The ‘Early Reading Profile’ presents an evidence based alternative to whole language type reading assessments.
It is a quick single word reading assessment. It presents words that gradually increase in length and phonic complexity. The progression reflects PLD’s structured synthetic phonics approach. The assessment takes minutes to present, and should determine the level of the decodable readers that are required for home reading and in-class shared reading.
This ‘Early Reading Profile’ is ideally designed for the initial two or three years of schooling (when students are first learning to read). However older students still operating at a junior primary level, will benefit from the effort of teachers to track their development and to match decodable reading material to their exact level of operation.
Teachers administering the screen are required to record the percentage of accuracy for each level while rating the level of automaticity observed. Training to administer the screen can be found in the following online courses:
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https://courses.pld-literacy.
org/courses/Learning-to-read- spell-and-write-in-Foundation -
https://courses.pld-literacy.
org/courses/Teaching-students- unable-to-read -
The full screen is found in the 2018 edition of the Phonic Sight Word Sequence.
The screen is designed for students who are starting to read, in the Foundation school year and should continue to be administered at regular intervals (e.g. each term of semester) in Year 1 and 2 (or until students are able to read all words accurately and automatically). Once students reach this level, the screen has done its job. Some students reach this point by the end of Year 2. It is also common that a proportion of middle and upper primary students are still operating at a junior primary level and would benefit from this screening tool.
FYI – some SSP’s will reverse stage 1 target 2 and 3 . It is true that as some students as they acquire CVC skills they soon after or simultaneously acquire CCVC and CVCC word skills. In the PLD process, after CVC skills have been acquired, some early phonics instruction is scheduled, before CCVC and CVCC and target 5 phonic concepts are presented.
Educators should find that ‘Early Reading Profile’ outlines a fairly standard SSP progression which can be utilised in conjunction with other evidence-based SSP programs.
Recommended reading:
https://www.dyslexiasa.org.au/