Language Arts Whole School Online Course with Lyn Stone (PD497)

Comprising six comprehensive modules, alongside tried and true teaching methods to get everyone excelling, this hands-on, engaging workshop is designed to raise teacher capacity to ensure mastery of the principles of structured literacy for all students.

Language Arts helps a teacher use up to date, research-based information about how we learn. It then helps them to apply that knowledge to imparting vital information about how English writing works.

The Language Arts approach has a clear scope and sequence from Foundation-6, covering spelling, grammar & syntax, and morphology. It dovetails well with any high quality systematic synthetic phonics program. It effectively answers the question: “Now that my students have learned the code, what next?”

It is laid out using a direct, explicit approach with worked examples and incorporates robust teaching techniques designed to reduce cognitive load and increase retention.

It comes with resources and equipment for immediate application in the classroom.

Language Arts was written for an international audience within the anglophone world.  Designed and refined over two decades of clinical practice and school consultancy by Scottish linguist Lyn Stone, it takes into account her unique perspectives on accent and dialect.

Note: Prices are inclusive of 10% Goods and Services Tax (GST) for all Australian residents. 

The key topics are:

1. Learning how we learn

What has science taught us about how to make changes in long-term memory?

• The Language Arts approach seeks to reduce demands on working memory by encouraging practices that make writing transcription increasingly automatic, so that ideas can flow unhindered and so that learning can take place in an ideal setting.
• In Language Arts, valid and reliable assessment with a view to separating the underlying processes from one another helps us to target our intervention and make predictions about response and expectations.
• In Language Arts, being able to identify what a child struggles with leads to targeted, effective intervention. Knowing a child’s working memory and attentional capacity alongside their transcription and text generation ability, helps predict response to intervention.

2. The simple views of reading and writing

What do we know about the critical processes involved in literacy acquisition, and how can we maximise this knowledge so that everyone gets the best deal at school?

What has science taught us about how to make changes in long-term memory so that reading and writing become increasingly automatic and increasingly strategic?

• In Language Arts, we recommend a 4-step process for teaching and learning so-called irregular words.
• In Language Arts, we think about the essential lessons from history, geography, science and art and weave our practice around them.

3. Structured literacy:

What do children need to know about how words work in order to get faster, stronger, better at reading and writing?

• In Language Arts, etymological stories are told through the Four-Step Process. This process can be taught even to children who are still learning basic phoneme grapheme correspondences.
• In Language Arts, syllable counting, determining syllable emphasis, and understanding how open and closed syllables operate is the recommended scope of syllable work.

4. Grammar beyond naming/doing/describing:

How parts of speech can be taught memorably and logically so that children understand, can use and enjoy grammar.

• The Language Arts approach recommends using linguistically accurate descriptions of word and sentence structure from the start.

5. Morphological magic:

The secrets of teaching how to define, spell and learn word parts and their combinations.

• The language arts approach encourages word study that pays attention to bases, their meanings, their families, and the way their spellings are altered when attaching suffixes.

6. Writing done well:

How to make the leap from word-level learning to producing high quality written work.

• The Language Arts approach defines and exemplifies the notion of quality over quantity when teaching how to write.
• The Language Arts approach empowers teachers and students to build reliable, generalisable structures for high quality writing at every level of academic activity.
• Not for the faint-hearted: the Language Arts approach advocates for a reduction in focus on narrative writing and lays out the evidentiary basis for this argument.

Suitable for:

• Primary teachers whose students are ready to read to learn
• Teaching assistants wishing to know more about literacy instruction
• Education professionals working with groups and individuals
• Homeschooling parents who wish to give their children a high quality literacy framework
• Secondary teachers who have the desire to increase the quality of written work across the curriculum
• School leaders looking for ways to keep up the momentum generated through high quality early literacy instruction

Program format:

Language Arts with Lyn Stone is offered as a six-part on-demand online Open Learning course.

The content is intended to be easily digested over about 18 hours; three for each key topic. Because it is on-demand and not live, how much time it takes will vary depending on individual circumstances. To provide maximum flexibility, once you have logged on for the first time, your access to the course will be granted for six months. That’s half a year to make your way through each topic, try out the lessons and really digest the material.

It will also give you the opportunity to interact with our ever-growing community of international professionals also making their way through the course.

The downloadable manual, scripts, worksheets and slides are, of course, yours to keep forever!

We will be monitoring all the forums, answering questions, delivering feedback and uploading our latest resource findings in real time from the very beginning. You will not be alone.

We will also be offering additional live tutorials via Zoom on an intermittent basis. These will be open to the public and will incur a fee, but those enrolled on the course are invited to attend at no cost.

Included materials:

• A F-6 scope and sequence, encompassing when and how to teach spelling & handwriting, morphology and grammar & syntax,
• Digital downloads of each element manual, containing scripts, lesson plans and high quality worksheets and activities,
• Video guides to each module,
• External links to further study and resources,
• Video demonstrations of lessons.

Schools:

We have special deals for schools wishing to have whole staff trained in this program.