifying problems and making referrals. The level of teacher vigilance has a significant influence on how teaching is delivered after Kindergarten and the first year of school. When research is incorporated as a form of partnership with the teachers and starts in Kindergarten, the negative effects of low SES and the risk for reading failure become progressively weaker and eventually disappear by Grade 3. This clearly shows that teaching effectiveness actually improves when research is incorporated in literacy programmes.

Research from North Vancouver and other districts around the world continues to show that in our schools there are many children who have the potential to develop normal writing and reading abilities, but do not have access to this basic right through no fault of their own. In order for these children to receive equal opportunity in developing fluent writing and reading skills, it is critical that they are identified at a young age as "at risk". Once identified as having early reading difficulty, it is necessary that those children receive early intervention that includes explicit teaching of the rules of written and spoken language. In this light, it is clear that funds devoted to education should primarily be distributed to inner-city schools that do not have the resources for implementing such plans of early prevention. Without continuous, massive commitment on the behalf of government and communities, we will fail to reach the most basic "equality of opportunity" that constitutes one defining character of a modern society. As shown by the North Vancouver experience, universal, comprehensive and sustained literacy-intensive school-based programmes are a concrete way to arrive at equality for all.

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