Steering the Ship Back to Words

To put it all into context: 

For some years now, I have been asked by government departments to review and advise on word-study and phonics documents. I have always outlined my misgivings frankly, with suggestions on how to fix the obvious flaws. Policy shifts slowly. Systems are large ships. There has been genuine movement. Phonics instruction in many schools is stronger than it was, and the dominance of balanced literacy in teacher training has weakened. That is visible in classrooms.

However, in some contexts the centre of gravity has shifted too narrowly towards “sounds”. Decoding has improved. Students are getting off the ground in reading. Yet writing and spelling outcomes remain uneven.

I hear regularly from middle primary teachers asking, “What do we do in Years 3–6?” They are working with students who can read with reasonable fluency but cannot reliably spell, manipulate morphology, or control written expression at the level expected of their age.

The explanation is rarely found in Year 4. It is found in the foundations laid in K–2. If early instruction treats English primarily as a sound system, the structural layers of the writing system remain underdeveloped. Orthographic conventions and constraints, morphological awareness, and syntactic understanding need to be present from the beginning in developmentally appropriate ways. Without that, teachers in later years are stabilising gaps rather than extending knowledge.

A ship can adjust its course mid-voyage, but the original navigation still shapes the journey.

The Adelaide workshop was built around live word work with thirty educators. Numbers are deliberately limited so that I have time to really work with the audience.

We had primary teachers, school leaders, speech pathologists, system-level coaches, high school teachers, a teacher of the deaf, and a teacher or EALD adults.

Participants suggested the words their students struggle with. We examined them structurally and considered how that work translates directly into classroom practice. The feedback reflects that focus:

• “I liked to see exactly what a session would look like with a student.”
• “Challenged thoughts on syllables.”
• “Learning about high frequency families.”
• “Very practical & ‘hands on’ examples – so useful.”
•  “The Department suggests teaching one ‘high freq’ word at a time → this is something we will look into.”

When high-frequency words are treated as isolated items, students memorise fragments. When they are taught as structured families within the writing system, patterns accumulate and reinforce each other.

Several comments repeated the same theme:

• “Hands on → visible → practical.”
• “Content that can be used with students and applied to words/concepts.”
• “Participating rather than just listening.”

This work opens up and expands teacher knowledge. Once teachers understand the structure of English, the relationship between reading, spelling and vocabulary becomes clearer and instruction becomes more coherent across year levels.

Literacy instruction has shifted significantly over the past decade. The next stage requires steadiness. If instruction centres exclusively on sound-to-print correspondences, students may decode efficiently while their spelling and written expression lag behind. The writing system is layered, and early instruction must reflect that reality from the outset.

Teachers are asking deeper structural questions. Schools are reconsidering how word study sits within their broader literacy framework. When the course of literacy instruction is being set, foundations determine where that ship ultimately lands. Word study is central to that course.